Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Why I'm back to Ubuntu from Linux Mint

Many Ubuntu users were not happy with the decision to use Unity over gnome.  Unity is slick in some ways, but it is (at least originally) very slow and very un-customizable.  A lot of Ubuntu users I know switched to Linux Mint, and I did too.  Now I'm back to Ubuntu 12.03 LTS.

Why did I switch back to Ubuntu?

  • Slower updates and broken repos - Ubuntu updates are slow, but Linux Mint's are even worse.
  • No upgrade option - Linux Mint users aren't really given a simple path to upgrade when new releases come out.  I at least like to try to upgrade one or two editions before doing a fresh install.
  • Better support for Ubuntu - It's easier to search for and get online help for Ubuntu.  There are just enough interfaces (nice, albeit) in Mint that it makes some fixes take longer than they could.
  • The best desktop manager is neither unity or gnome-3 - I use the i3 window manager most of the time.  That means I don't really care what the default windows manager is because I will run my own anyway.  One can still get cinnamon, gnome-3 or mate (these are arguably the best normal wm's for linux) from within Ubuntu.