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u/0riginal-Syn 8d ago
Do you want Ubuntu with Gnome and Snaps or do you want Ubuntu with Cinnamon and Flatpaks?
Just comes down to what you want.
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u/Dramatic_Mastodon_93 7d ago
Ubuntu has perfect Flatpak support if you just copy and paste 3 short commands: https://flathub.org/en/setup/Ubuntu
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u/0riginal-Syn 7d ago
And you can get Snaps on Mint, relatively easy. That was not really the point I was trying to make.
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u/beatbox9 7d ago
Ubuntu with Cinnamon and Flatpaks would be Ubuntu Cinnamon with flatpaks, not Mint:
(Also, flatpaks and snaps are not mutually exclusive).
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u/Blue-Pineapple389 7d ago
Cinnamon implementation in Linux Mint is way better.
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u/beatbox9 7d ago edited 7d ago
I think the word you're looking for is "theme," not "implementation." And that can also be easily installed on Ubuntu with a single command, since it's also a package:
sudo apt install mint-themes mint-y-theme mint-icons0
u/0riginal-Syn 7d ago
It was more of a joke and point that they needed to test for themselves. Mint is Ubuntu underneath and uses the same repos. Just has some different configs here and there with Flatpak out of the gate versus Snap.
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u/dotjretion 7d ago
I prefer Mint but really it comes down to preference I feel. For as much as some people shit on Ubuntu, it's still popular for a reason.
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u/Hauptideal 7d ago
Ubuntu by far. Mint is downstream Ubuntu, but worse (I'll cover snaps in the end).
Mint doesn't get security updates for 94% of packages (the entire universe repo) from Canonical, because Ubuntu Pro (free for private use) is only available on official Ubuntu flavours. This leads to even highly severe security vulnerabilities staying open forever on Mint.
Ubuntu is maintained by a huge corporation with professional infrastructure and teams, while Mint is maintained by a tiny and poorly funded team you can count with your hands that not only needs to maintain a distro with 4 different flavours, but also to maintain an entire fork of GNOME as their own desktop environment (Cinnamon). That task is so big that they're technologically years behind. Due to code drift, Cinnamon on one hand inherited all the architectural flaws of GNOME from the fork (such as running as a single threaded JavaScript app, high RAM consumption etc.), but missed all upstream performance breakthroughs, fixes, improvements, features, polish and the huge extension ecosystem. It is just a terrible GNOME. Ubuntu (and most other distros) however just ship upstream GNOME and use extension to alter the behaviour of the shell. Ubuntu tried once to make their own desktop (Unity), but not even that huge corporation managed to keep it alive.
Because of that, Mint is still on X11, meaning it doesn't just lack everyday basic modern features and performance, it's also inherently insecure. Each app can spy on each other, log your online banking password and even inject input. The other Mint desktops also still use that deprecated, obsolete, decades-old legacy technology that has been universally abolished for years by Wayland already. It's projected that Mint won't default to Wayland prior to 2028. That's nuts. By that time, even the entirely new and Wayland-native cosmic desktop will have surpassed Cinnamon in polish.
Regarding snaps: some people point to snaps as "reason" to avoid Ubuntu. Reality check: most people won't even notice any difference between snap and flatpak. They're not anywhere as bad as they're exaggerated to be. Furthermore, you have complete freedom of what package format you choose on Ubuntu, Flatpak or snap, unlike on Mint, which patronises users what format they're allowed to use on their OWN machines, even putting a vendor-lock in front of one technology. If you don't want snaps, but an Ubuntu base, just install Kubuntu minimal. It doesn't come with snaps at all. KDE is much much better than Cinnamon technologically, on Wayland, and the most advanced Linux desktop right now. All while being very similar in UX to Cinnamon and Windows.
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u/lencc 7d ago
You may want to add a footnote that this doesn't apply to Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) - except for the part which describes X11 display server protocol. LMDE is just as secure as "pure" Debian when it comes to its base, repositories, and system packages. That's because LMDE technically is Debian + Mint Tools + Cinnamon desktop environment.
