6 ms·

Mint 17.3 may be the best Linux desktop distro yet

90 points by jalan 11y ago

nkhodyunya 11y ago
No, I disallow it.
Sniffnoy 11y ago
> it'd be nice to have a keyboard-based way to do this as well, perhaps using "enter" rather than return to trigger it Does F2 not work for renaming files? Maybe that's only a Caja thing, I don't know...
- barrkel 11y ago
  F2 for rename is a Windows idiom - as is the slow double click mentioned in the article. I'd be surprised if F2 didn't work, given the way Cinnamon apes Windows idioms. (Not that that is a bad thing. I use Cinnamon by choice on Ubuntu 14.04 in my day job. I far prefer Windows idioms to the Mac conventions that much of Unity is aiming for.)
- edent 11y ago
  F2 works for me in Cinnamon / Nemo. Running it on top of Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro - so I can't say for certain that it is standard!
SeldomSoup 11y ago
As someone whose desktop needs are pretty simple, I agree with this assessment. If you want a *nix that's point-and-click configurable, looks nice, makes it easy to install software, and generally doesn't get in your way, Mint is definitely the way to go. I've tried all the popular distros, from (X/K)ubuntu, to Debian, to Fedora, to Arch and others, and I inevitably keep coming back to Mint. Just my 2 cents.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
I was using Mint for over a year. New one is really glitchy on windowing or graphics. Sometimes it makes a weird pattern while keystrokes dont do anything. Also, dragging file save dialog to see a title in background causes entire window to unmaximize & hide behind dialog. Huh!? About to ditch it entirely if I dont find work-arounds in a few days.
- VonGuard 11y ago
  MATE or Cinnamon? Want to know before I install. I get weird ass errors like nobody when I install Linux. Currently, my Ubutntu 10/14 machine randomly decides to ignore keyboard inputs and replace them with random other letters. Happens right in the middle of me typing, and I do a lot of interviews. I've literally had to reboot the damn thing in the middle of an interview because my typing was onscreen as akusfhlasiuryieuhfisuhefuishfiushefiluhsufh. Never found a single forum post or bug report anywhere near this...
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    I forget. It's the one that has the Windows-style button on bottom left.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    It sounds like you may have accidentally triggered a shortcut for switching keyboard layouts. Try looking through the keyboard shortcut settings for something too easy to press by accident.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      Appreciate the tip. Ill check. You have a guess on why moving a Save File dialog messes with window for application itself? That's a new bug to me for Linux in general.
    - VonGuard 11y ago
      I did check this and it was not the problem, unfortunately. I've just nuked the partition from orbit and started over with Mint.
SwellJoe 11y ago
I understand the appeal for sticking with what you know (because ease-of-use is most often just "what I'm used to"), but I don't really find the modern Gnome UI and desktop problematic. It has some pretty big annoyances, in terms of notifications (some of which are seemingly impossible to disable), and the screen dimming thing that it does when using any menus (which also effects the secondary display, meaning you simply can't use a Gnome desktop for any professional video or presentation task). Nonetheless, I'm not choosing a distro based on the desktop; Fedora has spins for every major desktop I'd want to use (though no good tiling WM options, with good integration, unfortunately, but nobody seems to build something like that). I do like that they're building based on the LTS release of Ubuntu. The life cycle of a standard Ubuntu release is too short for comfort, IMHO. (Fedora, too, though security updates stick around long enough for me.)
mattlondon 11y ago
+1 to Cinnamon being great. I've found Ubuntu's Unity to be really non-intuitive and awkward to use ... even after several years of using it I've never got used to it and generally found it frustrating to use. Cinnamon is an absolute joy to use in comparison - just does its job and gets out of the way. Sounds like Mint is a sort of "unbuntu-without-unity" which is worth its weight in gold in my opinion. Wish I could change my work's distro to use it!
- t0mk 11y ago
  how about {x,k,l}ubuntu?
  - VonGuard 11y ago
    All the Ubuntu's have terminal GUI problems. They just keep tinkering and changing things. Gnome did this to itself, too, and thus, we're left with all these weird GUIs that aspire to be Windows 8, or Mac OS, when Gnome 2 was fucking perfect and shoulda been left alone.
    - icelancer 11y ago
      Totally agree. Ubuntu 10.04 was the height of usability. Unity is an embarrassment.
    - bachmeier 11y ago
      I was a happy Gnome 2 user for years, and am now a happy Mate user. I don't think the weird GUIs aspire to be Windows 8 or Mac OS. They just aspire to be weird.
    - noir_lord 11y ago
      > All the Ubuntu's have terminal GUI problems. They just keep tinkering and changing things. Xubuntu doesn't. 4.12 in 15.04/15.10 was much the same as 4.10 in 14.04 (other than bug fixes and some small tweaks to fix stuff they where near identical). The XFCE folks reached rough parity with Gnome 2 in terms of desktop usability then just focussed on small increment improvements and bug fixes and that has been a major win imo as I can use a desktop that supports modern linux distro's, is fast on everything and rarely surprises me.
tootie 11y ago
ChromeOS is the best :p
- evv 11y ago
  Hopefully you still like it when it evolves into Chromandroid
VeilEm 11y ago
