Switching from Xubuntu to Linux Mint
After 13 years of running Xubuntu on most of my hardware, I’ve now switched my main (desktop) workstation to Linux Mint XFCE 21.3 (codename: Virginia).
I want to be clear, there is (almost) nothing wrong with Xubuntu 22.04, it’s a great distribution of Linux! Xubuntu has been the distribution of choice for The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project for a long time, and the project is likely to continue to distribute computers with Xubuntu 22.04 for some time…
But… for some time we’ve also known that Canonical isn’t backing down on their snap packaging system. In Xubuntu 22.04 this meant Firefox and the Chromium web browsers were installed as snap packages. Yes, it is possible to remove the snap packages for each, and install the Debian packages, but I’ve always been of the mind that snap packages should have been opt-in, not pushed on users.
The snap problem
I’m not intensely opposed to snaps. In fact, at one time I tried to get Fasteroids (https://chaslinux.itch.io/fasteroids) accepted into the snap store. But the direction Canonical has chosen for most of the spins of Ubuntu under it’s umbrella, is all snap.
I tried the new flutter-based software program in Xubuntu 24.04, and it’s a fantastic improvement in speed over GNOME Software, but it’s all snaps from what I can see, and there’s no visible way to integrate flatpaks (as there is with GNOME Software). Again, it’s possible to de-snap 24.04, but that creates a mess more work.
A bit of history (context)
When Canonical announced they were going to switch their desktop environment from GNOME 2 to Unity, the Computer Recycling Project went looking for an alternative to Ubuntu. The project had been using Ubuntu since 2006 (prior to that we were installing WCLP, a custom Debian-based distribution mainly driven by the efforts of Paul Nijjar and Daniel Allen). We looked at a number of alternatives before the switch to Unity. Linux Mint was in contention as one of the distributions we might have switched to. Ultimately, we found at the time that Xubuntu just ran better across a wider range of hardware. Xubuntu was lightweight. Perhaps not quite as light as Puppy Linux, or Lubuntu, but at that time it had a few more features those distributions didn’t that made it more friendly to less experienced computer users.
Bugs here and there
For the most part, my experience with Xubuntu has been pretty great. Over the years I’ve run into a few issues, mostly minor, but a few that were a lot more serious (print driver change issues in 20.04). Nothing that was a real show stopper. And compared to Windows, it was a real blessing. Being able to manage hundreds of updates in less time than it took Windows to complete a few updates, not having work interrupted by forced updates, and less headaches servicing client’s Linux Machines.
Other Linux/UNIX experience
When I met Paul, and the members of KWLUG, back in 2001, I’d been using Red Hat Linux for a little while. I started with Slackware 96 (thanks Mike), got introduced to the Walnut Creek CD distributor, and used FreeBSD for a number of years, until an inkjet driver pushed me back to Linux. Over a number of years I tried many other Linux distributions: Linux Mandrake, Fedora, SUSE Linux Professional, Yellow Dog Linux (on Apple hardware), Gentoo, and a whole whack I’ve forgotten.
Learning how Debian-based Linux distributions did things was new to me in 2001, but I’ve really never looked back on my personal machines.
Linux is my preferred operating system
Linux is the operating system I prefer to run on my own machines at home. This has been the case for quite a few years. There is very little software that I need to run that doesn’t have an alternative on Linux. I often hear people arguing that Linux software isn’t as professional-grade, or doesn’t have feature X that their favourite Windows commercial program has. What is often forgotten is those “professional” programs are just tools, and tools are only as good as the person using them.
I’ve seen professionals, and “professionals,” and in my experience it’s the person that matters more than the tools used. Practice, ability, and creativity tend to matter more than the tool used.
Tested on my notebook first
I tested Linux Mint XFCE on my laptop, and on a few machines at work, before deciding to make the switch on my main desktop workstation at home. I’ve also switched to Mint on my main workstation at work.
This should be enough of a hint to indicate that I’m also thinking of switching the entirety of our installations at work to Linux Mint XFCE. This probably won’t happen for awhile. I’d like to see what happens with a few point releases of Xubuntu.
I’m still a big fan of Xubuntu, and if you visit the project, you’ll see one of the dual monitor workstations I use sometimes is still running Xubuntu 22.04. There are a lot of other tasks that need to be done before switching the project to Linux Mint, but the network boot image is already working on our PXE server, and I’ve begun to look at software we might include on our installs (I’ve started writing BASH scripts around this, but these will change).
Barring any show-stopping issues, I’m pretty confident that I’ll be using Linux Mint XFCE for quite awhile.