Re: Linux flavours
Well, I am not a Mint user (used to be until they canned KDE and so I went Neon which works very well for me) but, attempting to answer your question:
1) Cinnamon. For users who say Gnome 3 as a tablet only interface, Cinnamon was Mint's initially rushed answer, essentially Gnome 3 as it could have been. I known many users use Mint just for Cinnamon. If I was not a KDE fan (I kinda need KDE just for the keyboard support leave alone the rest) I would probably go Mint Cinnamon.
2) Mint is pretty solid and reliable. When Mint did KDE it was a storming distro for me... though I could see the Mint crew was struggling with QT and KDE and I knew I would have to switch. Neon came along just in time!
3) Some would say the standard installed packages in Mint are extremely useful, and some utilities really are Mint only and cannot be installed in another distro (I know, I've tried) and since apps are what people use day to day that counts.
4) Suspicion of Canonical which many regard as getting too close to Microsoft style lock in, hence concern over snap - concerns I share, personally.
5) The downsides of snap might be too much to bear particularly enormous installs! I mean, in Neon, if I wanted to use a snap package I could end up having to download and unpack the entire Gnome GUI to run a text editor! This is something that concerns me given I need huge amounts of HDD space for my work.
6) Clem is generally regarded as a good guy who does a good job and is highly regarded in the Linux community as a whole.
I think over time Clem is going to have to distance further from Canonocial as the two distros are not ideologically aligned and the LMDE edition will have to become dominant. I think we're seeing a slow divorce here.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
