Nice! The outdated kernel was one of the main reasons why I never recommended using Mint. Now, if they can do something about their other outdated packages like Mesa - and switch to Wayland - I’d be happy to recommend Mint.
They have the edge kernel, which is not exatly the latest and greatest but should be new enough.
I think their focus is having things that doesn’t break and requires no tweaking.
I have to ask: what are you and your friends running that doesn’t work with kernel 5.15? FYI, I got a Thinkpad T14 Gen 3 running Mint with no issue.
Running recent AMD hardware and gaming. I have a ThinkPad Z13 with a Zen 3+ APU, a performance-oriented homelab machine with a recent Zen 4 APU, and a Zen 2 gaming desktop with a recent AMD GPU.
For the laptop, my main concerns are battery life, desktop responsiveness and gaming performance. As you may or may not be aware, the AMD space has seen a flurry of development activity these past couple of years thanks to Valve and the Steam Deck. There have been several improvements in the power management aspect in recent kernels, specifically the AMD p-state EPP driver. For desktop responsiveness, the new EEVDF scheduler has been a groundbreaking improvement over the old CFS scheduler. Finally, for gaming, there have been tons of performance improvements and bug fixes in the Mesa and Vulkan drivers, and as a laptop gamer I always aim to squeeze every bit of FPS I can get out of it. For some games, a recent Mesa makes a huge difference.
I also appreciate the improvements to the in-kernel NTFS3 driver since kernel 6.2 (where some important mount options were added) and most recently (tail end of 6.7) a bunch of bug fixes were also merged. I use an NTFS-formatted external drive for archival and file sharing between different machines (I also use macOS and Windows, hence why I went with NTFS), so any improvements to the NTFS3 driver is something I look forward to.
Next is my homelab setup, it’s recent bleeding edge AMD hardware which runs a ton of VMs (Openshift container platform, Docker, Postgres and a bunch of web apps). When I’m working on it, I also use it for dev stuff and some work stuff - whilst all the VMs and containers are running in the background. So once again, I’m looking for stuff like EEVDF for desktop responsiveness, but also improvements to KVM or virtualisation performance in general. I’m also really excited for the upcoming kernel 6.9, because of the KSMBD and bcachefs improvements - particularly the latter, since I intended to evaluate a tiered storage setup using bcachefs, and if it’s any good, I’ll make the switch from btrfs.
Finally, for my gaming PC - obviously I’m always after the latest Mesa and Vulkan improvements, as well as overall desktop responsiveness and performance. In addition, I also care about things like VRR and HDR support, and all the Wayland-related improvements across the spectrum. All of which have seen vast improvements in recent times.
I mainly run Arch (with Cachy repos), which allows me to use optimised x86-64-v3/v4 packages for the best performance, as well as special AMD-GPU optimised Mesa/vulkan/vdpau/vaapi drivers which is available only for Arch (as far as I’m aware; but maybe there’s a PPA for *buntu as well?). In any case, with Arch I’m able to easily fine-tune and get the most out of my systems.
So there you go, this is why I chase after recent packages and why Mint isn’t suitable for me. I know if you wanted to, Mint users could subscribe to PPAs like Oibaf or something, or manually install recent kernels, but then you’d break the system and that defeats the whole point of Mint’s focus on stability. On the other hand, I don’t mind recommending it for someone who’s main use case is primarily home-office/web browsing etc and they have an older system. But for power users, gamers, or those who have recent hardware, I definitely cannot recommend Mint in good faith.
I’ll start using Mint… heck, any version of Linux… as soon as they introduce a proper UI for a plethora of system settings. If I ever have to use a command line for anything but THE most esoteric, potentially system-damaging scenarios, the O/s has failed in my book. (Windows user since 3.1, never lasted more than a day with Linux)
Windows settings are notoriously confusing, and absolute majority of things can currently be resolved in various Linux environments via GUI.
I honestly don’t remember when I last opened the terminal. Using Manjaro KDE on my main machine right now.
They are confusing, but I can at least find them eventually. I can’t remember exactly what it was that the problem was with my last Linux install… I think my secondary monitor was stuck at 640x480 resolution or something, and I couldn’t find a way to fix it that didn’t involve the command line
If I ever have to use a command line for anything but THE most esoteric, potentially system-damaging scenarios
But you don’t have to though, at least if you’re running a sensible distro and have Linux-friendly hardware. My elderly parents for instance have been running Linux for over a decade now (Xubuntu first, now Zorin) - on bog standard Dell machines - and never once had to touch the command-line. I think I intervened a couple of times a maybe 4 or 5+ years ago, but haven’t had to any major tech support or CLI intervention in the few years.
Linux has come a long way. If you’ve got compatible hardware and don’t have any specific proprietary sofeare requirements (like Adobe etc), then I’d recommend giving it a try. If you’re open-minded that is.
I no longer use Linux Mint, but I really enjoyed the decade I spent on it. The kernel change seems like a good move considering Mint is targeted towards desktop users.
They didnt use Pipewire before??
Lolz
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultPipeWire
I know that Fedora does breaking changes and basically beta tests, but Pipewire “just works” since at least 2 years
yeah it worked for most people back then as well, not well as today, and it has been my to tool for audio before the 1.0 release they fixed a lot of issues, and part of the Linux DE Stack had to make a lot of changes as well, the core for Linux Mint is older then 2 years.
Fedora is a Developers OS after all, it would need to pull stuff like that in before most do.
Are these rolling out to LMDE?
LMDE is already on pipewire as far as I can tell. I have a process running by that name, as well as one called pipewire-pulse which I assume is providing some or all of the old pulseaudio functionality for whatever might be expecting it.
No problems I’m aware of. I thought I was having problems early last month, but that turned out to be hardware failure.
I would expect all these changes get to LMDE except the kernel, which is based on Ubuntu.
Why except the kernel? Of all the things, that’s the easiest to get custom.
Sure, you still can customize the kernel, it’s just not the same default kernel for LMDE. Kernels move differently in Debian but you can always install something like the Liquorix kernel if you need the newest, and Ubuntu still uses the HWE model IIRC.
pipewire was the smoothest transition ive ever experienced in linux, and fixed most of my grief with the audio subsystem. mint always takes its sweet time and i feel like this should have happened much sooner, but better late than never.
