Mint 17.3 may be the best Linux desktop distro yet
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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!
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.
Normally, this takes about 10 seconds on a modern machine. On these 10 year old Dells? Unity chugs... A task that should take me 5 minutes takes an hour because Unity lags so far behind the mouse and slows every single process on the machine to an absolute crawl.
I cussed out Canonical for this a few years ago when they asked me some survey questions. They wanted to know why Ubuntu was not more popular on the server. My answer was that Unity was such a crock of shit that no one wanted to go near damn thing, even if they were just going to make the machine into a headless server. It's that freakin' bad.
I usually don't even bother doing that through Unity: just open a tty with crtl+alt+f6, install all the packages from there ;)
Then you can manage updates automatically, probably just security updates.
Seriously, none. I always go for debian, have worked on various ubuntu servers.. The only difference is that Debian is more barebones.
The only real issue with XUbuntu is the lack of window resize control. The window borders are a single pixel wide and it can be extremely frustrating to resize a window. The only way to reasonably get it done is by using the either one of the top window corners but if you use the left window corner you have to be careful not to accidentally close the window.
Other than that, super happy with XUbuntu!
I had RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 6.5 forced on me in a workplace, and it has Gnome2. Having that side-by-side with recent xubuntu on my laptop, Xfce is way ahead, much better than Gnome2.
Settings->Appearance->Style.
Also alt + mouse right button works for resizing.
Anyone had similar problems and found it has improved or not?
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.)
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?
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
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 :)
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.
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
> Level 4 and 5 updates are not recommended unless they bring solutions to issues you're facing
What's a level 4 update? And how do I know if it solves an issue I'm facing? I haven't got the faintest idea what they are talking about and I dare say I'm an experienced user otherwise. What could my in-laws possibly do with that information?
> Upgrade for a reason
> "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it".
So don't upgrade it is. Will then bugs continue to be fixed to my system? Will there be timely security fixes? As an end user, I only want things not to break.
> Should you decide to upgrade to 17.2's recommended kernel you can do so
So not only are you encouraged not to upgrade, but to mix kernel versions as well. Not helpful. Their users must run an awful lot of combinations.
I think I'll pass, again. But thanks for digging this up! It does indeed look like the project is moving forward, and looks a lot improved. There is still room for an easy-to-use Debian for end users, which Ubuntu managed to be for a number of years.
> There is still room for an easy-to-use Debian for end users
Does it have to be Debian? I'm looking forward to the inevitable "non-free" Guix fork that my grandmother can use. That will surely be the year of the Linux desktop.
Indeed. All the above concerned what looks like official communication from the project only, not what they choose to spend their time on. But it's important to give a fair picture of yoru project to the outside world, if not for other reasons than simply to avoid hordes of thankless users demanding support.
It's a bit unfortunate when articles like the Ars one paints this as a desktop operating system for end users. It's clearly not what they're aiming for, and it only reinforces the commonly held view that Linux is somehow for nerds only.
Ubuntu seems to still be the desktop operating system to recommend for non-technical users, but between Unity and the shopping lenses we desperately need a plan B.
> Does it have to be Debian?
No, but Debian does bring so much of the solid foundation "for free" that I feel it is probably the easiest way to get there. Debian has had a mostly working upgrade path for some 20 years now, which is simply outstanding.
What's missing is mainly a well polished default GUI, including the ability to discover and install new software. Debian is simply too flexible for a non-technical user. It must probably also take care not to break the most non-free software.
* 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..
About to ditch it entirely if I dont find work-arounds in a few days.
Does F2 not work for renaming files? Maybe that's only a Caja thing, I don't know...
(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.)
Running it on top of Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro - so I can't say for certain that it is standard!
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.
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)
Qt has somewhat better support for such displays, but I think the last Mint KDE release is 17.2.
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.
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.
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.
I can understand that, but I just can't live without a tiling window manager. Every time I have to use a UI with movable windows I feel old-fashioned and clumsy. If you think about, tiling is the interface folks are used to with their phones and tablets already.
There's good UI research potential in discovering the ideal ways to indicate how to split, move &c. windows in a tiling WM.
I've tried tiling wms in the past but they never stick for me, probably because most of my work is isolated to the browser and email, and I typically have each maximized on separate displays. I've always preferred my terminals to be backgrounded when not in use and to have all the tabs consolidated.
This was pretty easy to setup and has run quite well without much administrative work beyond the initial installation (something I've never been able to say for Ubuntu, unfortunately), and when I'm away I can just SSH in from a Chromebook.
Windows make sense to me if you wanna do specific things but a dev/admin OS outside the MS ecosystem is a awful.
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.
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?
Between Mir and Unity, it has jumped the shark years ago.
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).
What's different about Manjaro's package manager? Is it a porcelain for pacman?