Linux Mint 16 "Petra" MATE released | Hacker News Reader

Linux Mint 16 "Petra" MATE released

blog.linuxmint.com

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If you've already upgraded before, keep doing it this way:

$ sudo sed -i 's/raring/saucy/' /etc/apt/sources.list

$ sudo sed -i 's/olivia/petra/' /etc/apt/sources.list

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

$ sudo shutdown -r now

I've been a fan of Mint for years, but 15 was a wreck for my box. I've been looking forward for the upgrade for months.

And by 'wreck' I mean it's entirely workable but with annoying bugs. I was hoping to be able to engage the developers (of Mate really) but they closed my bug without comment. I switched to Cinnamon and it was much better but still has some bizarre behavior centered around X stability AFAICT.

I'm hoping for the best with this release. When it works well it's awesome.

In the last couple months I've tested elementary, pinguy, and the mint 16 MATE RC. I think I'm actually going to stick with it because it's the only one of those three that supports seamless multi-monitor/single setup (like recognizing the hdmi output immediately without changing a setting), proper suspend/hibernation, and probably some other hiccups in others that I've forgotten.

Very happy with Mint.

FYI: These were my first experiences with linux so they were also beginner-friendly.

I have a dual install of Mint on my machine precisely because of its seamless HDMI support. It was the one thing I could never get working properly on my primary OS, but Mint did the trick right out of the box.

"Linux Mint 16 features MATE 1.6, MDM 1.4, a Linux kernel 3.11 and an Ubuntu 13.10 package base."

So based on Ubuntu 13.10 which means EOL in July 2014.

I'm looking at the LTS release of this distribution (based on Ubuntu 14.04) as a possible replacement for CentOS 6.4 with wider package choices.

Does this mean it includes Canonical spyware?

I don't think so, I use Mint in part because it removes some of Canonical's garbage- and I really like Cinnamon.

I imagine the Mint people chop all the Unity libraries out, which means no Dash search or lenses, hence no sending of search terms to remote servers.

I think that they use the Ubuntu repositories for base packages, X server and for installing application software and add their own repositories on top for the MATE specific stuff such as MDM and MATE itself.

Disclaimer: I don't currently use Mint

I've been having a good experience with Mint 15, I like Cinnamon, and I plan to install Mint 16 Cinnamon on my next laptop.

I've never upgraded before, just started out fresh. But y env got pretty complicated so I'd like to try an upgrade. What's the experience with the "Fresh upgrade"[1]?

[1]: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

A fresh upgrade is just backup, plain install, restore. It's super reliable but somewhat inconvenient and time consuming.

A package upgrade is easier for friends of the command line but runs the risk of leaving your computer with an inconsistent package selection or configuration. And it's less used so bugs are more likely.

I tried a package upgrade for 14->15, worked great. shrug I did 15->16 a few days ago reinstalling fresh (wanted to disable encrypted home directories, figured this was the easiest way to do it). Worked great too.

Great, if they only provided decent support for older versions. I'm using the LTS release on my desktop, but pretty much all software besides Firefox and Thunderbird are at least three months behind.

The LTS should be good till 2017, but it's already far behind in 2013.

That's how Debian's release system has always worked, and most derivatives have stuck pretty close to it. If you want software pretty close to the day of its official release, use a bleeding-edge distro like Gentoo or Arch. If you want software literally the day of its release regardless of what your distribution's maintainers think of it or its compatibility, most distributions have testing channels where new packages are inserted as quickly as they can be built (for Debian, this would be sid).

Heh, well that's the point of the LTS release. It gets security updates and patches, but those releases are not designed to stay current.

If you want current software, don't run old releases.

I've encountered this sort of logic before. It is certainly one way of defining "long term stable" but a more useful definition is that packages go through more extensive interoperability testing prior to being made available, so they are 3 - 6 months perhaps behind the current stuff but not years behind.

It is perhaps one of the biggest challenges for me on a Linux desktop, constantly having to choose between 'everything works' or 'has current features'. Which is not a choice I need to make with commercial desktops.

It's not a choice you are given for proprietary desktops. New features are almost always the domain of point releases. The linux distros have just decoupled that so you know what you are missing if you wait.

Does this bump up LMDE also? Is there any connection between the release cycles?

