this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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That's because Cinnamon is actually a fork of an ancient Gnome release that has since gotten much fewer enhancements compared to Gnome (and Plasma).
That is factually wrong: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/38/ChangeSet#Unfiltered_Flathub
When the WiFi relies on insecure encryption, the problem will only be delayed on Mint because Mint's underlying Ubuntu core is just older. Once a newer security policy comes to Mint, it will have exactly the same problem. The actual solution is for you university to update the WiFi encryption. In the meantime, according to https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/StrongCryptoSettings2#Upgrade/compatibility_impact the security defaults of Fedora can be rolled back to an earlier level quite easily.
mate is what originally spawned from gnome 2. while cinnamon was built from gnome 3, it has been completely separated from it for a decade.
both are under active development, run current applications, and offer what would be described as a more 'traditional' desktop environment (compared to gnome shell or ubuntu's unity). they're both lighter-weight then gnome, with mate being a bit leaner than cinnamon.
mint would be my suggestion for op, and any of the default mint desktops, including their other option--xfce, would be suitable for op's use case.
I followed Cinnamon's git closely for years. The commit "Renamed files to Cinnamon" was the last commit to the majority of files over years, despite the fact that Cinnamon had several formal releases in that time. It took literal years for its development to actually get off the ground and not just get some light touches in JavaScript files. The slow start reverberates until this day as you can see with its slow Wayland adoption and OP's "Mint seems rather outdated" comment. IMO Cinnamon isn't even the best choice for people who want a Windows7-like workflow. Gnome with Dash to Panel achieves the same with less technological legacy.
Okay, after removing all the preinstalled media players plus firefox and reinstalling them through Flathub it might be possible to skip the official tutorial.
Fedora should just preinstall everything as flathub flatpaks.
That is a valid point. Although I can imagine that Mint devs would rather leave legacy TLS enabled to be more user-friendly.
Thanks for the link, I will try this.
If you are the one installing the distro, it probably doesn't matter that you have to copy-paste some commands to install proprietary codes because it's a one time thing. In my experience, the bigger problem usually is not the first time setup but the maintenance. In case of Fedora they would have to upgrade it every 6 months. That's why I usually suggest LTS or something rolling but stabe distro like OpenSUSE Thumbleweed.
The upgrading experience for Fedora Workstation is super smooth, on par with macOS, Android, and so on. Gnome Software just tells the user that a new version is available, the user clicks on the upgrade button and then it's just waiting a bit and a reboot.
Technically it's not required to uninstall the default applications but obviously you'd still wanna do that to avoid clutter.
Even though not Fedora-based but that's pretty much what I have on SteamOS: Firefox, VLC, etc. all from Flathub. Because of the 32bit dependencies, Flathub is my preferred way to install Steam on regular Linux distributions anyway (for obvious reasons not on SteamOS).