Linux Mint 16 “Petra” Xfce RC released | Hacker News Reader

Linux Mint 16 “Petra” Xfce RC released

blog.linuxmint.com

35 pointsiamtechaddict35 comments

I was very disappointed with the debian version of linux mint. It was just awful. I have used archlinux for 2 years and I wanted a rolling release easy to use, but mint debian was slow, had connection problems and overall crashed way too many times.

I moved to crunchbang and it works very well. All out of the box. Fast, very fast. Very nice design overall. I don't understand why its releases never reach the front page of HN.

yeah, I felt the same...

Switched to normal Debian.

Interesting... How would you quickly compare Arch vs #! vs Debian?

Arch is very lean and it's absurdly up to date. Debian is a monstruosity and even it's testing branch is not as up to date as arch.

However, arch breaks things often, very often. You make updates crossing fingers you will be able to reboot. Debian, crunchbang, overall, is very stable.

It depends what you want. If you are not a linux guru and need to work on your system, then go for something easy and stable like debian, otherwise do go for arch.

--- Edit

Yes, I talked all the time about Debian and I missed #!. Let me say, crunchbang for me it's just an easy way to get a debian testing. I prefer it like this as last time I used Debian it had some rough edges I have no time anymore to smooth over. I want things to work out of the box and a good community, check #!, they actually have a nice welcoming community.

Where is #! then?

Isn't crunchbang a debian distro with openbox? You can put openbox on any distro you like including arch if that's what you are after.

I know that - I'm just really confused about what crunchbang really is now. So it's just debian with a different default wm?

"Put simply; CrunchBang could be thought of as a layer built on top of Debian, specifically to provide a great Openbox experience."

http://crunchbang.org/about/

That's kinda what I expected, an out of the box OpenBox setup built on top of Debian. It does say they use packages from their repository so there must be some differences than if you did it yourself.

yes, but archbang and crunchbang have nice defaults.

As great as Arch's documentation is (best in all linuces I've tried), I still prefer to have some nice defaults so I can get stuff done whilst learning the knobs.

I would say although Arch has a steep learning curve, there's plenty of documentation and tutorials about getting started. I have a machine that runs it and love it and I'm in no way a Linux guru.

I've only had one update issue, otherwise, it's pretty been reliable.

Note that Manjaro (http://www.manjaro.org/) is a "user-friendly" distro based on Arch. I tried it briefly via a liveCD from a British Linux magazine, and it looked promising.

Why do you say Debian is a "monstrosity"? What would that make Ubuntu then?

I'm about ready to move back (from Ubuntu) to Arch for the rolling release support. Can't stand having to do "upgrades".

I do not like upgrades either so I really hope Debian will manage to shorten their freezes of Testing. Otherwise I might move to Arch too.

Could not agree more, although I dislike Arch. The reason I do is since it's extremely unsafe, I would want something as bleeding edge as Arch but with a purely functional package manager like Nix or GNU Guix. (I know you can install Nix on Arch but then I will still have to use Nixpkg repo.)

What do you mean by unsafe? It seems stable enough for a laptop. I wouldn't run it on a production server though.

Why not? Because of the problems due to running updated software or are you aware of some problem with packages?

I ask because I have run Arch in production for the past 3 years on about 10 servers without any problems (knock on wood). Only official packages and always after quickly testing the latest pacman -Syu on a test machine.

Compare to a couple Ubuntu servers I have to deal with I have to go out of the way to get more recent packages, which are often unofficial (I avoid having to build packages where possible).

Many AUR packages just pull from the HEAD of some git repo or pull down X random tarball from a URL.

With something like Debian, you have layers of package maintainers in the middle to insulate against attacks, and specific, immutable bundles of data included in the packages themselves. Also, the entire Debian infrastructure (signing keys and all) being compromised, and such an incident going unnoticed, is a much less likely occurrence than the same for the hosting site some individual software author uses.

Sure, you can still add third-party repositories to Debian and install deb packages from outside the main sources. But when you do that, you're making a conscious decision to do so, on a package-by-package basis. Any package you pull from AUR could be vulnerable, unless you manually check the source of each and every one. When you install from the Debian repos, you can trust that a certain standard of quality and security is being upheld.

How does this compare to the safety of Ubuntu? Is a rolling release distro inherently less safe than a fixed release distro?

If I run bleeding-edge packages I want atomic updates (if install fail it won't change the state of the rest of the system) and support for roll-back (if a package is unstable I can easily go back one version without ruining the dependency tree for all other packages).

there's also opensuse's tumbleweed - http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed

I also recently tried out Crunchbang and love it for the same reasons that you cite.

It provides everything that I love about Debian without the Ubuntu overhead.

Is this somehow more notable than other distro + desktop releases?

I'm wondering that myself. Mint doesn't normally use XFCE, or at least didn't when I used it in the past. It was always a fork of GNOME. So maybe that's the news?

Mint is also pretty popular as an alternative to Ubuntu for Linux newbs, so I can see why people think it's interesting and upvote. We get a fair amount of distro release announcements on HN.

Indeed XFCE is a new option. It used to be only MaTe or Cinnamon desktop environments.

I know upgrades-in-place are not officially supported by Mint, but has anyone done it for 15->16 without exploding their system?

I swapped Ubuntu for Mint Cinnamon,

Mint Cinnamon for Xubuntu.

Maybe Mint with XFCE is what I really want :P Will try it for sure :)

What was wrong with Mint Cinnamon? I've been using Mint 13 for a while and I was just about to upgrade to 16.

Its nice, but occasionally Cinnamon seems to grab the CPU and take a huge amount of resources for no apparent reason.

Maybe that explains why Mint 15 Cinnamon is so slow for me. 13 works fine.

Is it the nemo file manager? under some circumstances, nemo starts to hog memory and CPU. It has to be killed. It will restart ok when you open the file manager again. Aside that annoyance, all has been working fine. I don't recall exactly but it is a known bug in 15, so I expect it to be fixed in 16.

Nothing wrong specifically with Mint Cinnamon the only thing I can remember bugging me was the mintMenu being slow to show up after clicking it. I do enjoy messing with a different OS every now and then, XUbuntu actually stuck for quite a while, might be going back to it too, but I installed Mint XFCE yesterday (after trying ElementaryOS for a little bit) and it seems to run quite nicely on my AMD-E450 APU 11,6 inch net(ish)book

i try other distros but i always wind up back w/Xubuntu. so hard to beat. recent 13.10 upgrade on an old Inspiron 8600 is clearly faster than 11.04 it was previously running. what a concept ... OS version upgrades w/smaller resource footprint. Mint/Xfce sounds promising, i'll give it a shot this weekend on similar old hardware. will also try CrunchBang's "older hardware" version. but Xubuntu is the rock.

I found Lubuntu the fastest. I copied ArchBang's awesomewm setup because ArchBang is beautiful. The result was fast and usable.

One word, for those in the know ;-)

-Aptosid

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