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Cinnamon, the popular desktop environment featured in Linux Mint, makes more sense as a distribution-agnostic package.
[...] Since time immemorial—or, more likely, the late 1990s—the intractable problem of “fragmentation of the Linux desktop” has been debated on the internet. While some contend that the wide variety of competing distributions offers more choice to users, that choice can also be overwhelming—making it too difficult for new users to decide on a distribution, or leading them to choose a distribution that is poorly-built or unsupported, providing a bad first experience.
While these arguments have merit, they ignore a critical problem: The infrastructure and developer attention needed to maintain a distribution is extensive, and difficult to justify. Long-running Linux distributions have stopped operations due to a lack of resources, and it is time for Linux Mint to consider doing the same in order to prevent developer burnout, while transitioning Cinnamon into being a fully platform-agnostic desktop environment.
[...] CERN withdrew from Scientific Linux in 2015, beginning a migration to CentOS, with Fermilab announcing their own migration to CentOS 8 as part of the transition from their own distribution.
[...] Likewise, the Arch-based Antergos distribution announced plans to shut down, as the developers "no longer have enough free time to properly maintain Antergos," and that "continuing to neglect the project would be a huge disservice to the community."
[...] Ultimately, the benefit of Cinnamon can be realized as a truly distribution-agnostic desktop environment. Most of the work is already done: Fedora already has a Cinnamon spin, and can be installed in Debian, OpenSuSE, and Arch (among others). Transitioning Linux Mint development efforts to make Cinnamon an Ubuntu Flavor—adhering more tightly to Ubuntu's infrastructure and release timelines, rather than operating independently and running the risk causing package conflicts—would deduplicate a great deal of work, providing more time to further improve Cinnamon, and ease the strained schedules of Clem and other Linux Mint contributors.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday May 31 2019, @05:20AM (1 child)
I've put Lubuntu on a couple of old laptops (1GH, single core, 1 or 2GB memory) for people who just want to be able to surf/email. It works well and runs ok even on those old machines.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday May 31 2019, @04:12PM
I put an old version of xubuntu and lubuntu on a few old thinkpad a21m laptops. Still have one or two clunking around somewhere.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"