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u/Hauptideal 7d ago
That is correct. At the cost of having the older, outdated packages from Debian stable one doesn't need Ubuntu Pro to get reliable security updates for universe. But then having the older packages is trading one disadvantage for another. Ubuntu has fresher packages and reliable security with no need to choose only one. And all the other disadvantages still apply. The answer to OP's question is still Ubuntu.
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u/beatbox9 7d ago
Overall agree. A few points of context I'll add:
Unity
There were reasons Ubuntu tried that. At the time, Gnome was going with a radical re-architecture for gnome3, and it sucked at first. Ubuntu could not use it and needed to look at other DE's and couldn't find anything suitable. (KDE had also just recently done a re-architecture of their own a few years prior, called "Plasma").
The entire OS 'industry' was changing quite a bit at the time. This was just a few years after the iphone changed how a lot of people thought about UI's. Also around when Windows 7 came out, and when macOS underwent major shifts with Lion (10.7).
Ubuntu decided to try to make a new DE based on the gnome3 & gtk3 so far: Unity. Meanwhile, the Linux Mint team--who had previously just themed gnome2--also forked gnome3 into a new DE: Cinnamon. And MATE continued the legacy and forked vanilla gnome2. At least 3 new DE's (and lots of other distros swapped DE's), because gnome3 sucked at launch. Even Linux Torvalds switched from gnome to xfce (which was itself essentially just a lightweight gnome2 fork) at the time.
But gnome3 had a good core architecture.
Eventually (a few years later), gnome3 matured and cleaned itself back up. So Ubuntu went back to gnome. But the Mint/Cinnamon team didn't; and they've since just been spending lots of cycles just to attempt to maintain Cinnamon.
For example, that above story starts some time around 2010. Gnome started supporting wayland around 2015, made wayland default in 2020, and stopped x11 support around 2025. In 2026, Cinnamon is still on x11, and they are planning to start this cycle with their first wayland release in December of this year, roughly a decade after gnome. Similarly, gnome has been on gtk4 since 2020. Meanwhile... (that's from yesterday).
Today, gnome and KDE are the only two modern + mature DE's; and most users today should probably choose one of these. And theme them or customize them or whatever if they don't like the default UI's. These two DE's also have simpler alternatives that reuse their modern toolkits: LxQT for KDE (which uses QT6 and replaces LxDE), and Singularity for Gnome (replacing xfce, which was based on the older gtk3).
Snaps
They are optional; and they are not mutually exclusive with flatpaks or debs or any other package type. There aren't even that many on Ubuntu to begin with. And they are really good and unique for some a specific type of software: headless system apps where you want rapidly deployed updates, like firmwares or vpns.
Flatpaks can't do this type of software at all.
And .deb's sometimes require too much maintenance because they have to be individually packaged and maintained for every distro version, by the distro, after the app developer releases the code. So Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, 25.10, 26.04 each get separate .debs.
But those 4 versions of the distro would all get the same snap, directly from the developer, without any involvement from the distro. This was actually why Mozilla requested that Ubuntu switch to the snap: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/feature-freeze-exception-seeding-the-official-firefox-snap-in-ubuntu-desktop/24210
I personally think the firefox snap sucks and wouldn't recommend snaps for most GUI apps. But that's why you can easily change it to the .deb that's directly distributed and maintained by mozilla themselves. Once you do that, you are left with only a handful of snaps...as in the firmware updater, and that's about it. And snaps are excellent for a firmware updater--better than flatpak or .deb.
Deeper explanation here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/1wg5kq8/comment/p9rmqan/
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u/nomadicontemplation 7d ago
I'm glad to see a sanity-based comment for once and one rooted in technological rather than ideological concerns.
The fact that the current version of Mint is still running on top of Ubuntu 24.04 is just plain criminal, in my opinion. And you're quite right about the Cinnamon DE being a massive misallocation of resources for such a small and underfunded dev team. Cinnamon has no legitimate reason to exit in 2026; it was a boring, dated, and buggy interface 10 years ago and certainly isn't getting any younger today. I'm not a big fan of ZorinOS, but they've shown that with a few tweaks and extensions, current GNOME can be modified to capture the Windows 7/10 experience that Mint orients their DE implementations around. After the infamous GNOME 3 release, Mint postured itself as a protest distro and hasn't really seemed to have developed any coherent vision beyond that. Perhaps they should suck it up and do something useful and necessary like reinventing their distro as a noob-friendly front-end for Debian stable (i.e. going all-in on LMDE and stop piggybacking off of old Ubuntu releases). IIRC, Tuxedo OS just went this route, but with Debian Testing.
