Linux Mint 17 "Qiana", the latest version of the popular Linux distribution, was just released. It is a long-term support version, to be supported with security updates until 2019. It is released in the MATE (Gnome 2 fork) and Cinnamon (Gnome 3 fork) versions. It is the first release of a new update strategy; the next few releases until 2016 will be based on the same base packages as this LTS version.
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(Score: -1) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 31 2014, @11:40PM
In the early morning, Rasheed comes down the stairs of his two-story suburban family-home accompanied by a bass glissando in the background music, while adjusting his tie prim and proper with both hands.
He asks his wife and two kids where the goodness is, then the flash of an organ glissando in the background music seguing into a gospel-inspired chorus punctuated by finger snaps; all as the high-yellow trophy housewife proudly introduces the product smiling and holding it next to her face for all to see. All words spoken by the family are now held to strict rhyme, in a meter appropriate with the background music.
The scene cuts to the product's box on the coffee table in the foreground and the family shuckin' and jivin' in the background before the music and camera fade.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday May 31 2014, @11:55PM
I've really seen nothing in Mint to recommend it over any other Me-Too Gnome distro. I've never liked Gnome, and maybe that is why. (Although I like XFCE4, and in many respects its not that different than Gnome.
The more SystemD is pushed, the less I like it. If it just stays out of the way, I'll be happy, but I suspect a huge security vulnerability will be found in SystemD, because its being implemented until it is designed, and patched until it is debugged.
I was pleasantly surprised how well OpenBSD 5.5 + XFCE4 went onto one of my machines recently.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Informative) by joekiser on Sunday June 01 2014, @12:43AM
+2. OpenBSD is simple by design and documented very well. XFCE, with its strong development team and incremental rather than revolutionary changes, remains a clean, modern desktop that stays out of the way. I expect this OS+desktop combination will work for a lot of old-school users who like maintaining control of their system and are tired of the endless changes in the *Kits and broken UI candy.
Debt is the currency of slaves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Subsentient on Sunday June 01 2014, @01:08AM
No systemd, eh? http://universe2.us/epoch.html [universe2.us]
Also, I have another link [dropbox.com] for you. This is what I currently run. It's an XFCE 4 i586 distro with Epoch for the init system.
Here's my card [universe2.us].
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1) by NullPtr on Sunday June 01 2014, @10:01PM
I like gnome, or at least, I like Mate which is like gnome. I jumped ship from Ubuntu to Mint when Unity (heh!) was released, tried a few different windows managers but settled on Mate. Some of the other windows managers are flaky (at best) or designed for low power machines (don't have any). Also, Mint "just works" whereas sometimes it's a pain in the arse getting wifi working, or sleep, or whatever.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 01 2014, @12:29AM
FTFS: the next few releases until 2016 will be based on the same base packages as this LTS version
Lack of reliable in-place upgrades has long been a sore spot for Mint.
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[1] Accessibility (the ability to index to a spot on the page) is non-existent on Mint's blog pages. 8-(
-- gewg_
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Angry Jesus on Sunday June 01 2014, @02:06AM
I've been runnning Mint for a few years and it didn't bother me. In place upgrades were a hassle, but rare enough that I could deal with it.
But today I decided to write an applet for cinnamon. This was the first time I was motivated enough to try to do more than fiddle with Mint's GUI tools for configuring Mint. I just wanted to modify an already existing menu applet to parse Firefox's profiles.ini file and generate a menu of all my profiles so I could launch them individually instead of having to go through Firefox's bare-bones profile manager. I have a lot of profiles.
It should have been trivial to pull off, I was starting with something that was 70% there already. But no, Mint's developer documentation is basically non-existent. You are expected to dig through Mint's own javascript libraries to figure out what they do and everything else is hand-holding on IRC, if you are lucky. And debugging? Not a chance. You have to either read the session-errors.log file or use the horrible, horrible "looking glass" GUI that you can't even cut-n-paste error messages from. Some errors go in the session-errors and some go to looking glass and its not obvious why some go one place and not another. It is hard to think of a worse design.
