I've had issues with Wayland, even in 2025, but never with X11. X11 may be old, but it's stable. Mint is for normal people, not us. I do have it on my travel laptop though, because well, it never has any issues.
I tried Linux desktop for the first time in like a decade. Didn't know Xorg was deprecated for real, as in most distros moved to Wayland. Was surprised that the one hold out was Mint. And learned the hard way that Mint didn't work on my fairly normal PC, due to an Xorg issue.
This is the thing so many people recommend?! No wonder Linux is unpopular.
Also there like 20 competing ways to install packages now. Used to just be apt.
Flatpak and Snap are new to me, and that's the annoyance. Like I get if there's some technical advantage to a snap, but apt can install snaps too. Also idk what .appimage is.
rpm was a thing that existed but wasn't a Mint way of installing. Tar, yes. I can see why you'd consider a tar a package, but I was thinking of things actually designed for packages, and tar isn't really an extra thing to learn and deal with. Port tree, idk never heard of that.
> Flatpak and Snap are new to me and that's the annoyance.
These were designed to solve different problems.
PS - Just avoid snap. Fuck snap. All my homies hate snap.
Flatpak otoh is software basically delivered in a container with some security restrictions. It works great, but you may want a GUI problem called "flatseal" to enable access to certain parts of the host filesystem, device access, etc depending on specifics of what the particular application is supposed to do. That's a bit of a security boundary (good).
Flatpak does solve several big issues with the minor and only occasional need to use flatseal to enable access to say something in /proc /dev etc
(Even if they're all true) Do any of those things matter to a user? If the goal is to ditch Windows and have something else that can run Steam and a web browser and maybe some other applications, being "ancient" sounds just as likely to mean "stable and actually works"
One immediately noticeable thing is the lack of gestures on X11. Touchpad and touchscreen gestures just work in Wayland, most DEs implement them OOTB, even Hyprland has them.
Imagine going from a modern OS to one that doesn't have touchpad gestures in 2026. Yeah there's workarounds but having to config that isn't a good user experience.
Mint won't even boot for me because it doesn't support my year old GPU (9070 XT). That's a huge miss when someone is looking at an OS primarily for gaming.
Replacing something that's SOTA with something that still uses X11 and years old software isn't it (it makes Debian Stable look modern).