Reading this post I am reminded just how much more work it is to have a functional linux desktop that ends up running worse than a Mac or windows box. More for less. Less battery life, less games, less driver support. Old hardware. I've been running OS X for many years now but I think in the future I see myself going back to windows and using docker toolbox to get an easy to start and maintain linux development environment. Lot's of Windows tools have matured and there are good terminal options now for sshing into a local lightweight vm to do dev. On the hardware of my choosing, no more being locked into overpriced boring silver apple hardware.
- wtbob 11y ago
  > Reading this post I am reminded just how much more work it is to have a functional linux desktop that ends up running worse than a Mac or windows box. I'm extremely happy with stumpwm. It runs, it switches between emacs, Firefox and a good console just fine. It's infinitely more work to get Windows or an OS X box to the same level of functionality, because neither of them properly supports all of these key features: POSIX; a Common Lisp tiling window manager (which means I always have a REPL a slime-connect away); native X11. I literally never miss Windows or OS X.
  - codezero 11y ago
    OS X is POSIX certified, no Linux distribution is but that's a minor point I assume.
    - wtbob 11y ago
      True enough; I edited my comment to indicate that I mean all those features at once.
      - codezero 11y ago
        mostly unrelated – but I wouldn't have known/cared about POSIX compliance until I ran into it: On OS X, getopt is POSIX compliant. GNU utilities tend not to enforce POSIX in getopt, as a result you can do things like ls .txt -la On a POSIX complaint system, the optional arguments must come before any file arguments. This is super annoying to me, after having been using Linux for 15 years :) Personally, I've been super happy with OS X for all purposes except servers, but to each their own, and that's where Linux (and the BSDs) shine – giving you access under the hood, which is awesome, but some of us just want the car to drive itself, so to speak.
fit2rule 11y ago
I have to admit that the prospect of Ubuntu's future looking not so bright is a bit disconcerting. Does anyone have any insight into why the author of this article makes this claim? I know that there is a lot of controversy about Ubuntu's changes to try to build 'something new' that will compete with the big players, but I didn't think this meant that Ubuntu has an uncertain future. I guess nobody has a time machine, but as a long-time user of Ubuntu, I'm intrigued by what those in the know feel about its future. Is Ubuntu jumping the shark?
- creshal 11y ago
  > Is Ubuntu jumping the shark? Between Mir and Unity, it has jumped the shark years ago.
- tdkl 11y ago
  Probably the fact that after they made Linux much user friendly and popular they focused on mobile and didn't really touch the desktop significantly again.
burntcookie90 11y ago
I've actually just installed Gnome + PaperGTK on a chromebook pixel LS running arch and I've never been happier with a linux box. Migrated over from a thinkpad x1 2015
justinsaccount 11y ago
I run cinnamon on one of my thinkpads. It's interesting to me how there are a ton of things is does usability wise better than my work OS X laptop: * The desktop overview 'expose' like thing gives me a large 2x3 grid of mini desktops, each containing mini windows that I can drag between different desktops. OS X displays a tiny 1x6 list of desktops and you can't drag windows between desktops directly. * When I click the date in my panel I get a mini calendar popup. * When I click the volume applet it has a entry right there for switching output devices. on OS X you have to option click the volume thing to get the hidden menu. Right click on an external mouse does not work. Those are just the ones I notice on a daily basis..
- jrcii 11y ago
  You can fix the calendar popup problem with an app called Day-O, which I agree should be the default.
  - justinsaccount 11y ago
    Cool.. That didn't end up working for me since I use dark mode, but I followed their suggestion to try http://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ http://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ instead which is working nicely.
Estragon 11y ago
What is the upgrade path like on mint these days? I ran into real problems with it when I tried it a few years ago.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  The Mint updater has a menu option for upgrading. You click it, and it updates, reliably. The KDE version gets the update option later than the others, though.
pixelperfect 11y ago
I installed Mint 17.3 Cinnamon a couple weeks ago. Every time I've installed a Linux distro in the past 10 years, I have run into major issues with drivers, and this was no exception. It's related to having both an onboard Intel graphics card and an Nvidia video card. If I disable the Nvidia card, performance is fine but I am unable to hookup a second monitor. If I use the Nvidia card, I can hook up a second monitor, but there are major issues with screen tearing. If not for this issue, I would be quite satisfied with this OS.
twic 11y ago
I've been out of the desktop Linux world for a while. How does Arch compare to Mint? I rather like Arch's rolling release model, but Mint sounds like a seriously polished piece of work.
- collyw 11y ago
  Mint also has a rolling release based on Debian. I looked at Arch but the install looked difficult, so I ended up on Manjaro. Arch based with an easy to use installer and package manager. Works great on the laptop I am currently typing on, but its a bit crashy on my Gigabyte brix (though Mint had problems on that box as well).
  - tomjakubowski 11y ago