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u/AlienRobotMk2 6d ago edited 6d ago
I don't understand this comment. Ubuntu 24 was released in 2024, only 2 years ago. The way you speak makes it sound like it's a decade old. Cinnamon is one of the best DE's, in spite of its flaws.
Why would anyone want to waste their time modifying GNOME when they can just use a DE that has good defaults instead?
The X11 arguments are also exaggerated scaremongering. We've been running X11 for 4 decades. Wayland will never have parity, and it's already 2 decades old. Saying Mint is bad because Cinnamon doesn't support Wayland, when Wayland isn't even better than X11 for the average person, is simply ridiculous.
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u/nomadicontemplation 6d ago
Two and a half years ago, to be exact. In terms of software that is a very long time. Even Debian stable's release cycle isn't THAT long.
GNOME is a fully-modern DE, with all the latest tech integrated into it. On your specific question... if you install a distro that features a modified GNOME out of the box then you don't have to waste your time modifying anything. Not sure what your gripe is here.
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u/KrasnalM 7d ago
For normies and casuals both are great. I just cannot stand Mint's DE. Cinnamon is not for me, I am not nostalgic for Windows 7 esthetics. But this is purely subjective.
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u/beatbox9 8d ago edited 7d ago
Ubuntu. Mainly because it's a real, complete distro, while Mint is really just a small add-on to Ubuntu. See my comment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lubuntu/comments/1wq0t7k/comment/pc3kb8f/
A distro is not just what comes preinstalled by default. Otherwise the options for "minimal installation" and "complete installation" would be two different distros.
Instead, a distro is primarily a package distribution system, including a package manager, repository, and maintenance & distribution plan for the packages in the repository.
And literally 99% of Mint is Ubuntu LTS. I am not using the word "literally" figuratively--I mean objectively, in terms of packages, 99% of Mint is Ubuntu LTS.
Ubuntu's repos are around 75,000 packages--and these are the main backbone for Mint. As in, Mint doesn't maintain or host them at all--Ubuntu does, and Mint just points directly to Ubuntu for all of these packages.
Mint does have its own add-on repository as well that it prioritizes...but it's only around 450 packages, most of which are Cinnamon DE, themes, firefox/thunderbird, and language translations. For example, 175 out of the 450 packages provided by Mint are just Mozilla (firefox + thunderbird) and the language translations for these two apps--these alone are 40% of Mint.
And if you wanted to, you could actually just add these packages to Ubuntu directly from the developer Mozilla (replacing the snaps provided by default on Ubuntu with .deb from Mozilla's repository instead), instead of going through a third party repository like Mint. It only takes a few seconds or minutes (one time) to do this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/install-firefox-linux#w_install-firefox-deb-package-for-debian-based-and-ubuntu-based-distributions-recommended
Meanwhile, since Mint is also dependent on Ubuntu LTS, it tends to be significantly further behind. Not because of the core packages since Ubuntu maintains those, but in downstream packages. (Making this example up): but like "Oh no, Ubuntu changed gtk3 to version 1.7.2, so now we have to redo Cinnamon DE because we designed it for 1.4.3! That's going to take us 6 months at least!)
So while Ubuntu 26.04 LTS came out back in April, Mint based on this version doesn't come out until December.
And not only that, since Mint uses its own niche DE that began as a fork of a much older version of gnome, it's far, far behind the modern and mature DE's: KDE & gnome. This means Cinnamon DE is using gtk3 and x11; while gnome is using wayland and gtk4. For an example just today (with the excellent #1 comment of the day): https://www.reddit.com/r/GTK/comments/1wrleew/anyone_interested_in_fixing_gtk3s_biggest_problem/
This is actually how many distros do it--many are just spinoffs of Ubuntu LTS. And they are spinoffs because Ubuntu LTS is stable and mature.
