@gpstarman THIS is the reason I don’t use Mint. I am otherwise the perfect candidate, more or less - I only want to USE an OS, not LEARN it, and all else being equal I much prefer using a GUI to a command line. But the big thing is I don’t want problems that have to be solved in order to use my computer. I want Linux to be as easy to use as MacOS and when I say I don’t want to do something a certain way, I don’t want a bunch of momma’s basement dwellers ganging up on me to tell me that’s the only “right” way to do it (in truth that is seldom the case). Also, I don’t want to be forced into the Canonical way of doing things (Ubuntu is turning into more and more of a shitshow with each new release, in my opinion).

The problem with Mint is that it tries to appeal to Windows users, and Windows users are used to having their machine come with a shit ton of preinstalled crap. Well I am not saying the Linux apps provided with Mint are crap, just that there are far too many of them, and most of them are things I would never use. Why they don’t let you start with a minimal system and then let you add the software you want is beyond me. Well, unless you are trying to appeal only to Windows users who for some reason expect that.

And to those who say why not just start with Debian, well the problem with that is the minute you run something like Debian other Debian other users ASSume you want to LEARN Linux (I don’t - REALLY, I DON’T) and therefore if you have any issues the first thing they do is say why didn’t you read the man page or something equally stupid. I didn’t read the fucking man page because man pages are written by PROGRAMMERS in a way that only other programmers can understand (with some rare exceptions). I don’t want to have to read ANYTHING, I don’t want there to be problems in the first place or if there are I want a GUI-based program that will fix them.

As an example I set up a media center PC to run Kodi and decided to try Debian with the XFCE desktop. I ran into a few issues but the big one was it didn’t automatically mount my external hard drives. Well the hard drive names have spaces in them. And of course every solution I found was to use fstab, So I tried that, escaping the spaces in the drive name with backslashes, which works almost everywhere in Linux, but apparently not in fstab. And fstab is too stupid to just skip over a line it doesn’t like; instead it stops the computer from booting normally. So when I rebooted the computer, it went into a black screen with a login prompt and NOTHING I could do after that would let me remove that line from fstab (because fstab is apparently a protected file in some way; even using sudo nano would not make it writeable). So I just started over from scratch, because again, I DON’T want to “LEARN” Linux, I just want to use it, and starting over took far less time then it would have taken me to figure out the “correct” way to do it.

But I still had the drive mount issue and I just wanted to mount the damn drives without using fstab (for obvious reasons - once burned…)- I know Ubuntu mounts USB connected drives automatically at boot, so why doesn’t Debian? Anyway I asked in a forum and the one thing I requested is “PLEASE don’t suggest fstab” and I explained why. Guess what almost EVERY response was? Both suggestions that fstab was the ONLY way (it isn’t) or that I should have figured out how to resolve the inability to edit fstab using some obscure program I have never heard of before. (For anyone else with this issue, check out a little program called udevil; that was what worked for me as long as I set it up to run at each reboot, I have also since heard you can use some kind of gnome disk utility that also works under XFCE and will let you mount disks at startup). And boy do those people get pissed off when you don’t just accept their “expert” advice even though they are telling you to do the ONE thing they were requested NOT to suggest (I had actually already tried most of what they had suggested anyway).

So that is the conundrum - you want a Linux distro that’s not Ubuntu, but that is designed for people who couldn’t care less about “learning” Linux any more than they want to “learn” MacOS or Windows. And from what I understand Mint is great for those people IF you can put up with all the random software they install by default; it’s very seldom you run into weird issues in Mint (that also USED to be true of Ubuntu). Whereas in some other Linux distros (even Debian to some degree) some users think that half the “fun” is solving problems (I can’t believe some people think that is fun!). But one big impediment to Linux adoption is you still have the old fart Linux users that haunt the forums and just don’t understand that things aren’t like they were 20 years ago, that most people don’t want to struggle with an operating system nor search half the Internet in search of solutions, and that being “spoon fed” answers is something they now expect (especially now that AI’s do exactly that, even if they are sometimes wrong). There ARE users that DO enjoy that sort of problem solving, just like there are people who enjoy tinkering with cars even though most of us just want to drive them and not have them give us problems. The people who enjoy getting into the guts of an operating system or a car will always be in the minority, and the rest of us kind of hate them when they talk down to us in a condescending manner or act like we just don’t want to put in whatever they think is some required amount of effort (no, we really don’t, because it shouldn’t be difficult in the first place!).