Clem talks about that in the comments. What are some no hassle, Debian based, rustless distros as alternative to Mint?
There is the Mint version that is based directly on Debian, instead of Ubuntu: LMDE
I haven’t used it myself, maybe someone with actual experience can comment on it.
I wonder why they make both Ubunutu and Sebastian Debian based Mint. That duplicates the work.
I would probably jump from ubuntu to mint if they drop ubunutu in favor of debian. But then, debian itself is a perfectly fine distro and i could also use it directly.
Too much choice.
LMDE exists as the DR plan for if Ubuntu loses the plot again and Mint can no longer rely on Ubuntu as the upstream. Yes it does create extra work, which is one of the reasons why LMDE releases tend to lag behind the primary Mint Cinnamon, but it’s worth it from the Mint perspective to have an alternative route immediately to hand.
Noob question - I use Linux Mint and have for a year or so. People often have comments about switching distros like it’s super easy to do.
If I wanted to do that, how hard is it? I’ve not really had any problems with Mint… but mainly want to know in case I want to try a new distribution one day.
If your current distro works, there’s no reason to switch. Switching means a fresh install, repeat whatever customization you want or need, restore your backup. It’s not difficult, but can be time-consuming until you have everything configured they way you want it.
It depends. I’d say it’s a scale of fairly easy to very easy depending on how you have everything set up and documented. Essentially, back everything up and install the new distro then put it all back. It will take some time, though. The first time I distro-hopped, I forgot to take a list of my installed packages, which made for some unwelcome surprises when I couldn’t find certain programs. That’s not hard to overcome, just keep a list of your installed packages. Even if you don’t, it’s easy to just reinstall them.
It completely depends what you use your computer for.
For example, do you game? DRM free or no, and where are they installed? On a seperate drive?
What about work stuff? Media? The larger question I’m getting at is “how much of what you do is portable, and easy to just plop on a USB stick, reinstall from the internet, or just leave on a second drive already in your desktop?”
It’s easy or hard depending on how you did your previous installation and how much are you willing to learn.
Having / and /home in diferent partitions helps a lot but then one have to think about keeping or changing the DE of choice, keeping or changing bash, zsh, fish, etc. Some adaptation is required.
The comment itself:
[…] Rust-coreutils does affect us. This is something we definitely see as part of the base so even though we would prefer for coreutils not to change, we’re hoping to align with Ubuntu on this. We’re concerned with regressions. New code almost always introduces regressions. That’s a lot of new code on very important components. I was shocked to see rust-coreutils updated from 0.7 to 0.8 just days before the stable release of Ubuntu 26.04. It actually broke something important on our side. We fixed it. I’m sure Ubuntu will update it whenever new regressions are found. We’ll see.
Why is this a problem?
One issue with this is that uutils is licensed under the MIT license, instead of coreutils’ GPL license. In fact, for reasons I don’t quite understand many of these rust rewrites are licensed with the MIT license. This will contribute to long term erosion of the rights granted by the GPL to software projects and users.
In fact, for reasons I don’t quite understand many of these rust rewrites are licensed with the MIT license.
I think it’s pretty obvious. Corpos are doing the EEE approach in the Linux ecosystem.
Yeah, the ‘for reasons I don’t quite understand’ bit was intended slightly sarcastically.
It’s bad that we’re in an all-time low percentage of politically minded Linux users, in another era Rust would never be close to the Linux kernel or would pose as a threat to GNU/GPL.
Why is Rust your problem here? It’s a fantastic language. The issue is licensing
It’s the tool used to enshitification of Linux, that’s my problem. Tech and politics are indivisible. We’re on lemmy.ml so that should be a no-brainer.
Also, technically, it’s not very stable and there’s no alternative for the compiler.
The main problem is that it’s just not battle tested like GNU coreutils are. And Canonical has only tested this in one cycle, 25.10, before introducing it in an LTS. Would’ve made more sense to wait until 26.10.
Other find problem with it being MIT licensed.
The main problem is that it’s just not battle tested like GNU coreutils are.
Mint is the last distro that would push something that isn’t battle tested. IIRC they haven’t even started working on Wayland support.
Have you read Clem’s comment?
Its two fold for many (not for me): Rust and MIT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG2ZMvBT8W4
4:25
(sorry my third party youtube frontend can’t share timestamp links)
tldw:
- more CVEs than the old core utils that have been tested and in prod for over 30years
- no feature parity, so existing stuff that uses them will suddenly misbehave, when certain flags are missing
- different license, MIT instead of copyleft, so it’s more friendly for companies to use it for profit, while abusing the work of volunteer contributors
FYI you can put &t=265 on the end of the URL for the timestamp.
Well, what about just using Debian? It’s a bit hassle, maybe, but if you have prior Linux experience, you’ll be fine.
what about just using Debian? It’s a bit hassle
What hassle? Genuinely curious.
Well, for example, upgrading between releases is done by manually editing
sources.listand some other steps, and there’s no easy tool for that. This is not difficult, exactly, but for people with little experience it’s a bit daunting. Debian in general isn’t the most new user friendly distro, in my experience. Distros like Mint and Ubuntu make the Debian experience slightly easier. Not that Debian is some esoteric system.
LMDE comes to mind
what advantage does it have over stock debian…?
All the nice bells and whistles that mint comes with: mostly cinnamon and the upgrade manager out-of-the-box. I’ve been using it for a few months, and I prefer it over stock debian and normal mint.
oh nice, maybe ill give it a shot.
This I really like Debian but on my everyday “production” system I run LMDE. I still have Debian in all it’s glory but also all those small extra convince features and we’ll thought out defaults.
I prefer it over stock debian and normal mint.
I normally run debian but I ran LMDE for a couple years and thought it was nice.
If you like running a Linux Mint workstation, its mostly the same but built on Debian instead of Ubuntu. It came from their goal of making a version of Mint that doesn’t have any dependencies on Ubuntu.
afaik, it just looks prettier and gets Cinnamon sooner if you use that.
It still has all the normal debian quirks.
You do realise that the Linux Kernel has Rust in it, right ?
You’ll need to go to BSD if you want to be Rust-less
https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-7-features-changes
" Linux 7.0 also declares the Rust for Linux effort as “here to stay”"
I’m aware. Python (which is the glue of apt) uses Rust as well. Baby steps.
The Linux Foundation is part of the enshitification of Linux.