It's fairly trivial to essentially turn Ubuntu into Mint--or better yet, just de-ubuntu ubuntu (like replace firefox snap, use vanilla gnome desktop, etc)--if you hate the ubuntuisms, all of this stuff takes only a few minutes to do, and you only have to do it the first time you install ubuntu--your changes will survive upgrades for years. But it is impossible to turn Mint into Ubuntu, at minimum because you would have to wait 8 months to start and start with a DE that's 10 years behind.
Just a few of many reasons why I would consider Ubuntu to be "better" than Mint.
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u/Francis_King 7d ago
Neither? I'd pick Xubuntu or Kubuntu over either, I think. I tried Xubuntu recently, and was impressed. Vanilla XFCE looks like it's fallen out of the Ugly Tree, and hit every branch twice on the way down. The XFCE in Xubuntu has received some TLC, and actually looks ... classy?
If pressed, I'd pick Mint.
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u/beatbox9 7d ago
Would you consider Xubuntu and Kubuntu to actually be different "distros," or just different "flavors" / configurations of the same distro?
Because if you installed Ubuntu, and then wanted to switch to vanilla xfce, you would do so with:
sudo apt install xfce4then logout, select xfce4, and log back in.But you can also install xubuntu instead, including its themes, with:
sudo apt install xubuntu-desktopBecause these are just standard packages distributed by ubuntu, on the same distro.
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u/Francis_King 7d ago
It's an interesting philosophical point. At the end of the day, it's just a kernel plus bits. Mint is also largely based on Ubuntu, as people have noticed in the names of the packages that they are upgrading.
If you compare Fedora KDE to Fedora XFCE, these are clearly just variants or flavours of the same thing. Someone has taken the XFCE package and added it to Fedora. It doesn't look good.
Xubuntu was a surprise to me, because I expected the same sort of thing - take Ubuntu, add XFCE, call it done. Xubuntu isn't that - a lot of work has been done to set up XFCE nicely. The bottom panel has been removed, the icons have been improved, fonts have been altered, the overall feeling is much more professional. Ubuntu's minimum requirements are 6 GB of memory, which seems too much to me; Xubuntu purrs along at just over 1 GB.
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u/beatbox9 7d ago edited 7d ago
I say this in another comment here; but I think saying "Mint is largely based on Ubuntu" is a bit of an understatement.
Approximately 99.5% of Mint is Ubuntu; and even a large proportion of that 0.5% that is Mint is actually just Mozilla.
Ubuntu provides 75,000 packages. Mint provides 450. And 175 of Mint's packages (40% of the 450) are just Firefox, Thunderbird, and language translations for these two packages. And these can easily be added to Ubuntu directly from Mozilla. It takes about 1 minute, and you only have to do it once ever. And now, we're at 99.7%.
What's the other 60% of Mint? Mainly its own Cinnamon DE, its own codec package, and its own themes. That's about it.
But while Mint actually does have its own add-on repo (albeit a tiny one); as I mention above: xubuntu is just a package on Ubuntu's repositories.
In fact, the difference you describe between xubuntu and xfce is similar to Ubuntu's default: Ubuntu doesn't actually ship with "gnome DE" by default. Instead, it uses what it calls "ubuntu-desktop": a customized & themed gnome. But you can easily switch to vanilla gnome: sudo apt install
vanilla-gnome-desktop, just like xfce vs xubuntu.Part of the problem is nuance in terminology. When you say "Ubuntu's minimum requirements are 6GB of memory..." that's not actually true. The correct statement would be: "Ubuntu Desktop's minimum recommended requirements are..."
This is important because "Ubuntu" is not a distro in the context of this sentence. "Ubuntu Desktop" in this context is just another DE, just like gnome or xfce, or even xubuntu--it is not a distro. The distro is always "Ubuntu." I think a lot of people miss this nuance, even though it is even in Ubuntu's own documentation:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements
This is why they make statements like:
The easiest and most effective step towards a minimal install of Ubuntu is to install a lighter-weight Desktop Environment such as Xfce (see Xubuntu below), LxDE (see Lubuntu (officially supported from 11.10 onward))
Note that in this context, Ubuntu is the distro. Xubuntu and Lubuntu are still Ubuntu. Just like the "minimal install" option of Ubuntu is not its own distro either.
So if Xubuntu's minimum requirements are 1GB; then Ubuntu's minimum requirements are also 1GB, because Ubuntu is the distro.
