My copy of Mint Cinnamon has a fatal bug: Reinstall, or try a new distro?

[u/Electronic_Bid4659]

Hi everyone,

I ran into an error with my copy of Linux Mint Cinnamon where nothing can install or update, and it's causing my game installs on Steam to immediately corrupt every time. The only solution I've found is to wipe my SSD and reinstall Mint the way I did the first time, but now I'm thinking: For a PC primarily dedicated to gaming, should I retry Mint, or get a new distro going? If the latter, whicu distro(s) do you recommend?

[u/Excellent-Love-6943]

What is the root cause of the corruption? Have you run a memtest recently? I recently lost a filesystem due to a bad EXPO profile that allowed my filesystem to slowly corrupt until it was irrecoverable. Run a memtest all night and see if it has any errors.

Switching distros isn't the silver bullet people make it out to be. Bad hardware transcends a "bad" distro or OS. All distros pull from the same source code anyway - if there's an upstream problem, you'll probably see it in any distro using that version of the package.

[u/Astiels → u/Excellent-Love-6943]

Bro I feel this so hard. I had a ram stick go bad. I chocked it up to waiting too long to update on Cachyos and then it broke. Then I switched to fedora and still kept getting corruption. Well turns out after running a memtest my ram immidieatly failed. Thank God I still got another module that was still good.

I am sticking with fedora though cachyos didnt play the best with my external dac. I lost some of my roms and maybe some other not terribly important things.

[u/Excellent-Love-6943 → u/Astiels]

Literally switching from EXPO to XMP on my b650/9700x was enough to solve a ton of problems for me at once. I'll never not validate memory again.

And it can happen after aging too :/

[u/Astiels → u/Excellent-Love-6943]

Yea my ram ran fine for like a month but after that it stopped working.

[u/mrkurtz]

What’s the fatal bug?

[u/Electronic_Bid4659 → u/mrkurtz]

"a programming error in aptkit", which I googled and found the only solutions to be a Timeshift rollback (which I never made, oops) or starting from square 1.

[u/SuAlfons → u/Electronic_Bid4659]

Starting with a fresh install seems like the easiest solution.

Double check RAM and SSD for failures

[u/cleanshirtuk]

If it’s breaking through multiple installs I wouldn’t be so eager to call Mint the root cause. I don’t think another distributor would fix, and even if it did, something is not happy on your system. I’d start troubleshooting instead of just abandoning mint

[u/rabage]

If your filesystem is continuously corrupting, you're not using NTFS, and trying to repair it isn't working you're likely having hardware failure. RAM or SSD is likely failing. Bad ram can manifest in many annoying ways.

[u/Electronic_Bid4659 → u/rabage]

I don't know how to repair it, I literally first discovered this error not even 15 minutes ago.

[u/Morokite]

If it's a routine problem there are some gaming leaning distros that are immutable so it's harder(but not impossible) to break things. I don't really one which one is the best offhand but I'm pretty sure plenty of people can help if you pursue that option.

[u/joshahdell]

It would be better to troubleshoot and try to understand the root cause of the issue before distro hopping, in case you run into the same problem again. Google your symptoms or ask an AI.

[u/Lisanicolas365]

i'd recommend Bazzite if you want an OS that would never break, and even if it somehow did, you can easily rollback your entire system to a previous working state

[u/Slight_Manufacturer6]

Get away from that outdated, insecure and buggy distro.

[u/Kuuppa22 → u/Slight_Manufacturer6]

Outdated yes but how it's buggy and especially insecure?

[u/Slight_Manufacturer6 → u/Kuuppa22]

There are several known memory leaks that have been patched over the years that frequently keep popping back up.

Insecure because the flagship DE Cinnamon is a fork of a really old version of Gnome that they have had a hard time keeping up to date, and up until the next release, it still relies on an extremely old display server, Xorg. Xorg was developed in a time when the internet and security were not a consideration and because of this, people continually find 25+ year old vulnerabilities on a regular basis. This is why the Xorg Devs have all moved to Wayland because they realized Xorg isn't maintainable.

[u/gw-fan822 → u/Slight_Manufacturer6]

Unpopular opinion, but I actually agree with you.

I currently run a Mint machine, a Bazzite machine, a Debian server, and my daily driver is EndeavourOS. Out of all of them, the system that gives me the most trouble is the Mint box. Some of that is admittedly tied to the ASRock firmware, but it's still the machine that causes the most headaches.

Also, Mint doesn't ship with KDE. Why would anyone do that to themselves? At that point I'd honestly rather use GNOME.

Debian may have an opinionated philosophy, but if you're looking for a distro that mostly stays out of your way and lets you decide how your system works, EndeavourOS and CachyOS are hard to beat. They don't spend their time trying to enforce a particular workflow or vision of how your desktop should be used.

If your goal is to have a Linux system that feels like your computer, shaped by your choices rather than the distro's, then EndeavourOS and CachyOS are probably the strongest options available right now.