    > Arch based with an easy to use installer and package manager. What's different about Manjaro's package manager? Is it a porcelain for pacman?
    - collyw 11y ago
      There is a graphical one available, which wasn't available when I looked at Arch.
hsivonen 11y ago
What's Mint's sustainability model? Does it have many developers? How do those devs make money to pay their bills?
- qbrass 11y ago
  mint-search-addon tacks their referral code to searches you make using it.
callesgg 11y ago
Thats Mint.
jamespo 11y ago
A distribution I'm keen on is the Arch / Gnome Shell based Apricity.
illuminated 11y ago
I echo most of the author's excitements but for the ElementaryOS. I've just stopped looking at any other distro after installing the latest, Freya, which is also based on 14.04. Elementary doesn't have many of the UX shortcuts that the latest Mint has, and has far less developers working on it, but it's still such a joy to use.
xorcist 11y ago
Last time I looked on Mint there was no support for upgrading the system. It doesn't matter how easy installs are, I'm not going to tell my mother-in-law to reinstall twice per year. This review consists of someone who clicks through an installation and tell what it looks like. That's not very interesting. You only install once, and colors are configurable, if you care about those things. Supported hardware must work without configuration or drivers, but that's mostly a solved problem. Casual users care about longevity. Will my software stop working because of an upgrade? Will something move because of a redesign, so I don't know how to use it anymore? Are those things there for Linux Mint yet?
- lingben 11y ago
  Not sure what you mean by 'support'. There is an extremely easy and stable upgrade process as well as guides, forum help, etc. However, it isn't necessary to upgrade frequently if you go on the LTS track. As for 'reinstalling twice per year' again, not sure where you're getting this from. Linux mint 17.3 is supported until April 2019. That's almost 3 and a half years before you need to upgrade. http://linux.wikia.com/wiki/Linux_Mint http://linux.wikia.com/wiki/Linux_Mint And in the meantime you get continuous upgrades for software you've installed in an intuitive and easy to use UI. You ask, 'Are those things there for Linux Mint yet?' Yes, yes they are :)
  - xorcist 11y ago
    Whatever "support" means for an open source system, but is it recommended and is it well tested? The official documentation said "don't upgrade, do a clean install". That alone made me not consider it at the time. Three and a half years of support is impressive for a community project and I wonder how they manage. However that matters little for a consumer operating system if you can only do n+1 upgrades anyway. What matters is that upgrades are automated and well tested.
- sampo 11y ago
  > Last time I looked on Mint there was no support for upgrading the system. Some years ago, the recommended way to upgrade Mint was indeed to do a full reinstall [1]. For a couple past years, there has been a simpler way, involving a bit of command line acrobatics [2]. Still not good for your mother-in-law. Apparently [3] only in 2015 Mint finally started to have the "normal" way, where you just click on an upgrade button, and the system upgrades itself. But even now, this does not upgrade the kernel. Weird. [1] http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2 http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2 [2] https://gist.github.com/hgomez/7074150 https://gist.github.com/hgomez/7074150 [3] http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2871 http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2871
sampo 11y ago
Does Cinnamon allow for vertical panel placement?
drdaeman 11y ago
Not for many laptops as GTK doesn't handle non-integer scaling well, so it doesn't really support MidPPI-screens. It can work normally and work for HiPPI with x2 scaling, and that's it. I'm unaware of any simple way to set larger widgets - I think GNOME had some knobs but in their quest to "simplify" UIs they were removed long time ago. There are no theme-based workarounds in Mint (i.e. theme with larger widgets), either. Their theming team suggest if one's got a 13" FullHD screen they've just got to have small widgets (https://github.com/linuxmint/mint-themes/issues/90 https://github.com/linuxmint/mint-themes/issues/90) Qt has somewhat better support for such displays, but I think the last Mint KDE release is 17.2.
scurvy 11y ago
In 17.3, is Flash still a dependency of the main codecs deb? In previous versions of 17.x, it was impossible to remove the Flash deb without uninstalling everything useful.
SFjulie1 11y ago
I migrated from mint/ubuntu/debian insanity to FreeBSD for working and windows to play and share obediently my private data with criminals (government, marketing people, companies and VC included). I stopped fixing stuff because it works, and since then I am happily bored again doing the minimum work expected from me without stress. Some stuff I don't have anymore (like weired chars in the console). But I never thought of it as a good idea in the first place I want ";" to be ";" not a greek question mark. Bye bye linux(es). You are becoming an unusable bloatware.
giancarlostoro 11y ago
I don't think I've ever used Mint, or if I did it was brief. I've used Netrunner which was really nice, but ultimately fell in love with openSUSE. I may someday give Mint a try though. This is interesting news but the article is confusing to me at first glance as to what Mint is actually doing. Cinnamon isn't really for me though. I loved Gnome 2 because it was highly customizable but now that it's gone my only alternative is KDE or XFCE but XFCE feels like it's missing something everytime I use it.

