I worked with Clement between 2017-2019. I invested a significant amount of time getting their mutter fork caught up, and there was a fallout resulting from all the work being reverted at the last minute before the next release.<p>I'm still bitter about this, and I think this experience has been traumatic. On their private Slack workspace they harassed me, later banned me from their Github organization, used social media to defame me, and continued to attack me in Github issues for some time afterwards.<p>During this time I also got a job with a reference from Clement praising me, but was later laid off after he wrote a blog post attacking me while being increasingly harassed in private by various Linux Mint team members. I wish I still had that reference email I let him send directly to my previous boss, so people could see how quickly he will turn on people within a three month time period.<p>Needless to say this has spoiled my appetite for being an open source contributor. Maybe I will eventually find a project that interests me, but every time I try to get back into the Linux desktop userland these experiences come back to haunt me.<p>Edit: It seems people want proof, but all I can show is a public figure who has done irreparable damage to the way I look at FOSS.
As inflammatory as it is, my experience with Ubuntu (non-LTS) was the biannual death march. An upgrade broke my system. I never had any such experience with Win or Mac, so it was a Linux-specific problem. I suppose I could've used the LTS version, but then (again unlike Win and Mac) I would've been limited to only old versions of packages. Mint would probably have been similar.<p>Nowadays I'm using Manjaro for 3 years running. There's no 6 monthly release cycle, but a continuous stream of rolling releases. An upgrade has never broken my system to the same extent as it did with Ubuntu. It's closer to the Win and Mac experience for me.<p>Caveat though: Manjaro is not as beginner friendly as Ubuntu or Mint or Pop!_OS.
It's funny how the concept of "distro" is losing importance now.<p>Do people really care if their docker containers run Ubuntu? Debian? RH? Not really<p>Also 90% of the pain in (traditional) distros seem to be the UI stuff (Window Manager, drivers, audio, etc). Not saying the other parts are not complicated, but upstream does most of the work there.
Love Linux Mint. I say that as a Unix loving, Slack, Arch and OpenBSD wielding geek. I just don't want to deal with anything else than being productive, and Linux Mint helps me do that.