It's official: Ubuntu Cinnamon remix has been voted in Ubuntu's Technical Board has voted and passed the motion: as of Ubuntu 23.04, Ubuntu Cinnamon will become the ninth official flavor. The youngest member of the Ubuntu family will become official as of the next release: Ubuntu Cinnamon 23.04 will be an authorised option, joining the existing eight others. It's not the only one …
[Author here]
> But does it need it for anything important?
It's an Ubuntu flavour. So it has Snap Firefox, same as all the other Ubuntu flavours.
If you don't want that, you can remove it and install the natively-packaged version. The `deb-get` tool is a very easy way to do this.
1. Install deb-get
2. Remove Firefox snap.
3. Use deb-get to install the native one.
4. Remove each other Snap, replace with natively packaged app.
5. When all snaps are gone, remove snapd.
Job done.
Does that sound too much work? Fair enough: use Mint then.
[Author here]
> Or Debian if you don't need Mint's bells and whistles.
Well, yes, true enough.
It is yet to be seen if Debian 12's inclusion of `non-free` drivers and firmware on the installation media will make it significantly easier to get started.
I suspect it will remain a more challenging option for most non-technical users, TBH. There is nothing wrong with Debian but it's aiming at a different sort of user than Ubuntu and perhaps even more to the point Mint are.
Debian has had links on their own pages to install media with "non-free" firmware for years, and I've usually found myself needing them - probably because I tend to favour previous generation Macbooks that I can buy second hand, and they inevitably require such firmware. I can only assume that the Debian folk have been tracking the popularity of that semi-official install media and the change in policy for version 12 is a consequence of that.
[Author here]
> I'll stick with fedora Cinnamon and carry on using flathub when I need to
Fair enough. You do whatever works for you.
I am not a big fan of Cinnamon (although it's better than GNOME IMHO). If I wanted the latest and greatest Cinnamon, I'd just run Mint.
Suggestions...
ubuntu-edu-secondary: Maths Geezer says - geogebra, a decent graph plotting program, some kind of skills based flash-card proggy, desktop logo/snap/turtle thing [See Brian Harvey's home page]. Octave and an algebra package such as maxima for the A level Maths people.
A lot of lessons online now in video form with handouts [e.g. https://corbettmaths.com/] so not sure what the USP of edubuntu is these days.
Best of luck
When I got my latest laptop (a bloody awful Dell XPS13+) I decided to give Ubuntu a shot because they were the only distro seemingly supporting the camera (getting it working in my usual Manjaro seemed too much of a faff). 22.04 with standard Gnome. I mostly liked it although I wasn't a big fan of the Snaps.
Then I stupidly upgraded to 22.10 which made a complete mess of things. Applications failing all over the place. Evolution constantly telling me it could no longer connect to my Gmail accounts. Eventually I flipped and installed Mint with Cinnamon. And I've been really happy with it. The only thing I'm not so keen on is the titlebars as I really prefer the titlebarless look. I tend to run all windows full screen so I have little need for them.
Nemo's pretty decent nowadays. Integrates well with SMB, my Nextcloud instance and all my Google shares (which I rarely use from Nemo TBH).
I might give this version of Ubuntu a shot, but honestly I've had a much better experience with Mint.
Debian and Cinnamon is a decent compromise - all the apps (and maintainers behind them) from Debian and a fairly vanilla Cinnamon. And no need for flatpak or snapd unless you want to install them.
As the universal operating system, our priorities are our users and Free software.
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