If he got the cinnamon version, that is indeed the default Ubuntu based one. I use the same thing.

One of the biggest draws of regular Mint IMO is that it leverages the advantages and resources of Ubuntu but it removes the parts that many people don’t like.

As an American, this line short circuited my brain:

Police there still carry guns on the regular

I live in a quiet but growing suburban town that’s closer to rural areas than the nearest city. When I walk my kid to elementary school (how European of us, lol) the police officer working as a crossing guard for the kids still has their gun, taser, bulletproof vest, and all their other gear on.

And it’s not a school-specific thing. You just never see cops without their weapons here. Armed and armored is just part of the uniform, essentially.

I’m good with cinnamon myself, but you can totally install KDE on mint instead. It is just Linux after all.

When I do a search for mint kde, this is the first result and has step by step instructions. It looks like it can be as simple as apt install kde-standard or kde-full.

https://linuxiac.com/how-to-install-kde-plasma-on-linux-mint-22/

I’m tempted, and I may mess with it some day, but honestly after tweaking some settings I’m pretty happy with how my cinnamon desktop performs.

That’s the proprietary app container system pushed by Canonical who maintains Ubuntu. That’s as opposed to something more widely accepted like flatpak. I’m not an expert on everything Canonical has done to piss of the FOSS community, but I think snaps are the biggest one.

And in regular old Linux Mint Cinnamon you don’t have to deal with that, and you can still lean on Ubuntu’s apt repositories.

And when Mint is right there too.

I have Ubuntu packages all through my system and I don’t need to care about whatever BS canonical is up to. Worst case scenario is I switch to LMDE one day.

My first was Sun Solaris Unix, but now I’m a middle aged engineer who wants to fix company product issues rather than personal workstation issues, and Mint rocks my socks.

The mundanity of my computer working seamlessly every day is right up there with the mundanity of my car starting every morning, as far as how much it bothers me, lol.

But there’s nothing wrong with messing with your car’s engine or your computer’s OS, obviously. Some people are just in a place where they want to do that and some aren’t.

The regular version uses a lot of Ubuntu resources but doesn’t have snaps either.

Yeah, honestly it’s worked fine without any fiddling around. If it makes a difference, I tend to do things like let mint use non-free components if necessary, and I know I do have the “play drm stuff” option turned on I’m Firefox, even though the privacy and security stuff is all strict.

It’s just a Dell laptop with a discrete nvidia gpu in addition to the embedded Intel one. I think it works fine though with either the open drivers or the closed nvidia ones, but I don’t know if it touches that gpu.

I get to dual boot at work (I run mint btw) and the only reason I ever boot into windows every week or three is to make sure it doesn’t get so out of date that it gets booted from the network.

I guess it’s time to stop that shit! Having windows available is not worth the risk of messing up my work machine. Hell I’m tempted to nuke that windows partition and double the size of my /home partition!

Though I will give Microsoft credit that m365 stuff, including video calls in Teams, work great using the web versions in Firefox. That’s even with the security and privacy stuff cranked up. I only white listed those sites for cookies and local storage for convenience.

So if you ignore all the bad stuff, it’s full of good stuff? Brilliant!

This needs an extra top panel with the dude just chilling with no makeup, maybe reading a “clown makeup for dummies” book. The caption is “my last Windows machines are barely working but they know what happens if I have to ‘fix’ anything.”

That’s where I’m living right now. The PC I use all day is already Linux.

GSUS

As opposed to G.E.C.K. OS.