Quoting: Purple Library GuyPersonally, I like Cinnamon quite well, but I use Mint with Mate because of a particular personal schtick: I like having a few launchers on the taskbar and launching my most-used applications that way. But I also like plenty of space on the taskbar for showing the different windows, because my long habit from old Windows days is to switch between things that way. So I like having two taskbars--one along the bottom for application switching, one going up the right hand side for launchers (on the side because widescreen real estate). Mate is happy to do that for me, and thus far every time I've tried Cinnamon I couldn't get that to happen. So I've stuck with Mate, but it's not like I have anything against Cinnamon; it's quite nice, it's just that one feature I want.

Recently when I got a new desktop I tried out Ubuntu Mate on it for a while. Didn't like it as much, I'm happy to be back with Mint.

Was the taskbar/panels thing perchance quite a few years ago? When I initially jumped ship from Gnome, about the time Gnome3 came out, at the time Cinnamon didn't really support multiple panels very well; and is ultimately how I decided on XFCE at the time. It came a long way in a short time back then and hasn't been an issue in a long time as far as I'm aware, but that said, I ended up loving XFCE so much I've never had a reason to switch to cinnamon.

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I'm honestly not sure on the good choice for gamers thing. I mostly game on my HTPC, which is Windows still, and that runs Kodi and my games on a big tv/armchair gaming.

That said, my main desktop/workstation has been Linux for a very long time; and I do do _some_ gaming on it, mostly keyboard+mouse stuff like RTS, point-and-click adventures, and generally light-duty single player stuff (after all, my gaming hardware isn't in this PC, so it's an older GTX for instance). For those games, it runs them great without any issues at all; this includes setup of course. Steam runs great, Proton does a great job, Minigalaxy is great, some Humblebundle linux games, some AGS games I set up myself, stuff like that. Lutris is good but I find I have to tweak too much to get games working, it's good, but the weird combination of a simple-interface-but-also-kind-of-a-pain-tweaking isn't for me.

So I guess yeah, being Ubuntu based, it's a good choice. Drivers are very easy to set up as well, Steam/the-others are easy to get going, etc. Mint also has sane default packaging that makes it even more ready to use then Ubuntu in my personal opinion. That said, I also don't really play big multiplayer/competitive games whatsoever -- they're just not my jam -- so I can pretty much guarantee that a "good experience" depends on what you want to play. I'm quite sure Anti-cheat stuff is still a problem for linux in general, it just doesn't apply to me since I don't really play those games.

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Quoting: scaineThat's really interesting. I only use about 3 or 4 PPAs (Mesa, Wine, Chrome/Dropbox and OBS), but I've found the Mint upgrade to be a real train wreck. It refused to upgrade unless I downgraded all my packages first, which took ages. Then finally upgraded, then I had to restore all my PPAs, and so on. It was painful stuff. To be fair, Ubuntu isn't hugely better - but it automates a lot of the process for you.

But just look at these instructions... holy cow. https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2 [External Link]

You're not kidding about holy cow there, wow. Looks extremely verbose, and almost all of it seems to be about taking backups and such. That's also...not quite the right instructions, they should probably be more clear about that...

https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/upgrade-to-mint-20.html [External Link]

I guess I was wrong about it being in upgrade manager, could've sworn it was. Uses the "mintupgrade" tool. I've taken backups like the doc suggests, but I've never bothered to downgrade any PPAs or anything; but then I don't use any PPAs that would interfere with system packages to begin with (that's "looking for trouble"). I will say this though, if you use any PPAs for newer graphics drivers it would be wise to downgrade and remove _that_ PPA in advance.

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Quoting: scaineCertainly, Mint's biggest problem is the lack of an upgrade path. You basically have to re-install every two years, simple as that. Hardly ideal. But otherwise, it's amazing. So why am I constantly on the lookout for another distro...? :grin:

Oh? The upgrade path typically "opens" shortly after new releases, and they appear as a menu item in the update manager. The update manager does not, however, alert you about this; I believe that's intentional as the Mint camp typically, as well as any sane person would, tell a person not to do a major upgrade unless they had an actual reason to. It's fair to say I probably only knew about this because I subscribe to their rss feed on their homepage, and when they announce new releases, they also announce upgrade instructions typically; I doubt I'd be aware of the details otherwise. It's a few clicks to do and is pretty similar to just doing a normal update. All that being the case, if you don't mind doing new installs, keep doing them IMHO. Any OS, Windows and OSX included, tends to appreciate a fresh start once in a while. I've used the upgrade method for the last few major versions.

