<div class="header-image"></div> <table class="table-header"> <thead> <tr> <th colspan="2"></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>2024-05-03</td> <td style="text-align: right;"><a href="About.md" class="internal-link">About</a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> # Linux Mint and Handling Controversies  >[!note] > This post was updated on May 12, 2024 to include the content of Clem's post on the Linux Mint forums. I love Linux Mint. It was the first distribution I started using full time (Mint 9, if I remember correctly), and I believe it was the distro I had on my machine when I actually deleted my Windows partition. I have, as one does when new to Linux, hopped from distro to distro, looking for the "perfect" one for me, but I found myself continually coming back to Mint. Discovering and learning Linux was a really fun time for me. Back then, the flagship DE for both Mint and Ubuntu was Gnome 2.x. I liked Ubuntu a lot too, but I thought Mint was better out of the box. It was the first distro I remember having a *real* software centre. Other distros, Ubuntu included, were just using Synaptic Package Manager, or the like. It had an update manager that I liked a lot better than what was being used elsewhere too. And it installed media codecs and proprietary drivers during the system installation, which even Ubuntu didn't do back then. I remember running Ubuntu 10.10, though, and **loving** it. I would have been a complete convert, I think, if not for Ubuntu 11.4. That was the edition that introduced the Unity desktop, and, consequently, was the *last* Ubuntu release I used as a daily driver, and it wasn't just me. Unity was a controversial change for Ubuntu. There was a **lot** of controversy in the tech world back then, specifically the Linux world. It began with the 4.0 release of KDE. This introduced the Plasma desktop to the world, and it was a buggy piece of shit! I mean it *looked* great, but it was simply not ready to ship when it did. KDE 3.5, I think, was the most popular DE out there for Linux before the release of 4.0. More popular, even, than Gnome. But with KDE 4.0, Gnome overtook KDE in popularity and it's been that way ever since. When Gnome 3.0 and Unity were introduced a short while later, they both caused quite a stir as well. If KDE 4.x had been more stable, it probably could have reclaimed its throne as the most popular DE, but instead what happened was that DEs became more varied and fragmented. XFCE gained a little resurgence when Linus Torvalds announced he was dropping Gnome in favour of the more dated DE. I, myself, switched to it for at least a couple of years while KDE 4 sorted itself out. I ended up switching to KDE more or less permanently after 4.8, which I felt was stable enough to use. It was *still* pretty buggy, but when it worked I liked it very much, and its stability improved with every point release. Still, when Mate was introduced (basically a fork of Gnome 2.x) I did go back and forth between the two DEs. At that point I had pretty much landed on Mint and stayed there (after a short stint with SolydK). Though for 2 years, after Mint ditched its support for KDE, I did switch to Kubuntu for another 2 years. I've found myself now having used Mint Cinnamon for 2 years, and I do love it. And with Canonical forcing all official Ubuntu spins to use snap packaging, I won't be going back. I have looked around at other Ubuntu-based distros now that KDE 6 is out, but I can't see myself using it as a daily driver at this point. Linux Mint had its controversies too, the biggest one I remember was surrounding the Banshee music player. I loved Banshee, although many did not, as I recall, because it was built using Mono. It was also notoriously difficult to import a large number of music files into its library and took some patience. But once that was done, you could set it up in many different ways and I still look back on it fondly, for exactly this. It was the only player I've ever used that I could make look and behave exactly the way I wanted it. Anyway, one of the ways Banshee made money was that it had affiliate links embedded into the player. So if, for example, I had an .mp3 by Bob Dylan, within the player it would provide me an Amazon affiliate link to buy the CD wherein that track could be found, and the purchase would provide the developers a little cut. What Mint did was change that affiliate link to *Mint's* affiliate link and so Mint would get the cut. They did this without notifying anyone about the change. [https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/12/linux-mint-swap-banshee-affiliate-code-take-100-of-profits](https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/12/linux-mint-swap-banshee-affiliate-code-take-100-of-profits) Clem, did respond to the accusations: [https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=88315](https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=88315) I've used this example before in actually promoting Linux and open source software. My argument was that this was kind of a big deal in the Linux world, but let's face it: what Clem did meant *nothing* to the usability of the system. It was just a sneaky way of diverting money from one project to another. In other words, to me, an average user, this was an extremely *minimal* infraction. But it was a testament to open source, as, if the source code was unavailable, it may not have been discovered. And even such a *small detail* was discovered and made public knowledge. Imagine if it was something worse (like the XZ backdoor)? If something so insignificant as an Amazon affiliate link was discovered, of course when something worse happens it will get discovered too (like the XZ backdoor). Another controversy Mint found itself in at one point, which I find mind-bogglingly ironic considering today's "*everything is political*" landscape, was some comments Clem posted to the Linux mint blog. I couldn't actually find the initial post. It has been deleted from the blog and wasn't archived. You can piece together the contents of it by looking at this thread of people commenting on it though: [https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1146796](https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1146796) archived here: [https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1146796.html](https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1146796.html) TLDR: This was from 2009, during one of the many Israel/Palestine flareups over the years. Clem decided to opine on the subject in the Linux Mint blog, coming on the side of Palestine, and, it sounds like, showing a bit of disgust at anyone siding with Israel in the conflict. The comments, largely, are **disapproving** of Clem for *bringing politics to a Linux distro*. Here is a small sampling: >[!quote] >*"Nice and real mature, using a operating system blog to push their own political agenda on as a vehicle. That'll keep people interested in Mint's future."* > >*"Huh? What the hell has Linux Mint got to do with Israel?"* > >*"Code has no religious or political affiliation. What difference does it make?"* Somehow I think if the same post (I really wish I could find it) were made today, people would respond with an entirely different take. What's interesting about all of these controversies, except one, is that they were about tech. And the one exception was only controversial because *it wasn't* about tech. Today, of course, a post like that would be celebrated. "*Everything* is political," after all. Personally, I remember not caring at all. I understood the criticism, but ultimately it was ignorable, and didn't affect my enjoyment of Linux Mint one way or the other. Today I might find it irritating, just because it would seem like jumping on a bandwagon, attempting to appease the Twitter mobs who insist that "silence is violence" (God forbid any children of the Internet suffer at the hands of the "deafening silence" of Clem Lefebvre). But ultimately it still doesn't affect my enjoyment of Linux Mint. It's still my favourite distribution (even without a KDE edition). I look forward to the day when the rabid masses are just as ignorable. Going through the comment thread I linked to above, I couldn't find a single response that thought his post was appropriate. But he just deleted it, and it was forgotten. Today, if someone has an opinion deemed inappropriate by the mob, a retraction, an apology (several, most likely), and, perhaps, some kind of charity contribution must be made to demonstrate your "commitment to being on the right side of history" or some such nonsense. If these things are not done, or even worse, the criticisms are completely *ignored*, it would result in cancellation. Most likely you'd be kicked out of the project/movement you, yourself started (just ask Richard Stallman about that one). I think most of us are finally growing weary of the righteous indignation of an adolescent Internet population. Cancellation doesn't happen as fervently in most circles any more. Perhaps we can now all go back to questioning why the hell a technology company is so invested in religious wars half the world away, or in the race ratios of its workforce. Or, optimally, realise code "has no religious or political affiliation," so what difference does it make? >[!Info] Update May 12, 2024 Coincidentally, I published this on the *15^th anniversary* of Clem's post, which wasn't on the Linux Mint Blog after all, but in the Linux Mint forums. Bryan Lunduke spoke about it a little bit in a recent video on his YouTube channel. He had a screenshot of Clem's post, and I grabbed a screenshot of that, so I'm able now to show the original post I was referring to: > >