Mint was my second distro and the first I actually stayed on. Versions 19.3, 20 and 20.1 were near-perfect. But I remember having a serious bug with 20.2 which made me unable to install software from the very start. Which forced me to downgrade.

Starting with versions 21-21.2 I got bugs related to the Cinnamon desktop in every new release. It’s honestly become so annoying, I am not sure if I’m gonna continue using Mint in the future.

Right now I’m on HamoniKR, which is a distro based on Mint 20.3, and it’s working near-flawlessly. I decided to use it instead of actual Mint 20.3 because the latter will reach its EOL in Apr 2025, and I’m hoping the HamoniKR team will roll out updates for their own distro like Deepin does for their Debian 10-based version. Because it’s almost 2024 and they still haven’t announced the new version of HamoniKR, yet I can see their website is very active. I can only assume they have some sort of long-term plan for this release. If not though, I’ll check out whatever the new Mint version will be by then, and if it’s still buggy, will switch to either a distro with either Gnome or KDE, both of which would be far from ideal.

Also, I gotta say, the community surrounding Mint can sometimes be very annoying when you post about problems on the forum. I assume because it’s a beginner-friendly distro, most of the replies you get are also from beginners who can’t help you. For example, I was describing a bug that turned all my audio file icons into office document icons, and all I got in response is “go into the file properties and change file association” and “change the theme”, even though I clearly described that the problem is not theme-related or association-related. And then I got not actual help from anybody that knows anything. And the Mint subreddit is plagued with screenshots of poorly-replicated Windows imitations, and the most upvoted posts are people saying they’ve just switched to Mint and how much they love it. While actual support requests go unnoticed.