Hacker News Reader

Comment by buster | Hacker News Reader

Now what about releease notes? :-) (edit: some information is here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RaringRingtail/TechnicalOverview )

Currently i am thinking of switching to LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) because i don't really like the way Ubuntu is going with Unity, Mir, upstart, doing too much stuff on its own.

Anyone with experience from LMDE here? Is it stable? Pros? Cons?

View on HN

I've switched all my desktop/laptop installs to Xubuntu. All you need to do is "sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop" and you get a nice, fast, clean desktop. It's also easy to switch back to Ubuntu and, as it's just a remix of Ubuntu, 99% of all the packages just work, support documentation is still valid and practically shares the same user base.

Xubuntu is still lead by Ubuntu though and it currently uses upstart. I'm not sure if Xubuntu will use Mir in the future.

I second Xubuntu. Still the distro I use on my linux machine to this day. I actually tried Linux Mint Debian Edition. I think the two main things that turned me off were its inferior support for particular third-party programs (I think they were Skype or Wine), and its general feel (font and window management seemed rough). This was about a year ago I think, so YMMV

Xubuntu here as well, it runs great without causing you any hassle, like Ubuntu with Unity does. The UI doesn't change a lot and you know exactly what you're getting.

The parent comment made me check out the official site.

The top feature on this page is a deal-breaker for me: http://xfce.org/about/tour

A Linux distro with no local man pages? Seriously? I sometimes use my laptop in places that don't have wifi. Not to mention the fact that the online manpages may become out of sync with upstream, or that the online manpage may describe a different version than what you have installed locally, e.g. if you're using an LTS version that's years old...

I tried stock Mint for some time, but found it buggy. I was a longtime Ubuntu user before that, having switched for reasons similar to yours.

Since then I've moved on to CrunchBang [0], which I absolutely love. For me, it hits the sweet spot of having everything I need without all the extra pizzazz (cruft?) of something like Ubuntu or Mint.

[0] http://crunchbang.org

It was buggy when Cinnamon was new, but now it's really quite stable and proves to be no more or less buggy than stock Ubuntu or any other distro. There were bizarre memory leaks in Cinnamon but those were fixed a long time ago.

There is an ongoing issue with Mint Update, but I'm aware a patch has been submitted. In the meantime I just run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y && exit` every day. (For whatever reason kernel updates get held back if apt-get upgrade is run instead of apt-get dist-upgrade.)

Mint is awesome and one of the better distros out there. Linux Mint 15 looks like it's going to be a decent improvement too.

Why switching to linux mint when you can replace unity by cinnamon while remaining on ubuntu ? Except the desktop, what are the compelling advantages ?

Doesn't Ubuntu insert amazon affiliate links into your search results while Mint doesn't, or was that removed? Or does Mint just do it as well?

That is and has always been a unity feature (or 'feature') - unity-lens-shopping. It's not even installed if you don't install unity, e.g. if you use xubuntu, kubuntu, lubuntu, etc.

Sure, but it's enough to make me avoid Ubuntu all together on principle.

Mint doesn't do that. However, the affiliate advertising package is easy to remove from stock Ubuntu..

Last time I tried, Cinnamon proved to be exceptionally buggy when running on stock Ubuntu. Also, Mint's default aesthetic is better IMO!

I've liked ubuntu and actually still use it.

I started using #! sometime ago. I agree with the lightweight aspect of it very much. One session on openSUSE on KDE reminds me of how lightweight crunchbang is :-D

For people already on non-ubuntu debian systems, I would recommend taking a spin on it.

I switch to Korora for my laptop. It is basically the Mint of Fedora. Quite happy so far.

My feeling is that Fedora has the better engineering, but Ubuntu has better polish. Korora puts some icing on top: good font rendering, Adobe Reader, Skype, nvidia drivers.

Fedora stays closer to upstream than Ubuntu. They just package Gnome 3 for example.

https://kororaproject.org/

My experience with Mint less than a year ago was that the Cinnamon interface was so bugridden I actually looked forward to going back to Unity. The only real bug I've encountered in Unity is the integration between it and LibreOffice that renders menu keyboard shortcuts inoperative (Alt+F doesn't open the File menu, and so on). It's a known problem but the Ubuntu, Debian, Unity, Gnome, LibreOffice and OpenOffice people all keep passing the buck and nobody is considering it a high enough priority to get in there and fix it.

If Unity had a functional Alt+Tab interface (swapping between open windows instead of open applications) I'd have no further complaints at all. I've grown used to it. Can't wait to see how 13.04 improves things.

Alt+Tab is done the same way in Gnome 3, that is, if you don't know about Alt+`, you're going to have a bad time.

Honestly I try to use E17 whenever possible (there is a bug against vmware player that makes it impossible to use them together at length, virt-manager and kvm-spice is only so helpful in comparison, but that means for me it's mostly E17 and some time in another system with Windows loaded in a VM)

In E17 the Alt+Tab behavior works as described (within the current desktop only, to keep large numbers of windows manageable... this may be an option, if you want Alt+Tab to switch between all open windows, there are a lot of options)

I know it's fashionable to use the desktop environment that comes with your distribution/pick a distro that has the DE you want, but I like to push E17 at every opportunity, it can usually be installed in any distro without too much trouble, and especially now that you can't claim it will "never be released" there should be stable packages in your modern repos :)

I don't care too much about the next Ubuntu release personally, I am waiting for eLive Gem ~3.0 (whatever version is next) on Debian Wheezy which should be out soon!

I used Cinnamon for a while, and occasionally the desktop would freeze and I'd have to restart X.

Cinnamon has gotten much better. You might want to give it another shot.

I'm using openSuse. It's fast and stable. Ubuntu Gnome ( http://ubuntugnome.org/ ) is also a good choice, but its not pure gnome as always.

openSUSE: Did you have problems with speed? Or nepomunk? I was eager to have a go when it came out (12.3), and has been a very raggedy experience for me so far. nepomunk constantly crashes, the system is veeery slow (on KDE at least) etc.

I'm on 12.3 with KDE, the only problem so far was making it remember the dual-monitor setup I was using. Apart from that, all good. A nice improvement over Ubuntu 12.04 with which I had a lot more problems.

I've switched from Ubuntu to Bodhi and then to Gentoo. Much more enjoyable experience for my power-user needs.

Used it sometime ago. It was good. Sane. Beautiful with quite normal decisions regarding what users want/need, contrary to Ubuntu's what we want users to want/need. Stable. Loved the way it worked just out of the box.

And the best thing was it didn't depend on Ubuntu. I said this because I liked even Mint Desktop better than Ubuntu which it was based upon.

Since then I've switched to some other OS.

I was on LMDE a year or two ago. I still found it a little 'one-step-removed'. Cinnamon is in the Debian repos now - just use Debian testing or unstable.

rmadison claims that it is only in sid, which is an important distinction, as current testing will soon be released as Wheezy.

A good point, though for most techies, running sid/Unstable should be alright on their desktop.

But so should testing – it does offer some stability and the remote guarantee that packages are installable, plus you get upgrades to stable for free at each release.

Then again, YMMV and everybody is probably better off making their own decision here :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com