Imho @KarlZeilhofer is working with Mint
Correct, Iām using Linux Mint 19.3. Shouldnāt it behave like Ubuntu 18.04?
I donāt know the answer to that question. However, if you search the issues tracker for āMintā, you will find quite a few issues. Most of these are in the āClosedā section because we donāt support it. But if youād like to recreate, fix and submit a patch for any of them, weād be happy to accept the patch.
I found 22 issues on gitlab, closed and open. Nothing special.
Mint is widely spread, I think.
If you can give me a Mint specific bug, Iāll try to reproduce it and fix it, if I can.
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All fixes are welcomed. Hereās a link to bugs closed because they were Mint-only
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Mint 19.3 Cinnamon is a widely used distro ā¦
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
I use it at with no issuesā¦
I do not argue that it is not widely used. Only that we have no developers who have stepped up to address the bugs. If someone starts to consistently take on and fix the Mint bugs then we can revisit our support. All supported distributions are supported because we have developers that are willing to fix issues.
Iāll note that this is why Arch (a relatively obscure distribution) is supported and not Mint or SUSE.
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Iām using Linux Mint since I remember to start using KiCadā¦ I never thought there were specific Mint issues 
Since Mint is based on Ubuntu I wasnāt expecting any major differences that could cause issues.
Not to try and derail but this is tangentially related and only needs one post to clarify. I started compiling my own Debian version of Kicad because the āofficialā version was hopelessly out of date. Are we just counting the backported versions in this to call it supported?
I just browsed through (and read parts of) most of the threads gathered by the search Seth_h linked to in post #5, and I could not find a relationship between those bugs and Linux Mint. Just because āMintā is mentioned somewhere on the page does not mean it is related to the bug.
The most hilarious was: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/2715
Title:
Main menu entries āEditā, āViewā, āPlaceā are not showing up (Windows 10) (lp:#1829640)
Relation to āMintā:
The bug does not occur on Linux Mint 19.1.
I think this is because of debian policy. This distro aims to be very stable which means they do not really allow updates to programs (only bugfixes are allowed). This means the only way to get newer KiCad versions in long released debian versions is by providing backports.
Thatās correct. Bug fixes and of course security fixes are encouraged to get into stable releases.
And I donāt see any āhopelesslyā outdated versions in backports. At least not since more than four years now.
I think you misunderstood @hermit. I do not read it as him suggesting that the backports are outdated but him being surprised that backports are needed in the first place. (What i read is that KiCad in the normal debian repo is outdated which is to be expected given the nature of how debian works)
Right, I agree fully. Reading this a second time I need to assent Iāve read it wrong.
I see often a lot of miss understanding on the users side because itās not clear to them how their distribution of choice has organized the package updates. Mostly distributions are chosen by popularity and shiny colored desktops.
To clarify: Supported means that one or more developers has agreed to address and fix bugs that are reported on a specific platform. And that there is a dedicated packager who works with the official distribution to package builds.
We would love for a Mint-based developer to begin addressing Mint (and Cinnamon) bugs. And for a Mint packager to begin maintaining a set of Mint-specific packages.
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Thatās correct. However, we do not have sufficient developer time to track down whether an issue is caused by distribution incompatibility or a KiCad bug. This is why we instituted the policy. We cannot support every OS/WM/compositor out there and actually develop KiCad at the same time.
Ah. Thanks for that clarification. At one point I was on the Sage Math mailing list. Their live distro was Debian but they had given up trying to keep an official Debian package. Iām not sure what the status is now days or how long ago this was.
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