90 points by jalan 11y ago

No, I disallow it.

> it'd be nice to have a keyboard-based way to do this as well, perhaps using "enter" rather than return to trigger it Does F2 not work for renaming files? Maybe that's only a Caja thing, I don't know...

barrkel 11y ago
F2 for rename is a Windows idiom - as is the slow double click mentioned in the article. I'd be surprised if F2 didn't work, given the way Cinnamon apes Windows idioms. (Not that that is a bad thing. I use Cinnamon by choice on Ubuntu 14.04 in my day job. I far prefer Windows idioms to the Mac conventions that much of Unity is aiming for.)
edent 11y ago
F2 works for me in Cinnamon / Nemo. Running it on top of Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro - so I can't say for certain that it is standard!

SeldomSoup 11y ago

As someone whose desktop needs are pretty simple, I agree with this assessment. If you want a *nix that's point-and-click configurable, looks nice, makes it easy to install software, and generally doesn't get in your way, Mint is definitely the way to go. I've tried all the popular distros, from (X/K)ubuntu, to Debian, to Fedora, to Arch and others, and I inevitably keep coming back to Mint. Just my 2 cents.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

I was using Mint for over a year. New one is really glitchy on windowing or graphics. Sometimes it makes a weird pattern while keystrokes dont do anything. Also, dragging file save dialog to see a title in background causes entire window to unmaximize & hide behind dialog. Huh!? About to ditch it entirely if I dont find work-arounds in a few days.

VonGuard 11y ago
MATE or Cinnamon? Want to know before I install. I get weird ass errors like nobody when I install Linux. Currently, my Ubutntu 10/14 machine randomly decides to ignore keyboard inputs and replace them with random other letters. Happens right in the middle of me typing, and I do a lot of interviews. I've literally had to reboot the damn thing in the middle of an interview because my typing was onscreen as akusfhlasiuryieuhfisuhefuishfiushefiluhsufh. Never found a single forum post or bug report anywhere near this...
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I forget. It's the one that has the Windows-style button on bottom left.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  It sounds like you may have accidentally triggered a shortcut for switching keyboard layouts. Try looking through the keyboard shortcut settings for something too easy to press by accident.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Appreciate the tip. Ill check. You have a guess on why moving a Save File dialog messes with window for application itself? That's a new bug to me for Linux in general.
  - VonGuard 11y ago
    I did check this and it was not the problem, unfortunately. I've just nuked the partition from orbit and started over with Mint.

