MX's take on xfce is excellent.

I believe this some true but once you overcome the learning hurdle Debian is awesome and worth the effort. Debian is my favorite OS. Let's face it evil Microsoft is the most out of the box user friendly OS. But Debian with a little time is as good even better than windows, can be customized to your liking. I love Debian it's stable reliable and with flat packs I prefer it, and no longer have a use for Windows which is the icing on the cake. I've tried other distros and operating systems but customized Debian is by far my favorite.

Thanks for this, it was good to see Brave was installed without issue. Informative. 🙂

sudo apt install arc-theme && sudo apt install papirus-icon-theme because default Xfce is ugly.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts on Debian 12. Debian 12 is my distro of choice and I had great fun learning how to tweak it to suite my desktop usage. Neither is there anything wrong wither prefering other distros for there out of the box setup. I'm interested to know how you get on with other distros.

Will it just be a straight upgrade after the Beta version, or will 22 have to be installed fresh?

How do I file a bug report?

Very good tip that I can recommend to other new users. I'm an oldie and I prefer the dpkg-based distros. Xfce is memory parsimonious yet extremely configurable, so the configuration advantages you refer to is xfce. I prefer recommending Xubuntu or Linux Mint, but the user manual is a clear plus. Also I formerly used Debian, but also I dislike their installation setup, they have made root actions inacessible from a user account terminal, and that's not user freedom. And I used Linux since the late 1990:ies, starting with Slackware then turning to Debian.

Great distro for old notebook 32 Bit. 😉

Hello sir. Does it comes with snaps?

If you enjoy DOS so much I thought I would let you know that you can find a program in your repo called dosbox. It's a fully featured DOS emulator that is 100% compatible with old school DOS programs. I use it to play old school games like doom or mechwarrior sometimes, but you can use it for whatever you used DOS for back in the day.

I tried CachyOS, Zorin, Ubuntu, and Nobara as well as Mint21.3...and I have to say that Linux Mint was by far the easiest one to understand and operate for a person coming off Windows. Fixing the numerous 'printer found' messages will be nice, because that's irritating. And another thing that bothers me is if you save files to a specific directory over and over the system doesn't seem to remember that, so you have to go hunt it out again and again. Maybe I just don't understand what's going on, but the file system behavior is a little strange. Other than that, I've used it now on an MSI C61 laptop for over a month and don't miss Windows annoying pestering a bit.

I had my first problem with LM 22 Beta, 2 days ago. The cinnamon greeter disappeared after an update and it wouldn't boot back into LM until I reinstalled the cinnamon meta package (Don't remember exact name off top of my head) Just a heads up for anyone who decides to use this on bare metal like I did. It worked perfectly before that and it works perfect now that I fixed it.

Me too. I like the whole Linux Mint experience.

I have Mint on one of my my machines it's great. To paraphrase, you'd never get fired for choosing Linux Mint. If you want to try some other distros for fun, maybe some independent ones, the ones not based on. Void or Slackware maybe.

mmm another bumubuntu crap video with somebody who has no clue.. Mint's just okay and I mean just okay..

I switched to Linux Lite many years ago after testing many different versions of linux before leaving Windblows. I have been using Linux Lite for many years now and just updated to the latest version earlier this year. It has been a pretty solid platform for me on my main PC. No regrets... I have also installed MX Linux on my laptop to play with, and it's been fine. I also have installed Peppermint OS on my wife's PC and she has been using that for many years now. Lots of options for sure. As for Linux Lite, watch out for the installation of "Snap" packages instead of normal debian packages. "Snap" packages may require you to reboot the PC before the installed programs will show up and be usable. I too am using an SSD for my boot drive and 4TB WD Red Drives for my main storage with no issues. Good luck in your journey...

they need to switch to KDE Plasma before I can even begin to care.

I've been a Linux Mint user since version 16, and I'm looking forward to version 22 and how it will affect me personally. I only tried out the beta version briefly as a Live session, as I don't have the time for an extensive test - on real hardware - at the moment. But one thing is certain: as soon as the final version is released, I will update. Without ifs and buts, because I know that Clement and his team have done an excellent job on this time as well.

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Mint gets miss labelled as a noob friendly distro, which is it blight, but no one ever said the same thing about Windows and Mac. IMHO Linux mint is one of the best distro, it is so user friendly that you forget you are in Linux. I have used every flavore Arch, fedora, Debian, but I keep going back to MINT. On the presentation side it feels slightly dated though and I personally still love Ubuntu. I am currently using a ubuntu flavor called Ubunut-SwayRemix, because i love WM's

love linux mint have it on my daily pc and on my ageing mac pro 5,1 ive upgraded to the max and it runs great

What I'd like most in a pc is privacy; to be able to use a site without enforced cookie consent.

In my early days as a zealous Linux convert, I tried literally dozens of versions on a cheap old laptop I bought for the purpose. I have now settled on three Linux distros: I run Zorin on my disposably cheap travel machine that has no personal data on it, and MX on that "tester machine" that I use as a Debian emergency computer in the event that anything Ubuntu-based goes south. My good old daily tower is and has always been Mint. Looking forward to 22.

I do appreciate Mint's steady incremental improvements, rather than radical changes, since I depend on a stable computer and don't need up-to-date gaming capabilities and the like. And Mint's presentation continues to be the one that fits best with my expectations of how a desktop should look and operate.

