Yozul

The whole apt ecosystem is kind of a mess, if you ask me. Debian stable updates on archeological timescales, Debian testing just isn’t a very good rolling release disto, you’re better off with Arch or OpenSuse Tumbleweed if you want to actually use a rolling release as a daily driver, Ubuntu is a mess of annoying corporate decisions I hate from Canonical, and all the others are all just kind of disjointed in how they try to fix those issues.

My personal favorite is Mint. They just try to make Ubuntu with some classic, boring desktop design and minus the more controversial Canonical decisions, but obviously that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I dunno, there is no perfect distro, you just have to find the one that for you it takes the least amount of effort to fix. Ubuntu really just kind of makes it a pain in the butt to fix all their weirdness though.

If you have the default version of Mint installed then your desktop environment is Cinnamon. There are also XFCE and MATE versions, but you have to go out of your way to get those. The default file explorer for Cinnamon is called Nemo, so if you haven’t changed it that would be what you are using.

Honestly, I think your best bet is trying Disks or maybe gparted if you like cli apps, and setting a mount point for the device from one of those. Linux doesn’t always like NTFS, but you should at least be able to mount and read the drive consistently, although I have to admit I’ve never used an NTFS formatted external drive, so maybe something weird is going on with that.

It’s true that there are some apps not directly associated with any DE that have moved to GTK4. If GTK5 actually was likely to come out any time soon you might have to worry about finding alternatives when they switch to GTK5. That being said though, GTK3 had been out for over 9 years before GTK4 came along, there were 4 years between the “last” version of GTK3 and GTK 4.0.0, they’re still in the “oh, this is what we’ll probably do when we release GTK5” phase of development, XFCE has already made a bunch of progress porting everything over to Wayland, and DE agnostic apps are less likely to switch over right away if mid-size DEs like XFCE and Cinnamon still don’t have good Wayland support. I wouldn’t stress out about it too much.

XFCE is still using GTK 3, why would they care what Gnome does with GTK 5? Nobody but Gnome is even using GTK 4.

For my laptop, yeah. I rarely actually use it though. For my desktop not so much. I really don’t keep that much personal information on it to begin with, and if someone breaks into my house they could probably get more by stealing the desk my computer is sitting on then by stealing the computer. It just feels like a silly thing to waste my time with.

Call it hate if you want, but it is an intentional design decision to break compatibility with other DEs. That is a choice they consciously made and have been very clear in communicating. There are trade offs involved. I’m not saying it’s a completely irrational choice or anything, but it is aggravating for those of us that don’t use Gnome when we have to deal with libadwaita apps. Libadwaita is designed from the ground up to be a Gnome exclusive thing. It is not for Linux. It is just for Gnome. That is the developers’ stated intention.

You sure did. Maybe libadwaita even includes tools to make it easier or something, I don’t know. I just think maybe the toolkit that breaks everything all the time isn’t the best example.

You don’t need libadwaita to do that. Lots of KDE apps are designed to work on mobile. Libadwaita just makes everything broken outside of Gnome.

You can’t just misread something and then claim that makes it clickbait. That term is losing all meaning from overuse. It’s an article about a Linux distro and it has the name of that distro in the title. That’s not clickbait.