SwellJoe 11y ago

I understand the appeal for sticking with what you know (because ease-of-use is most often just "what I'm used to"), but I don't really find the modern Gnome UI and desktop problematic. It has some pretty big annoyances, in terms of notifications (some of which are seemingly impossible to disable), and the screen dimming thing that it does when using any menus (which also effects the secondary display, meaning you simply can't use a Gnome desktop for any professional video or presentation task). Nonetheless, I'm not choosing a distro based on the desktop; Fedora has spins for every major desktop I'd want to use (though no good tiling WM options, with good integration, unfortunately, but nobody seems to build something like that). I do like that they're building based on the LTS release of Ubuntu. The life cycle of a standard Ubuntu release is too short for comfort, IMHO. (Fedora, too, though security updates stick around long enough for me.)

mattlondon 11y ago

+1 to Cinnamon being great. I've found Ubuntu's Unity to be really non-intuitive and awkward to use ... even after several years of using it I've never got used to it and generally found it frustrating to use. Cinnamon is an absolute joy to use in comparison - just does its job and gets out of the way. Sounds like Mint is a sort of "unbuntu-without-unity" which is worth its weight in gold in my opinion. Wish I could change my work's distro to use it!

t0mk 11y ago
how about {x,k,l}ubuntu?
- VonGuard 11y ago
  All the Ubuntu's have terminal GUI problems. They just keep tinkering and changing things. Gnome did this to itself, too, and thus, we're left with all these weird GUIs that aspire to be Windows 8, or Mac OS, when Gnome 2 was fucking perfect and shoulda been left alone.
  - icelancer 11y ago
    Totally agree. Ubuntu 10.04 was the height of usability. Unity is an embarrassment.
  - bachmeier 11y ago
    I was a happy Gnome 2 user for years, and am now a happy Mate user. I don't think the weird GUIs aspire to be Windows 8 or Mac OS. They just aspire to be weird.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    > All the Ubuntu's have terminal GUI problems. They just keep tinkering and changing things. Xubuntu doesn't. 4.12 in 15.04/15.10 was much the same as 4.10 in 14.04 (other than bug fixes and some small tweaks to fix stuff they where near identical). The XFCE folks reached rough parity with Gnome 2 in terms of desktop usability then just focussed on small increment improvements and bug fixes and that has been a major win imo as I can use a desktop that supports modern linux distro's, is fast on everything and rarely surprises me.

tootie 11y ago

ChromeOS is the best :p

evv 11y ago
Hopefully you still like it when it evolves into Chromandroid

VeilEm 11y ago

Reading this post I am reminded just how much more work it is to have a functional linux desktop that ends up running worse than a Mac or windows box. More for less. Less battery life, less games, less driver support. Old hardware. I've been running OS X for many years now but I think in the future I see myself going back to windows and using docker toolbox to get an easy to start and maintain linux development environment. Lot's of Windows tools have matured and there are good terminal options now for sshing into a local lightweight vm to do dev. On the hardware of my choosing, no more being locked into overpriced boring silver apple hardware.

wtbob 11y ago
> Reading this post I am reminded just how much more work it is to have a functional linux desktop that ends up running worse than a Mac or windows box. I'm extremely happy with stumpwm. It runs, it switches between emacs, Firefox and a good console just fine. It's infinitely more work to get Windows or an OS X box to the same level of functionality, because neither of them properly supports all of these key features: POSIX; a Common Lisp tiling window manager (which means I always have a REPL a slime-connect away); native X11. I literally never miss Windows or OS X.
- codezero 11y ago
  OS X is POSIX certified, no Linux distribution is but that's a minor point I assume.
  - wtbob 11y ago
    True enough; I edited my comment to indicate that I mean all those features at once.
    - codezero 11y ago
      mostly unrelated – but I wouldn't have known/cared about POSIX compliance until I ran into it: On OS X, getopt is POSIX compliant. GNU utilities tend not to enforce POSIX in getopt, as a result you can do things like ls .txt -la On a POSIX complaint system, the optional arguments must come before any file arguments. This is super annoying to me, after having been using Linux for 15 years :) Personally, I've been super happy with OS X for all purposes except servers, but to each their own, and that's where Linux (and the BSDs) shine – giving you access under the hood, which is awesome, but some of us just want the car to drive itself, so to speak.

