LET’S LOOK AT LINUX MINT FIRST, which continues to be a favorite of ours. In particular, it’s one that we still recommend to users who are taking their first steps with Linux. Initially (the 1.0 release in 2006 was a beta based on Kubuntu), it took the Ubuntu codebase and bundled flash and Wi-Fi firmware to make for a better out-of-the-box experience. It experimented with its own codebase for a couple of years, but then returned to Ubuntu’s, and since then the two have always been package-compatible. It enables Mint to piggy-back off the treasure trove of packages in the Ubuntu repositories, while still providing its own experience.
Flatpaks, Snaps, AppImages: They all seek to make it easier for developers to ship software in a distribution-agnostic manner. Whereas Snaps rely on a central app store, anyone can set up their own Flatpak remote. The Flathub repo (https://flathub.org) is a good place to find popular apps. Flatpaks are OSTree images too, which is why the two integrate so nicely in Endless OS. When you download your first (nontrivial) application on Endless OS (or your first Flatpak on another OS), you’ll find that the download is very large. This is because it depends on a large runtime (e.g. Gnome) Flatpak. Once you have this you won’t need to download it again for Flatpaks, which depend on it. These runtime Flatpaks are updated incrementally, so subsequent large downloads should be a rarity, and unlike deb packages there are no issues with requiring a particular version.
When Ubuntu switched to its Unity desktop, Mint offered something more conventional in the form of its Cinnamon desktop (which first appeared in Mint 13). Cinnamon was initially based on Gnome 3, but soon became its own thing. For die-hard traditionalists, Mint also offered the then-fledgling MATE desktop a fork of Gnome 2. Both Cinnamon and MATE continue to thrive, while Unity has been abandoned by Canonical (though the latest version lives on in the UBPorts mobile OS, and the penultimate edition is still tended to by a small but loyal community). When Ubuntu 18.04 was released, sans 32-bit ISO, Mint went ahead and produced its own (32-bit packages were still built for 18.04, but this is not the case for the latest edition, so Mint 20 is 64-bit only).