I haven't tried mint, but Ubuntu is a crap experience on my mac. I had it on a separate partition for a while, but I just couldn't stand all the graphical glitching.
I work in linux all day long, but i love osx. I have never, ever, thought to myself, "man, I wish I was running linux."
To be fair, while at work, I never think "I wish this was osx" either.
+1 for mint. I had been using Ubuntu since ~2006. Got annoyed with the direction they are taking. Installed Linux Mint. Didn't even have to install or configure anything for my wireless mouse/keyboard. Literally zero configuration, except for setting my preferences. I don't really understand the prevalence of Macbooks in web development. It's awesome hardware, but it's expensive. As far as software, there is nothing I am missing.
I agree that Mint is pretty good. I use it on a few older laptops with decent results, but Mint also wiped out the Boot loader on my Intel MacbookPro :(
I use Mint for over 5 years as my main OS and it allowed me to make a seamless transition from Windows/macOS to Linux for everyday tasks, on high-end hardware with multiple HiDPI monitors and including games with recent Steam updates (thanks to Ubuntu + Valve as well!). I can't imagine being stuck with Windows 10/macOS these days.
i used Mint on a 2012-era 8gb laptop from 2015 until it died a couple of months ago and never had any performance issues after replacing the original HDD with an SSD.
I think its just a bit of a crapshoot with hardware. I'm running Mint right now and I love it, but hardware support isn't perfect:
- My AMD zen4 CPU still isn't fully supported by Mint's shipping kernel (5.15.0-56). It works today (including sleep states). But it took a month or two to get a kernel which supported sleep states correctly. And I still can't see CPU or motherboard temperatures.
- My keyboard and mouse don't work over bluetooth. I think its the vendors' fault, but I bet they'd both work fine work on macos or windows.
- My speakers randomly get all garbled and weird sometimes. I've figured out running `sudo killall pulseaudio` fixes it (until next time).
- I like using Apple's "magic touchpad". But the driver is nowhere near as good as Apple's. Sensitivity is all wrong in linux. It registers accidental light touches as clicks sometimes, and it just feels janky. And application support for smooth scrolling is all over the place - some apps support it perfectly and others (Firefox, IntelliJ) interpret any tiny single pixel scroll on the touchpad as a multi-line scroll. I've reverted to using a traditional mouse.
That said, some things have been a delight. My old AMD 480 graphics card worked perfectly out of the box, with no configuration required. When I upgraded out my motherboard and CPU a few months ago, the computer booted just fine with no reconfiguration or anything. It just took it all in stride. (I've still never seen windows handle that so well.)
I'm not surprised some people have no problems with desktop linux. But YMMV.
And that's the reason why I love Linux. Even though I complain a lot about several of its shortcomings, I am a happy user. I just recently installed Mint it in a 2011 Macbookpro , and it is great.
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