Why choose Mint for a server?
I chose it because it’s like a community fork of ubuntu, so if I have any problem, since many people use ubuntu, I’ll find a solution easily. And ubuntu is based on debian which is considered very stable and used for most servers.
Stripping down a desktop-oriented distro down is probably more effort than it’s worth, so I’d just recommend disabling (when not working on the system) whatever Mint DE that would start-up at boot. Unless disk space is an issue, there’s no reason to do more than this. Otherwise, this endeavor largely becomes a (frustrating) reversion of Mint into the Ubuntu Server.
If you don’t need software from the Ubuntu repositories, Debian would be the best option for a bloat-free, non-Canonical server experience.
But why not use ubuntu server? Any version of mint ships with a DE out of the box and that will just consume unnunnecessary resources.
Some folks like to have a GUI server… CentOS ships with that option by default
And to answer your initial questquestion, I consider an app bloatware if its not compiled or customized by the OS devs.
Because I don’t trust canonical as much as the developers of Linux Mint.
They’re both systemd based, though, so that’s a common weak point… But yeah if you had to compare one to the other that sounds right
FWIW… A friend and I compared running processes on a fresh mint install and an Ubuntu install… Mint had much fewer processes
