Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” Cinnamon released | Hacker News Reader

Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” Cinnamon released

blog.linuxmint.com

95 pointsAkhilan28 comments

Following Mint since version 10, I always fallback on Mint 11 (XFCE) since it's the lightest non-obsolete version I can run on my old thinkpads (x40, x60).

More recent versions were often quite slower, this one (MATE desktop) is by far the slickest I've seen so far. The GUI has close to zero latency. Kudos.

I'm using Debian 7 and XFCE. It's pretty much the same regarding UI latency. And everything works on my T400 out of the box. Never been happier.

I've just migrated from Windows 7 (today after clinging on for about 3 years) and it's refreshingly good.

I expect almost anything to run blink fast on a T400 though (far better hardware, far better driver support).

The hardware is not that great. It's got switchable graphics so I've had to disable the Radeon portion and stick with Intel graphics. Managed with powertop to get 10.9W of power usage and 4.5 hours of battery. Not bad for a 5 year old machine with a 5 year old battery.

There's also the mate version - http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2627

Which is the one I went for :D

I hope they fixed some tiny theming issues that bothered me, as I would like to use Mate over Cinnamon this time.

Mate is an extremely solid desktop environment. So glad that someone saved all the work that went into Gnome2. It's fast and familiar, and that's all I need.

Finally the Apple Magic Trackpad works everywhere. Even offers battery warnings. Nice!

Mint+Cinnamon is a great desktop. It's saving me from being 100% Mac.

"Finally the Apple Magic Trackpad works everywhere."

Is this solution something mint-specific? e.g. can I install whatever makes this possible on an Ubuntu or Debian distro?

Haven't tried those distros. (my distro hopping days are OVER)

Before Qiana, Nemo (Mint's forked Nautilus), Cinnamon's prefs panels, some 3rd party toolkits, they all got scrolling wrong. Lots of apps got it right too, but enough was wrong that the trackpad was pretty irritating to use.

Now, in Qiana, everything seems to work. (well, the physics aren't there, like flinging to scroll feels pretty dead, but it's not bad)

Based on that, I'd guess that Ubuntu Trusty would work great, likely Fedora 20 too. Guessing no for Debian stable or testing, but maybe unstable would be good.

Ah, the benefits of choice...

The most interesting bits are at the bottom of the release page:

> Linux Mint 17 will receive security updates until 2019.

> Until 2016, future versions of Linux Mint will use the same package base as Linux Mint 17, making it trivial for people to upgrade.

> Until 2016, the development team won't start working on a new base and will be fully focused on this one.

http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_qiana_cinnamon_whatsnew.php

The release candidate or something had a note that it wasn't compatible yet with NVidia Optimus cards. I no longer see a note about that - does anyone know if it's been fixed? I had some problems with that when I installed Mint last time.

I just installed the Release Candidate earlier this month. Simple but Useful changes as far as I can see.

How do I update from 16?

    sudo apt-get dist-upgrade?

Does linux mint allow to upgrade directly in that way? I remember that older version would suggest to reinstall the os and strongly discourage a dist-upgrade.

At the time that was the only reason I avoided mint

>that was the only reason I avoided mint

Huh. I would consider it a good sign, a sign that the designers of Mint care about reliability and know how to achieve it even though they probably have fewer developer-hours to devote to a new release than the big distros have.

Not sure I agree. I changed /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list to use qiana and trusty (coming from petra), fired off apt-get update and dist-upgrade, hit "Y" every time it asked if a config file should be replaced, and ended up with a great system.

It just doesn't seem like a very hard problem to solve.

And, despite what the Mint guys claim, Ubuntu appears to have solved it just fine.

EDIT: upgraded from petra, not olivia

You have confused luck in following an unsupported set of steps for your particular configuration and set of installed packages with a solution to the general problem. There was no guarantee your system would continue to function, nor is there any guarantee that your system is not now broken in a subtle, yet-unnoticed way, nor is there any guarantee that your process will work for anyone else, nor that it will work for future releases.

This is the same mindset that blows up production systems with ad-hoc maladministration instead of following sound, documented procedures created with the input of people who actually understand the system and thoroughly tested in advance.

You talking to me? I never said I had the solution to the general problem. I only said that it doesn't seem like as big a problem as the Mint guys claim.

True, I did say that Ubuntu has solved this problem. For them, dist-upgrades are well understood and not blind luck. If you're disagreeing with that statement, I'd like to hear more.

> For them, dist-upgrades are well understood and not blind luck.

Ubuntu specifically tells you not to do a dist-upgrade, so your supposed evidence of how easy it must be doesn't even pass the smell test. The "correct" upgrade process is do-release-upgrade.

Unfortunately, that process still is not a complete solution, as demonstrated by the multiple clusterfucks I've had to clean up when people tried to use their upgrade process.

Even if they had succeeded, that would tell you nothing -- Ubuntu is a commercial operation with a substantial amount of money behind it. Linux Mint is not. ReactOS would be a perfect Windows clone if everything a funded corporation accomplished were easy.

Just a warning, I tried the same when upgrading from nadia to petra, and because I had compiled from source my Intel graphics driver, it screwed horribly and I spent hours trying to remove or recompile and reinstall it without success.

In the end, reinstalling Mint from a USB drive (preserving $HOME) took just a few minutes and the driver worked instantly.

So don't forget about this kind of dependencies before considering a dist-upgrade.

> It just doesn't seem like a very hard problem to solve.

For any given problem, only people who have not tried to solve it will say that.

What about people who have watched others solve it?

The documentation still discourages a dist-upgrade but at least includes it as an option.

http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

You shouldn't upgrade between major Ubuntu (-based) releases like that, as it doesn't account for certain configuration changes, you are bound to hose your system if you do it that way. Ubuntu has another script 'do-release-upgrade', but I'm not sure if Mint has it as well. I do know the recommended way to upgrade Mint is to do a full reinstall while preserving $HOME. There are step-by-step instructions how to do an in-place upgrade somewhere on the Mint site, I followed those once (14 to 15 I think) and it worked perfectly, but it's not recommended.

I guess I'll just hold off until I stop getting browser updates then. It's a major hose-off flashing a USB disk, rebooting, clicking partitions, etc. Best to avoid that.

Blog is down.

EDIT: It's back up now

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