In my last post, about using dnsmasq for funky DNS stuff, I mentioned in passing that I’m busy turning Linux Mint into my daily driver (for those who are not familiar with the term, “daily driver” is a term for the operating system you run on your primary computer, for most people that would be either Microsoft Windows 11 or MacOS, for some it’s some Linux distribution). I’m thinking of doing a series of posts about this process, so let’s call this post 1 of the series.

Why Mint?

When I mentioned to Big George that I’m making Mint my daily driver, his first question was “Why Mint?”

There are a couple of reasons I chose Mint rather than something like Ubuntu or Debian, some convenience and some philosophical.

Convenience? Really?

Let’s look at the convenience factors first. I’ve been doing Linux for a long time, the first Linux kernel I used was source code I downloaded from the University of Helsinki FTP server on a dial-up Internet connection. I used to make a living as a Unix consultant, mostly with SCO Unix and Solaris, but in later years more and more with various Linux distributions.

When it comes to running Linux based machines, I’ve pretty much been there and done that, I’ve run command line only systems where you literally have to compile almost every program you want to run (Yes, Gentoo is still around) and I’ve run a couple of different distributions as desktop computers. Now I’m old (and not making a living just doing Linux any more) and I just want something stable I can use easily and comfortably. For this there are some really good options out there, the most familiar of which is probably Ubuntu. Mint is essentially Ubuntu with some changes made. In this series of posts we’ll look at a number of the convenience factors in running a daily driver based on Ubuntu. Let’s move on to the controversial topic…

Philosophical reasons for choosing Mint

Well, firstly, I don’t want a computer that spies on me. I know full well that many of the web sites I visit, and possibly even my ISP, spy on me, I don’t need my computer itself also potentially spying on me. So this points me toward using Open Source as my daily driver instead of something like Windows or MacOS, it’s much less likely that my Linux operating system is going to spy on me.

For me, a big philosophical factor when choosing Mint instead of Ubuntu, is that Mint uses Flatpak and not Snap. This is a purely subjective choice, purely my own opinion, and I’m not saying that Flatpak is definitely better than Snap. These are just a couple of little things that drive me toward preferring Flatpak:

• The main repository you get Flatpak packages from is called Flathub, and is a community driven project, while the one for Snap is called the Snap Store owned by Canonical Ltd.
• Snap is closely tied to Ubuntu (and some variants of Ubuntu), while Flatpak is available on a wider variety of Linux distributions.
• Both use sandboxing to limit the access applications have to your system, but Flatpak has more granular controls, letting you have more choice over what an application can do on your computer.
• Flatpak applications generally start and run faster than Snap applications.