The same thing happened to me with Mint 17 and 18. I had done a little experimentation around Mint 14 or so, but when Ubuntu initially began making moves to support ZFS in their kernel, using an Ubuntu-based distribution became an appealing idea to me. I eventually worked out a procedure to create a ZFS-on-root Mint install with full-disk LUKS encryption: a user-friendly and capable setup that was still secure enough to put on a laptop and not really worry about using it on a public wifi connection.asqwerth wrote: Mon Sep 25, 2023 8:01 am For Mint, I really liked Mint 17 but Mint 18 just left me with a "meh" feeling. It wasn't that it was bad or anything. I just didn't see the point of keeping it when MX was working well and Neon filled the "Ubuntu" slot in my distro collection, while Void filled my "Cinnamon DE" slot.
My computing needs are pretty basic. I need a decent terminal for Perl and shell commands, a compiler, Remmina for remoting, and something to play music and videos. Mint covered all of those without the need to relearn too many basic desktop management skills like if I'd gone with a distro that uses Fluxbox, Openbox, or a tiling window manager like cwm or awesome.
Mint 17/18 was also the era when systemd became the default init system for Ubuntu, so by the time Mint 19 came around, I was already looking for a replacement. But alas, there weren't any distributions out there that were friendly to folks with a Debian background, came with an assortment of common applications for most use cases, automatically handled wifi and networking out of the box, used a familiar DE like Xfce, and looked and felt composed and polished, and didn't rely on systemd.
When I discovered MX Linux, I almost fell out of my chair.
That was sometime circa MX 18.3. There are hundreds of distributions out there. MX Linux is an environment. It's a solution.
