this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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Yeah, I'd say ideally you should be able to run mint and just figure out what you need to do with minimal difficulty.
My partner started using mint recently and the two biggest annoyances for her are having to enter her password all the time to update anything, and minor windowing differences, especially going in and out of fullscreen games. I think both of those are just a matter of getting used to how it's done differently outside of windows.
IMO the thing that could use some attention is their package manager. There are several warnings and failures that I think have been unnecessary.
ex 1. Almost every update will ask if she's sure she wants to resolve some package conflict in some default way. This is not a question a normal user is equipped to answer, and only makes the user uneasy about what's happening.
ex 2. When she initially installed, the welcome wizard had her run a speed test to rank her repo sources, and she picked a nearby university that seemed like a good choice. Then a few days ago at random, it became inaccessible I guess, and now her package update fails to update Firefox specifically. I need to help her sort that out, haven't had time.
These are the kinds of errors I expect to see on arch occasionally, but on mint I feel like it should always figure out what the best option is for the user and just do it. If it needs to let the user know it did something, fine, but don't present it ominously. Just put the system in a good state so that it'll keep working, that's all a normal mint user wants you to do.
In the update settings she can reset her apt sources back to "default". It's not too hard and there's a gui throughout the process (from memory).
The package conflicts is an interesting one, if you have the time to post one of these on lemmy I'm sure someone will suggest a fix. It's probably a
apt install --fix-brokenor something simple (hopefully) but I'm sure we could work it out.Totally agree that these are annoying issues though. See if you can use Nala, it's a TUI front end for Apt and it's got some nice user changes like if you run upgrade it updates and upgrades. It also has a fetch feature which finds nearby sources, so you're always downloading from the closest/fastest source.
It might be that it is just asking weather to replace modified configuration files by the default new config file provided by the updated package or keep the old, modified, one.