That said, for a long, long, time I've only made two data partitions for my installs -- home, and everything else, so if/when I ever need to do the nuclear option and actually reinstall it takes maybe twenty minutes combined; including picking out whatever software selection post install. Pretty much all my settings/icons/themes are in my home directory anyway, so even a fresh install takes very little time -- but I still haven't had to in a long time now. Not to make this about Windows, but honestly, whenever I have to do a full windows install it tends to be an all day affair in comparison; I'm not sure when it happened, but I tell ya, setting up Linux sure became far easier then windows at some point.

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Quoting: NanobangI expect it'll end up being Mint XFCE in the end, though. :)

That's my personal favourite and is what I currently use. Incidentally, and I suspect many people started "touring" just like I did back when Gnome3 first came out coming from a Gnome2 preference at the time, after trying several I ended up with XFCE.

The funny thing is at the time I thought to myself "XFCE is a better Gnome2 then Gnome2 ever was."

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The beginner friendly thing, while absolutely true, always baffles me when people talk about it regarding Linux Mint -- it tends to sound like it's only for beginners.

Personally I'm no beginner, not by a long shot, but I like a solid distribution that just works and tends to match my preferences out of the box. I personally recommend Mint for everyone.

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Quoting: DrMcCoyBtw, in case anybody needs it, here's a Linux amd64 build of ags 3.5.0.27, including libraries: https://drmccoy.de/zeugs/ags-3.5.0.27-linux-amd64.tar.gz [External Link]

I build it using a Debian Stretch chroot, which should make it fairly usable on all recent Linux systems. The binary has rpath set, so that it'll find the libraries in the lib directory automatically. You still need to supply the X libraries, since distributing those doesn't necessarily work too well. They should all already be there, usually, except maybe libXxf86vm. Its Debian/Ubuntu package is libxxf86vm1, on Gentoo it's x11-libs/libXxf86vm.

This should be able to run basically all those Wadjet Eye games on Linux, even those that never got a proper Linux release, once you install them on Linux. At least I used to run all the games that were out a year? two years? ago with this. Or rather, with ags 3.4.1, which hopefully shouldn't make a difference.

I'd certainly be curious if that works with the steam versions of their games, including the older ones; The problems varied that I would run into, such as steam achievements (I extended an AGS plugin that simply stubbed all of them out, games either refuse to start or crash if I recall, I haven't worked on it in quite some time), or things like the rain in Gemini Rue were buggy in different versions of AGS. The creator/main guy for luxtorpeda didn't care for packaging a pre-compiled AGS (which honestly is the right call, it's not a good way to do it), but considering I couldn't get the current build system for luxtorpeda working with the steam runtime environment locally on Mint at the time, there just didn't seem to be a lot of reason to do it when the games had zero issues running via Proton.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: dibzNice that they did this. For a little while I was helping with the AGS engine for Luxtorpeda, but more or less stopped working on it at the time due to struggling with making the build environment work properly on my machine.

I offer a Wadjet Eye game (of their choice) for the person who makes all Wadjet Eye games work with such an environment.

The last build I did worked for all the Wadjet eye games I owned at the time, which wasn't all of them. Luxtorpeda's build process was changing quite frequently at the time so I have my doubts it even still works under whatever the current builds are.

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Nice that they did this. For a little while I was helping with the AGS engine for Luxtorpeda, but more or less stopped working on it at the time due to struggling with making the build environment work properly on my machine.

It was extremely tedious, combined with the fact that quite a few games were paired to specific AGS versions that simply wouldn't work properly on anything but their build. Often these builds were customized to a degree, either their steam integration or some effect/plugin/etc they added; Especially when you consider those games would work perfect in Wine/Steam Proton out of the box. Strangely, some Wadjet Eye games had native linux builds at like Humblebundle (which I knew because I owned them) that never appeared on Steam.

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This stuff always confuses me, it's hardly unique to this but doesn't it sometimes seem like one step forward two steps back?

Desk real estate, the type of tasks you use your computer/screen for, portability all matter and make a huge difference in the decision. The problem I tend to see, and this is absolutely my circle/work/things like that, is people often just aren't using their critical thinking skills or want the latest shiny without really considering what it's for.

Assuming a person has the space and the ability to make the decision, often times multiple screens make WAY more sense then single giant screens, but it's also out of style, so way too often I see people use these "solutions" to problems they created themselves. You see this trend with window managers as well, some of them obviously target single-screens with dual or more being an afterthought.

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