Mint has all of the important high-quality software preinstalled.What good is an operating system without useful applications and easily accessible utility software? Elementary OS is better suited for lightweight home usage, including media consumption, internet browsing, and light gaming.You can set up a powerful and stable workstation without any additional hassle and quickly get help from its active community if you need to. Mint is best used in workstations and heavy workload scenarios.The main target user base for Elementary is folks that are migrating from macOS to Linux.It includes everyone that wants to use Linux on a convenient and stable distro. The target audience of Mint is very broad.
While Mint makes itself beginner-friendly by providing all of the essentials right out of the box, this does so by making the user interface pleasing to look at and easy to understand.
The documentation on the OS is extremely basic, even for a beginner.Īll necessary codecs and critical drivers are preinstalled on the system, and you get up and running fairly quickly.Įlementary OS isn’t as complete after install, and some effort is required to get the best apps for basic functions. It also has a community but a less active one due to the smaller user base. The documentation on the OS is also adequate, especially for beginner users. The community is fairly active, and you can get good community support very quickly. Resource usage is a bit more than Linux Mint, but not by much. Resource usage is fairly minimal but still more than some extreme lightweight Linux distros. It contains all of the necessary drivers out of the box and has excellent support for older hardware.ĭriver support is on par with Linux Mint, but it lacks in the department of support for hardware that’s a bit dated. Third-party software support is fairly decent but lacks a bit behind Mint, as it takes some time for the latest versions of software to become available. The repository also contains more than 30,000 useful packages. The third-party software support on it is excellent right out of the box. It can be used in a workstation, but that isn’t recommended. It is a general-purpose distro as well, but it is more suitable for media consumption and other lightweight activities. It is a general-purpose distro but works flawlessly in workstations and under heavy workloads. The base of Linux Mint is a mixture of Ubuntu and Debian. It was founded by a group of specialists with a heavy focus on ease of use and user experience. It is mostly driven by the dedicated Linux community.