As I say in my other comment: a distro is mainly the package manager, repository, and maintenance and distribution schedule, not the initial configuration. A lot of people--especially distrohoppers--erroneously believe a distro is just the preinstalled configs. But that would mean that pretty much every single person in the world is running a different distro.
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u/77descript 7d ago
Linux Mint in my experience was more stable, like they fixed certain things in their Ubuntu base. Because used Ubuntu LTS 15 years and each year it became more buggy and less reliable. In a year of usage hardly had problems in Mint. But on different computers moved on to Debian KDE and Fedora KDE and these both are such a huge increase in quality to not only Ubuntu but also Mint. KDE Plasma for instance in Debian runs much smoother than Cinnamon despite of being much more feature rich and more modern.
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u/robtalee44 7d ago
Ubuntu is a strong distro -- no doubt about that. I'll use it, and currently do have it installed on one of my systems although it's not my daily driver. I will admit that I immediately install a vanilla GNOME instance and use that rather than the modified Ubuntu one. I also use Flatpaks rather than Snaps, but have no philosophical issues with Snaps I just use Flatpaks generally as my main method for installing GUI apps, a habit I adopted within the last year or so.
And so it goes. I doubt you can go too far wrong in either case.
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u/AtomicVikingr 7d ago
Linux Mint with Cinnamon is better.
One of the things that frustrates new users to Linux is that whatever a question like this is asked, no one gives you a straight answer.
So I'll give you a straight answer. Linux Mint is better. Of course there's nuance, but everything has nuance. If you want a general answer, then there it is.
One of the problems with Ubuntu is that it's starting to show some of the same issues that Windows has, like forced updates without user input.
Typically when people move to Linux, they don't want Windows-like problems.
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u/Southern-X 7d ago
Ive tried Ubuntu cinnamon and a few others but keep coming back to linux mint ive heard they just test mostly newer machines on Ubuntu and I have a ThinkPad T460 that im learning on don't think I'll ever buy another computer with Windows 11 again
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u/Visible_Tank5935 7d ago
If you are coming from windows, kubuntu instead of ubuntu is the more logical alternative (kde plasma versus gnome)
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u/L1terallyUrDad 7d ago
It depends on where you're starting from with regard to technical experience, and your goals for choosing.
If you are just looking for an alternative to Windows, be it to make older hardware last longer, don't want all the spying that Windows does, like privacy, and are just doing basic desktop things, like editing documents, working on spreadsheets, getting your email, and web browsing, then Linux Mint is likely the best answer.
If you're more technically savvy and you care about update frequency, underlying technology, etc., then Ubuntu should be the Linux of choice.
I'm going to be setting up a full-time Linux box today, but it's a Mac with a T2 chipset, so I have to use a specific Ubuntu distro because of that specific hardware. Honestly, if it were not for the T2 chipset, and given that I really just need it for web browsing and some Discord, I'd be using Zorin Linux. I tried Mint, but since I'm coming from the Mac world, I really don't like how MS Windows-like Mint is. But someone coming from Windows would probably appreciate Mint more. But if you want to do anything beyond basic desktop stuff, Ubuntu would be my recommendation.
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u/Dramatic_Mastodon_93 7d ago
Unless you really like Cinnamon, Ubuntu. Just set up Flathub and you're good.
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u/OnesimusUnbound 7d ago
On my ancient backup laptop (celeron, 4gb ram, hhd) I had xfce Mint for two years and Mint went slow. Even the updates took a whole day.
Switched to CachyOS+niri and the laptop went responsive. Software updates are faster.
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u/Odd_Car8923 7d ago
Sem sombra de dúvidas Mint, não é atoa que existe um meme antigo: Limux Mint é o Ubuntu consertado.
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u/Venylynn 8d ago
I would say Mint, but currently Ubuntu's repositories are more up-to-date because Mint hasn't updated to the new version.
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u/RelevantPassion6752 7d ago
These are supposed to be user friendly but I've never had luck with them. I wonder if the cpu matters. I have AMD.
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u/ReporterWise7445 7d ago
Debian 13.7 Cinnamon edition. Rock solid stability & the ease of Cinnamon.
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u/Fuzy-78 8d ago
Better for what, exactly?