fit2rule 11y ago

I have to admit that the prospect of Ubuntu's future looking not so bright is a bit disconcerting. Does anyone have any insight into why the author of this article makes this claim? I know that there is a lot of controversy about Ubuntu's changes to try to build 'something new' that will compete with the big players, but I didn't think this meant that Ubuntu has an uncertain future. I guess nobody has a time machine, but as a long-time user of Ubuntu, I'm intrigued by what those in the know feel about its future. Is Ubuntu jumping the shark?

creshal 11y ago
> Is Ubuntu jumping the shark? Between Mir and Unity, it has jumped the shark years ago.
tdkl 11y ago
Probably the fact that after they made Linux much user friendly and popular they focused on mobile and didn't really touch the desktop significantly again.

burntcookie90 11y ago

I've actually just installed Gnome + PaperGTK on a chromebook pixel LS running arch and I've never been happier with a linux box. Migrated over from a thinkpad x1 2015

justinsaccount 11y ago

I run cinnamon on one of my thinkpads. It's interesting to me how there are a ton of things is does usability wise better than my work OS X laptop: * The desktop overview 'expose' like thing gives me a large 2x3 grid of mini desktops, each containing mini windows that I can drag between different desktops. OS X displays a tiny 1x6 list of desktops and you can't drag windows between desktops directly. * When I click the date in my panel I get a mini calendar popup. * When I click the volume applet it has a entry right there for switching output devices. on OS X you have to option click the volume thing to get the hidden menu. Right click on an external mouse does not work. Those are just the ones I notice on a daily basis..

jrcii 11y ago
You can fix the calendar popup problem with an app called Day-O, which I agree should be the default.
- justinsaccount 11y ago
  Cool.. That didn't end up working for me since I use dark mode, but I followed their suggestion to try http://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ http://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ instead which is working nicely.

Estragon 11y ago

What is the upgrade path like on mint these days? I ran into real problems with it when I tried it a few years ago.

nitrogen 11y ago
The Mint updater has a menu option for upgrading. You click it, and it updates, reliably. The KDE version gets the update option later than the others, though.

pixelperfect 11y ago

I installed Mint 17.3 Cinnamon a couple weeks ago. Every time I've installed a Linux distro in the past 10 years, I have run into major issues with drivers, and this was no exception. It's related to having both an onboard Intel graphics card and an Nvidia video card. If I disable the Nvidia card, performance is fine but I am unable to hookup a second monitor. If I use the Nvidia card, I can hook up a second monitor, but there are major issues with screen tearing. If not for this issue, I would be quite satisfied with this OS.

twic 11y ago

I've been out of the desktop Linux world for a while. How does Arch compare to Mint? I rather like Arch's rolling release model, but Mint sounds like a seriously polished piece of work.

collyw 11y ago
Mint also has a rolling release based on Debian. I looked at Arch but the install looked difficult, so I ended up on Manjaro. Arch based with an easy to use installer and package manager. Works great on the laptop I am currently typing on, but its a bit crashy on my Gigabyte brix (though Mint had problems on that box as well).
- tomjakubowski 11y ago
  > Arch based with an easy to use installer and package manager. What's different about Manjaro's package manager? Is it a porcelain for pacman?
  - collyw 11y ago
    There is a graphical one available, which wasn't available when I looked at Arch.

hsivonen 11y ago

What's Mint's sustainability model? Does it have many developers? How do those devs make money to pay their bills?

qbrass 11y ago
mint-search-addon tacks their referral code to searches you make using it.

callesgg 11y ago

Thats Mint.

jamespo 11y ago

A distribution I'm keen on is the Arch / Gnome Shell based Apricity.