It looks like LMDE used "update packs" which are snapshots of Debian Testing. The website doesn't indicate when those packs are released; however, there should be a way to get packages straight from Debian Testing for a full rolling release distro.

I've been using Crunchbang Linux and I prefer it over Linux Mint, Ubuntu, etc.

It's super lightweight, incredibly efficient, and gives me just what I need.

Naive question: visually, this looks like all Mints before it. As an Ubuntu and OSX user, I'm not sure I'm liking the 'retro' Linux UI style.

For a distro like Mint or Ubuntu to hire a professional design team for the OS to provide an aesthetic and holistic UX comparable to OSX / Android - is the stopper just budget or is there something technical in X/Mir that stops that from happening?

> Naive question: visually, this looks like all Mints before it. As an Ubuntu and OSX user, I'm not sure I'm liking the 'retro' Linux UI style.

If you don't like the look of MATE, then don't use it. The entire point of MATE is that it is something for people to use if they don't like what self-described UI experts did with GNOME after version 2.

Seriously, I'm not kidding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATE_(software)#History

If you want new, experimental, or 'professional', go look for it elsewhere.

(I do not use MATE, GNOME 3, Unity, or KDE.)

MATE is the most popular Gnome 2 fork for people who hate GNOME 3. Cinnamon appears to be an attempt to adopt some of the good qualities of Unity but without the drawbacks.

What does this provides me over Ubuntu?

It's mostly the same. It's a different skin / desktop environment. I prefer mint cinnamon, which I think hits the right spots for me. Really a matter of aesthetic preference.

Absence of Unity.

  apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

Unity provides best UX on Linux so far, or have other desktops catched on? Last time I checked Cinnamon (tried it on Arch Linux though) and Gnome Shell both lacked the depth of design compared to Unity.

(I and many others really prefer kde3/4, gnome 2 (and even 3) as well as mate and cinnamon and some light weight wms over Unity)

User experience isn't objective.

exactly his point

I prefer KDE. Unity has a mix of in-house, mac-style and Gnome design. I can't say it provides the best UX. It does provide consistency which makes it the most popular distribution and desktop environment.

On the other hand KDE is much more versatile and perceptive of user's choice. It has a rich set of software which includes a full productivity suite of KDE PIM (personal information management) and all Qt apps fit pretty well in KDE. KDE heavily uses widgets which makes your overall experience better.

You should give OpenSUSE 13.1 or Fedora 20 KDE a try.

>Unity

> best UX on Linux so far

surely you jest

I find Gnome 3 to be slightly less goofy, and the extensions repository makes it easy to patch over the remaining bits of fail.

You should try www.elementaryos.org

So why not just use Debian?

The ppa repositories are an Ubuntu thing I've heard, there seem to be slightly more packages for Ubuntu-based distributions, and lots of things are just pre-packaged. Instead of having to apt-get a filemanager and everything, things are compiled by people that probably know more about it than me. Like with laptops, I'm pretty sure I could assemble one if manufacturers let us, but the real experts can probably do it better (with heat management and whatnot).

That said, Debian works perfectly fine for me on my phone. It runs lxde chrooted in userspace (Android is the booted OS), and I have no trouble using and operating Debian as far as things are available for ARM. Even compiling new things for ARM is usually no issue, though things like compiling Firefox are probably beyond what I would want to try on my phone :P

This is a good point. In Linux Mint, Unity is in the repositories, but not mandatory - there are plenty of supported DEs. Wheras in Ubuntu, Unity is in the repositories, but not mandatory - there are plenty of supported DEs. So that's a big advantage of Linux Mint then.

wrong, they use mate, which is a sort of fork of gnome 2. debian is already committed to gnome 3... which has all the usability issues "solved"if you want to download tons of JavaScript to run locally... but all the system tools are still a train wreck. eg, just added my printer, can't even see the protocol I'm using via the gui, and since my net printer has a few, I only see it's model listed several times and have to guess, check elsewhere, repeat...

debian is already committed to gnome 3

They are testing xfce as the default - http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=co...

Yeah, I thought I'd give Debian's gnome3 the benefit of the doubt for a while.

I've switched to xfce4. Gnome3 is crashy and glitchy for me, although I do like some of the UI tweaks.

Use Kubuntu

Gnome 2.

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