Ubuntu has too many problems for me to want to run it. However, it has occurred to me that there aren’t a lot of distros that are like the Ubuntu LTS.
Basic requirements for a LTS:
- at least 2 years of support
- semi recent versions of applications like Chrome and Firefox (might consider flatpak)
- a stable experience that isn’t buggy
- fast security updates
Distros considered:
- Debian (stable)
- Rocky Linux
- openSUSE
- Cent OS stream
- Fedora
As far as I can tell none of the options listed are quite suitable. They are either to unstable or way to out of date. I like Rocky Linux but it doesn’t seem to be desktop focused as far as I can tell. I would use Debian but Debian doesn’t have the greatest security defaults. (No selinux profiles out of the box)
Mint is built on Ubuntu LTS but removes some of the problematic bits, it has a recent Firefox and Chrome is of course available, Fletpak support is also integrated.
I’ve run Alma and RHEL as a desktop and it was fine, my main use case was “like Fedora but stable” (more than a year of support). However the repositories are very limited, even with EPEL and third parties, so it eventually irked me enough to switch away. Also no btrfs support without replacing the kernel and adding support from third party places.
This is the response I was expecting
is there gnome mint?
Not as a spin but both vanilla and Ubuntu versions of Gnome are available in the repositories.
Not officially, you can install it separately but you’ll probably have to tie up some loose ends (haven’t tried)
You can look into Fedora if you want a good gnome experience or Debian if you prefer. The latter will have an old gnome version.