illuminated 11y ago

I echo most of the author's excitements but for the ElementaryOS. I've just stopped looking at any other distro after installing the latest, Freya, which is also based on 14.04. Elementary doesn't have many of the UX shortcuts that the latest Mint has, and has far less developers working on it, but it's still such a joy to use.

xorcist 11y ago

Last time I looked on Mint there was no support for upgrading the system. It doesn't matter how easy installs are, I'm not going to tell my mother-in-law to reinstall twice per year. This review consists of someone who clicks through an installation and tell what it looks like. That's not very interesting. You only install once, and colors are configurable, if you care about those things. Supported hardware must work without configuration or drivers, but that's mostly a solved problem. Casual users care about longevity. Will my software stop working because of an upgrade? Will something move because of a redesign, so I don't know how to use it anymore? Are those things there for Linux Mint yet?

lingben 11y ago
Not sure what you mean by 'support'. There is an extremely easy and stable upgrade process as well as guides, forum help, etc. However, it isn't necessary to upgrade frequently if you go on the LTS track. As for 'reinstalling twice per year' again, not sure where you're getting this from. Linux mint 17.3 is supported until April 2019. That's almost 3 and a half years before you need to upgrade. http://linux.wikia.com/wiki/Linux_Mint http://linux.wikia.com/wiki/Linux_Mint And in the meantime you get continuous upgrades for software you've installed in an intuitive and easy to use UI. You ask, 'Are those things there for Linux Mint yet?' Yes, yes they are :)
- xorcist 11y ago
  Whatever "support" means for an open source system, but is it recommended and is it well tested? The official documentation said "don't upgrade, do a clean install". That alone made me not consider it at the time. Three and a half years of support is impressive for a community project and I wonder how they manage. However that matters little for a consumer operating system if you can only do n+1 upgrades anyway. What matters is that upgrades are automated and well tested.
sampo 11y ago
> Last time I looked on Mint there was no support for upgrading the system. Some years ago, the recommended way to upgrade Mint was indeed to do a full reinstall [1]. For a couple past years, there has been a simpler way, involving a bit of command line acrobatics [2]. Still not good for your mother-in-law. Apparently [3] only in 2015 Mint finally started to have the "normal" way, where you just click on an upgrade button, and the system upgrades itself. But even now, this does not upgrade the kernel. Weird. [1] http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2 http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2 [2] https://gist.github.com/hgomez/7074150 https://gist.github.com/hgomez/7074150 [3] http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2871 http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2871

sampo 11y ago

Does Cinnamon allow for vertical panel placement?

drdaeman 11y ago

Not for many laptops as GTK doesn't handle non-integer scaling well, so it doesn't really support MidPPI-screens. It can work normally and work for HiPPI with x2 scaling, and that's it. I'm unaware of any simple way to set larger widgets - I think GNOME had some knobs but in their quest to "simplify" UIs they were removed long time ago. There are no theme-based workarounds in Mint (i.e. theme with larger widgets), either. Their theming team suggest if one's got a 13" FullHD screen they've just got to have small widgets (https://github.com/linuxmint/mint-themes/issues/90 https://github.com/linuxmint/mint-themes/issues/90) Qt has somewhat better support for such displays, but I think the last Mint KDE release is 17.2.

scurvy 11y ago

In 17.3, is Flash still a dependency of the main codecs deb? In previous versions of 17.x, it was impossible to remove the Flash deb without uninstalling everything useful.

SFjulie1 11y ago

I migrated from mint/ubuntu/debian insanity to FreeBSD for working and windows to play and share obediently my private data with criminals (government, marketing people, companies and VC included). I stopped fixing stuff because it works, and since then I am happily bored again doing the minimum work expected from me without stress. Some stuff I don't have anymore (like weired chars in the console). But I never thought of it as a good idea in the first place I want ";" to be ";" not a greek question mark. Bye bye linux(es). You are becoming an unusable bloatware.

giancarlostoro 11y ago

I don't think I've ever used Mint, or if I did it was brief. I've used Netrunner which was really nice, but ultimately fell in love with openSUSE. I may someday give Mint a try though. This is interesting news but the article is confusing to me at first glance as to what Mint is actually doing. Cinnamon isn't really for me though. I loved Gnome 2 because it was highly customizable but now that it's gone my only alternative is KDE or XFCE but XFCE feels like it's missing something everytime I use it.