Tried the beta and loved how much faster the Software Manager is now. Had no issues whatsoever. Being based on a much newer kernel was neat. The only gripe I still have is that preinstalled software packages are not marked as such in the Software Manager, but if you want to uninstall them you'll have to go through Synaptic, and there's a chance there to bork your system. Preinstalled apps should either be optional or uninstallable through the Software Manager. With the system packages now being newer versions there's less temptation to use oversized and slow to load flatpacks. Totally agree with how Linux Mint is just the best daily driver out there, though I prefer the XFCE4 version. Most impressive was running this beta on a i7 5500U and winamp vizualizations pop on it running through bottles and it uses just 20% CPU.

Still to this day Love mint, although have moved on from every day use.

I'm on Manjaro and I trust it enough to use it. That said I think I may be secretly hoping it breaks so I can just go straight Arch for my next one, I was too scared to do it before ha ha. Can't you just install KDE on Mint then you get the best of both worlds.

I know you tried mx linux and liked it. You should try their kde version if you want stable kde and a good distro.

I've tried pretty much all the main stream distro's over the years & always come back to Mint. Not had any problems with the beta 22 build.I use Chrome installed v chrome website rather than the unverified flatpak. My Win 11 laptop will be Minted as so as the official 22 is out. Good vid Mr John !

back yout to you, too

Did you edit video on 22?

I've tried the beta, rock solid as you would come to expect from Mint.

I wan't my Linux distro to replace Windows so I can use older but still good hardware to do everyday stuff.

You have your screen resolution set so high, I can’t even see what you’re talking about. Set your output to something reasonable like ~1366x768 for the demo output so we can see what the heck you’re doing on screen.

Thank you John! I am using Ardour on Fedora 36 and had some tech issues today, which I cannot resolve - not being a tech wiz myself. I enjoy working with Ardour a lot though. Will give this a try tomorrow, looks like a great fit!

I used ZorinOS for 2 years after leaving windows and have been on Manjaro for a few months now and honestly I think Manjaro has been a far simpler experience for me, I've barely touched the terminal and most small issues were resolvable in a GUI. I'm not a developer I can't code and I understand just enough to be dangerous lol. I'd happily recommend Manjaro to a new user if they were vaguely tech savvy because if it's your first experience of linux then you have the same windows things to unlearn as you do with any version of linux.

Maybe Max Headroom is due for a comeback?

5:34 I think people are gonna be quite the opposite of well informed. Well deceived is probably more like it. If at least the past 10 years have taught us anything, it's that mainstream media don't have an honest bone in their collectivist bodies, nor do they have any shame about outright lying. Perhaps I'm just being paranoid but I think this is the dawn of propaganda at a scale the world has never seen before.

You should really check out MX Linux KDE. Clean, simple, and still wildly customizable.

what happened to puppy linux? did you discuss it?

Agreed re Debian install. I'll compare MX XFCE vs Plasma. Will be interesting Using LMDE. Have some wifi issues. Seems slow...

MX Linux XFCE not enough marketing

mx linux and mint as the base line

In the 1993 movie 'Jurassic Park' Jeff Goldblum's "Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should" line rang rather prophetically. More than a dozen years ago, the Australian federal government, in its haste to up the ante in the fight against terrorism, at the recommendation of ASIO, the national intelligence and counter-intelligence directorate, approached the half-dozen or so internet service providers and asked them to record and archive all the internet traffic within Australia, to which the ISP companies turned around and told the government in no uncertain terms to go and get effed, because there simply wasn't enough data storage capacity in the entire country to do something like that for just 3 weeks, let alone for the 12 months that the government requested. Not even Google, probably the largest global data storage entity, can offer the kind of data recording and storage capacity that Microsoft had in mind with Recall, so I'm not sure that they've actually stopped to think it through at all. I think Microsoft wanted to pair up Recall together with Copilot (their version of AI) to get the kind of computing capability that would make Windows 11 more intuitive, more predictive, more personalized and more robust, to give end users the kind of targeted computing that would make it that much more indispensable and that much more reliable. What they forgot to realize though is that, with that kind of granular data recording, they'd inadvertently make personal computing that much more vulnerable and that much more intrusive and oppressive. No wonder Windows users are now absolutely aggravated by all this, completely suspicious of Microsoft's true intentions, not to mention, more determined to abandon Windows in favor of other OS platforms like Android and Linux. It turns out after all that the Linux universe didn't have to do anything else at all to get more Windows defectors.

You can easily disable all of this. It is not the end of the world.

Agree with all you said, John. Synaptic is powerful, but has to be learned because it isn't intuitive. Chrome is a mistake. BTW, version 7 is out now but I have no interest in reviewing it. I bought a "Windows Student" very cheap laptop for travel. I considered Lite for it, but even on a machine with only 4 and 64 Gb, Zorin Core runs like a cheetah. Far superior to Lite.

The way i see it is that if i cant remember where i put my stuff then it wasnt that important in the first place. Im not fan of all this and i dont expect us to be able to avoid this kind of stuff forever but as Peter Capaldi's Doctor in Doctor Who series said "Sometimes only choices you have are the bad ones but you still have to choose".

My answer in short: Hell no. Haven't trusted them since 2006, and never will.

No!!! The fact it is still in the OS, there and it just takes an MS update to enable it in error....