Linux Mint 12 Released - The Peacemaker? | Hacker News Reader

Linux Mint 12 Released - The Peacemaker?

zdnet.co.uk

44 pointsGarbage12 comments

Waiting eagerly to try this out, especially the GNOME2 compatibility, after experiencing distaste with the rough edges of Unity and GNOME3. Nice to see that at-least these guys don't want their OS to be run on mobile devices ;-)

The final release is still not out. This guy got fooled by the RC.

In fact, the final release's ISOs were available on Heatnet servers for some hours (http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/linuxmint.com/stable/12/) but there was no oficial announcement. I guess the real deal will come pretty soon.

Some of the mirrors had it , then (pulled it?).

Here's a US mirror that has the Final isos now: http://mirror.yellowfiber.net/linuxmint/stable/12/

For the rest of the countries, try tweaking the URLs similar to the above and you may get lucky.

Wow, kudos to Mint for trying to stay as close to Gnome 2 as possible. Hopefully this is something both Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 fans can agree on, judging from the screenshots I've seen it seems to be the best of both worlds. I can't wait to try it out.

Q: What do you think? Is Linux Mint a Ubuntu killer? Or Is Ubuntu killing itself?

I don't think Ubuntu is killing itself. Ubuntu is just targeting a different demographic from some of the "power users" who frequent HN. Grandma and Grandpa don't care whether or not it's possible to open three windows of the same app and switch between them with one keyboard shortcut. Give them a browser, IM, and a decent media player, and that's it. This demographic is also many times larger than the subset of power users who hate Unity.

One question that remains to be answered is: If Ubuntu continues to alienate power users, will this have a noticeable effect on the quality of the user community? One of the major benefits of Ubuntu is that it's very easy to find help online. If power users stop using the default edition of Ubuntu, high-quality help for the default edition might become harder to come by -- with detrimental effects on everyone else. I've already encountered a few cases where I wanted to troubleshoot an Ubuntu issue and found the answer in the Mint forum instead.

What's ubuntu plan of accessing the grandma & grandpa audiences? You see, one need a delivery method and a payload. They do have the payload. What's their delivery?

Last time I checked, they didn't have one. The only audience really using Ubuntu was one consisting of coders and geeks.

There's a famous russian chinese saying: When a rhino stares at the moon - he is wasting his spleen flowers.

Last time I checked, Canonical was trying pretty hard to get PC manufacturers in various parts of the world to ship their machines with Ubuntu installed.

Are they successful?

There used to be this practice when a PC manufacturer would put a free or cheap Linux or eve DOS on its PCs to reduce its price by a 50-100$. Everybody just erased whatever was on HDD and installed a pirated Windows.

But these days, with WGA and OEM Windows being really cheap, I guess it's unfeasible.

I think it's good that distros try to differentiate themselves.

Thanks to MGSE, GNOME 3 finally looks a bit more "power user friendly". At the very least, there is no more stupid assumption that one app is one window! But even with MGSE, Mint 12's desktop environment is much less configurable than Mint 11. If you happen to like the default look, that's fine; but if you don't, there's not much you can do about it. I guess it will change as the developers put in more config options, though. Mint has always been on the side of people who like to tweak.

MATE, on the other hand, was a bit disappointing in the RC. I haven't updated to the latest (pre-)release yet, but it felt rather unstable even with some of the interim updates. It's a pity because MATE is what many of the "heavy tweakers" will want to use for the time being. It's also not clear how long MATE will be maintained, if at all. Kudos to the team for trying to keep GNOME 2 alive, but I suspect it's going to be a long twilight in MATE land.

I'll keep checking out Mint 12 from time to time, but for the time being I'll stick with Mint 10/11 and Xubuntu for day-to-day computing. Xfce 4.8 is conservative, lightweight, rock solid, and surprisingly configurable. It's not at all difficult to make it look almost exactly like Mint 10/11. I can see why Linus Torvalds publicly announced that he'd switch to Xfce: it's currently the best "old-style" desktop environment out there. I wonder why the Mint team didn't consider Xfce for an almost drop-in GNOME 2 replacement. Oh wait, they already have a Debian Edition with Xfce.

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