Yes, I agree. I personally like Cinnamon and Gnome, XFce if my PC doesn’t have much ram. I don’t really enjoy any of the other ones.

I use the cli on macos often, because some apps need to be manually signed from the terminal. Power users on windows also use the terminal. However, the best of what you ask is Linux Mint.

lmde does not have all the pref panels like normal mint does. I always suggest against it, especially for nvidia users.

Linux Mint is not a “rando ubuntu fork”. It’s the most reliable OS for me, along Debian-Stable. It has prefs for almost everything, sane defaults, and a clear release and support schedule. And it uses Cinnamon. I’ve tried everything under the sun, I always come back to Mint. It works.

I’d personally get the Vala book and start with that. It’s more gnome-integrated and it’s a great language.

This looks like either a driver issue, but more likely, a hardware issue. Either your nvme, or your RAM, is faulty. Run memcheck (it’s a bootable thing you run to make sure your ram is ok), and I’m sure there are tests for ssds too.

it’s ok, but it doesn’t allow for preview, to select exactly what I need in a page, it goes directly to scanning…

here in europe we get this for a one-off purchase:

just downloaded it, i will try it later today

It’s $33 for the basic edition to buy outright, which is what most people need.

No KDE for new users, it’s way too convoluted and bloated ui-wise. It also uses lots of ram, more than cinnamon. XFce is indeed much lighter than either, but it doesn’t have enough desktop preference panels like Cinnamon does (e.g. printer panel).

Yes, it’s possible, look here: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114874435763184758

I don’t think so, it’s just $33 to buy it outright (no subscription). You can’t buy a good scanner or a printer for $33. It’s a good value for money, especially since the guy has to buy (and most importantly) test all that hardware for each release. It’s a lot of engineering time. But as I said, he probably forgot to add watermarking to the scanning stitching feature, so no purchase was necessary for me. The demo version is good enough for it!

With Linux Mint you don’t need the terminal 99% of the time. The rest distros are close to 95% of the time. I always suggest Mint to new users.

I use gimp to edit (clean up) my scanned watercolor paintings. Yes, gimp is good enough now for what I used to do with photoshop: adjustment layers, more sane ui. Only thing that was missing is a very obscure feature that photoshop has, to merge multiple scanned pages of a very large photo. I now use vuescan for that (the free version does not add a watermark when using that particular feature, unlike its scans!). And then I edit in gimp, or RapidRAW (a new, lightroom-like app, that’s easier to use than darktable). So I’m set.

This is how I do it:

• Scan with the official EpsonScan2 app form flatpak as TIFF (unfortunately their .deb file coredumps on Linux Mint). The XSane app unfortunately is too buggy.
• Then I merge the various scans to a single scan (if my painting was too large and needed several passes), with the free version of VueScan. There is one other foss app that can do that, but it’s so convoluted that it’s not even funny. Vuescan does it with a single click and it doesn’t add a watermark, curiously enough!
• Then I edit either in Gimp to fix the wrong scanned colors (this epson scanner moves oranges to red a bit), or fix mistakes (that’s common now even for traditional illustrators). If it’s only colors I need to fix and not change actual parts of the painting, I might just use RapidRAW.
• Then I export at 1024px high for web usage, as a jpg 90% quality. I then archive the TIFFs and XCF files.

Gajim. It’s still developed.

Who’s Anna? What is this about?

Mint is less than 2 years old, that’s NOT old enough to say “I won’t support it”. If Microsoft was doing the same with Windows, they would never succeed. Compatibility is a big, big thing, and as I said, it’s users who use Mint that require his Appimage, not an Arch seasoned user. He misses the point. Just let him bundle more dependencies. It’s already 1.25 GB the package, what if it was 1.3 GB? Not a big difference.

His continuing hatred for Linux Mint (disguised as “old distro, old libraries”) to not support it, kind of bothers me. Mint users are the ones who would need this shortcut more than a seasoned user.

Also, this appimage is not well done, it’s hardcoded to libfuse2.so, and so even Debian-Testing doesn’t work (that only has libfuse3).

Ignore the guy who said that you don’t have to use Gnome. Gnome is the most Mac-Like, and so is Elementary OS (that is directly copying MacOS). So I’d suggest either Debian 13 with Gnome, or Elementary OS. Elementary OS, by being based on Ubuntu, it has more stuff ready to go (Debian might still need manual adding of repositories, e.g. non-free, if you want to have an accelerated video encoding driver with your video editor).