Mint is built on Ubuntu… which is built on Debian… which means it inherits every upstream problem and adds its own.

When Ubuntu breaks something, Mint breaks. When Debian freezes for 2 years, Mint freezes. When Ubuntu ships outdated packages, Mint ships outdated packages.

Cinnamon is a horrible technical dead end

Cinnamon is:

  • still tied to X11
  • not Wayland‑ready
  • not modernizing at the pace of GNOME or KDE
  • maintained by a tiny team
  • unintuitive and more cumbersome than other DEs with CLI solutions

Mint’s update philosophy is “don’t touch anything”

Mint intentionally avoids major updates to avoid breaking things.

  • you get older kernels
  • older drivers
  • older Mesa
  • older desktop stack

Great (j/k) for grandma’s laptop. Not great for gaming, new hardware, or anything performance‑sensitive.

Mint actively discourages Flatpaks and Snaps… but also can’t provide modern packages

Mint hates Snaps (this actually makes sense for Desktop). Mint barely tolerates Flatpaks. Mint’s repos are old. So, users end up in dependency hell or installing random .debs (binaries, or what Windows users used to be mocked for) from the internet.

“we don’t like the App Store, but we also don’t have our own."

Mint historically:

  • delayed security patches
  • had a compromised ISO mirror distributing a malicious ISO
  • had a philosophy of “updates shouldn’t break things,” which meant delaying critical fixes

-Mint fans pretend these never happened.