...which is exactly why I dumped them all and just went to the source. Why have two middle men stuffing things up when you can just start from the source and do it 'your way'? What's next, a new distro based on Mint?!?!
I only heard of Mint being interesting for Cinnamon and codecs during install, and both got added to Ubuntu years ago after that. Wine on Mint was broken for months (there's a forum thread somewhere about it but also years ago) which implied their QA was worst than other distros. Although I've distro-hopped for years and generally stick to mainstreams. If it isn't Fedora, Ubuntu, or openSUSE, it better have a very compelling reason for being a fork of one of those
Ubuntu is Mint without all the bloat or baggage. Why would I go somewhere else, when I can go to the source. Tried Mint, debian, etc. Much slower bootup and usage. I did easily remove Snap without issue. That's the only issue I have with Ubuntu.
Debian, is the 'source'...of all the 'deb/apt' style distros. Ubuntu is Debian with added bloat and baggage, some questionable, almost like data mining when they had the opt-out (as opposed to opt-in) telemetry added a while back. Not sure these days because I don't follow the *buntu stuff any more (I liked Xubuntu back in the day), and I hate the Ubuntu flavored Gnome DE (Unity was worse). Mint is Ubuntu with some baggage (snaps) removed and Mint's tweaks/apps added. Not that either is actually "bloated" or bad, but they are tweaked to someone else's preferences beyond what Debian does. I prefer to tweak it to mine.
My Ubuntu is 4.3gb installed. My Xubuntu is 3.7GB. Where did the bloat go. This my distro is better than yours is why we ended up with thousands of copy cats. I've tried them all, the Ubuntu's I use are the best for my usage. Also, if you notice, people can't talk about their distro while saying how bad Ubuntu is. Do they even understand Linux. BTW, Snaps is the easiest thing to remove, and Xubuntu Minimal doesn't even have it installed. Tweaking is easy. I find debian needs more tweaking than Ubuntu.
Yes, Debian is quite a bit more bare bones, and does require a bit of work/know how during setup. Like I said, there is nothing wrong with either, nor is either "bloated" (it's all relative). What I see as bloat, the next guy might see as essential components. It's just personal preference. Do you want a bare minimum so you can tweak it exactly how you want and no extra fluff (Debian, Arch), or do you want all the main software and bells and whistles already installed so you don't have to figure out why "x" is not working yet (*buntu, Mint, MX, Manjaro, etc). Example: Debian 11 didn't even install "sudo" and 12 still doesn't add the main user to the "sudo" group by default. That would be a PITA for a brand new to Linux person. There are a bunch of really good distros out there (probably too many), varying in features and "bloat vs incomplete". It just depends on what level the user wants/expects, and do they care if it has "systemd", snaps, flatpack or not, etc. etc.
Developers who build on the "pure" distros like Arch and Debian most definitely have a place but I am just uncomfortable with this house of cards where Ubuntu is built on Debian and then Mint on top of Ubuntu, and yes there are others built on Mint, its daft. Mint is great and the developers are doing a great job but they should build on the original OS. LMDE is just an alternative for the future and is always late to the game and as soon as a new Debian build appears support for the existing LMDE is dropped very quickly, the Debian updates are still available but the Mint side disappears, its a real shame as LMDE is almost perfect for the beginner/casual user.
Agree. Though each new release of Debian is getting more and more "complete" and new user friendly, without pushing their own versions of software (media players, browsers, photo editors, cd rippers, conky, etc. etc.). Debian 13 may be very close to the level of LMDE "completeness". The older versions were missing some pretty required stuff (that should be invisible to the user, meaning most would have no idea it is even required) like sudo, samba, gvfs, gvfs-backends, dbus-x11 that would cause networking and opening apps via sudo to not work or throw errors. I had to keep a pretty big list of "basic" stuff to install right after the OS install before I could even complete the setup. That list has shrunk quite a bit. All the "how to fix" info you'd find would say, do "sudo apt install xxxxx" and you're like there is no SUDO!!!1 Then you figure out how to install sudo without sudo...followed by "User is not in sudoers group", ARGH!
I have high hopes of Debian 13 and Spirals release of it. Spiral makes Debian more complete and user friendly, if Debian themselves can match that it will be great but I have my doubts they will go far enough this time around. I can never understand why so much software is incorporated into a fresh installation, its so easy to add what you require no matter which version of Linux you decide on, its just point and click with most applications. Simple setup is all I want, and to be presented with a fully functional system without having to dig into system settings, all the Ubuntu based releases do this very well.
hm. maybe a barebones version is long overdue.. all that ballast that you have got absolutely no use for; libre office, firefox, timeshift, etc, etc..it is a pita.but i will stick with LMDE, for now..
I am doing the same, when Debian 13 comes out I will have another look. Its so simple now to add programs from the software manager there is just no need to bundle anything other than the bare minimum, like Dude Guyman I have my list of software that I like and its no hardship to add them. Removing stuff on the other hand is annoying.