Trying linux mint

I have been a linux user for 10-12 year, less time than i am a developer. But generally I was only using Debian based distros and specifically Ubuntu. Tried Fedora for a day or two, but because of video driver problems that where the same as Ubuntu i decided that it wasn't worth it to bend my mind to start thinking the 'Fedora way'.

In the latest years I started to actively dislike certain aspects of Ubuntu.

SNAP

I get the idea of packaging the dependencies in one to reduce system pollution and problems. At the same time everything was looking different then everything else. One major aspect of linux that I liked was the snappiness, how fast everything seems to be. But snaps added abstractions made everything book sloooow, once I measured one app start time that was native and with snap. The difference of 15 seconds bugged me allot.

Payed services

The payed services that where pushed more and more aggressively.  
Every installation started with "landscape" or the paid kubernetes services. Even the paid repositories, that I even didn't read what was it all about.

Before Installed Linux Mint 21 I had ubuntu 20.04 for more then 3-4 years ( Upgraded from 18.04 ) , but failed to upgrade to 22.04. Then did a fresh install of 22.04, but the snap was more aggressive and comments of the type "install a browser before you remove snapd otherwise you cannot search for solutions from that machine" was the last thing that pushed me to try another distro.

So why Linux mint.

As i said I like snappiness and dont care that much of visual parts of the os. Most of the time i work on fullscreen ( even with top title bar hidden ).  Have tried Cinnamon, XFCE, Mate before and decided to stick to the default.

One thing that was missing in Cinnamon compared to Gnome that I use for years was the focusing apps with WIN + NUM shorcut. The workaround for mint is to create a custom shortcut and add a command

WIN + 1 : Frontend development

wmctrl -xa google-chrome

WIN + 2 : Based on what I am working set the specific IDE/Editor

wmctrl -xa phpstorm

WIN + 3: Browser for searching

wmctrl -xa vivaldi

The other thing that I found that bugs me is the constant reminder that the boot partition is full, because mint installs kernel updates constantly.

That may be usefull to some people but not to me. I like to change the kernel ONLY when I am in a "experimenting" mood or to try fix a problem with the system like video issues.

The solution is to freeze the kernel packages:

sudo apt hold linux-image-5.19.0-28-generic
sudo apt hold linux-headers-5.19.0-28-generic

So for the 20 days running linux mint I can say its OK.