So after spending a day trying to pull off a trivial applet, something I could have done in about 30 minutes tops if I didn't want nice integration with Mint, I realized that Mint is just a pretty face on top of hollow engineering. I've actually heard good things about recently releases of Gnome3 and KDE with Qt5 has got a great rep. I'm going to look under the hood on both of those and probably go to the ubuntu version of one of them.
But Mint is dead to me.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Subsentient on Sunday June 01 2014, @02:30AM
I can't stomach KDE's size myself, and GNOME 3 feels like a fuckin' tablet to me, which is one of the things I revile the most, and I'm *not* a hateful person.
I'd maybe be able to tolerate MATE, but personally I prefere XFCE 4.10 (or 4.11, which is unstable 4.12) nowadays.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Sunday June 01 2014, @04:45AM
KDE's size is a lot less than most people think. And the power is worth what little extra size penalty you pay. Yeah, you can usually do the same things in Gnome, with a lot of clicking around, but KDE4 is finally as robust and fast as ever, and I can still run two VmWare Virtual machines simultaneously and have the system remain very responsive. (And this is on an older Dell core-two laptop.)
In linux, any unused memory is wasted memory. Just because it looks like most of your memory is in use doesn't mean you can't launch another task, or 4 or 6.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Subsentient on Sunday June 01 2014, @06:25PM
I feel like Lorien in Babylon 5 when Mr. Garibaldi claimed to be 'too old for this stuff'. I can't help but bust up laughing. Machines that you and I consider old, are different. KDE doesn't run well on a Pentium 3 800Mhz. I still get use out of such dinosaurs.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 01 2014, @08:12PM
KDE doesn't run well on a Pentium 3 800Mhz(sic)[1]
...which is why that project was forked after KDE 4 appeared.
https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ [trinitydesktop.org]
.
[1] Note that Heinrich Hertz's name is *always* capitalized, even when abbreviated, even when proceeded by a k or an M or a G.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 01 2014, @02:57AM
Do they still do that browser hijack? That a few other things got on my nerves (like adding a bunch of stuff to the fortune files).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Sunday June 01 2014, @05:33AM
I am both a programmer and a user. It is a sad state that I will continue to run Windows, but there are many, many things that still need work on the Linux desktops. With that said, from a user perspective, I think Cinnamon is beginning to pull ahead of GNOME and KDE. I have to admit that I'm no expert in any of these desktops and I'm most at home in the Windows world. I also have to say (as everyone on here already knows), there is still a lot of work to be done before it's the year of the Linux desktop. A lot of work.
I found it interesting that you and I both looked at the Cinnamon menu recently. I started digging trying to understand what was going on and also found the documentation lacking. If there is one area that needs improvement, it's welcoming new programmers. To a person like me, who has experience programming and a life outside of computers, it's daunting to try to come over to the Linux / Mint / Cinnamon world.
For now, I'm going to go a different route and continue playing with Cinnamon and tinkering with the programming side of things. I don't know if I'll ever create anything useful, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 02 2014, @06:19PM
I use multiple FF profiles,too. I've just made multiple .desktop files with the command "firefox" replaced with "firefox --no-remote -p PROFILENAME" and put them in ~/.local/share/applications. I also changed the titles in the files to something relevant to the profile, like "Firefox-Games", etc. Then they show up in the menu/launcher automatically. This is far easier and also more DE-agnostic than creating Cinnamon applets.
(Score: 2) by Angry Jesus on Wednesday June 04 2014, @04:43AM
I ended up just sticking with the unaltered "mylauncher" applet and using a perl script to generate the properties file that defines the menus. I did swap it's icon out with the firefox.svg icon so it looks pretty.
I'm still leaving Mint though. Considering how piss-poor the development environment is, there will never be much 3rd party development for it. If anything ever happens to the current owners, it will just die on the vine. So I'm going to leave before that happens.
(Score: 1) by blackpaw on Wednesday June 04 2014, @05:26AM
KDE/Qt5 is still very much in alpha, I'd stick with KDE 4 for now
4.13 is a classic release
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SuperCharlie on Sunday June 01 2014, @05:22AM
I installed Mint 17 Cinnamon earlier this evening and have had no problems. I jumped the Windows ship about a year ago with Mint 15 and have been waiting for this release to get on a LTS version, so Im glad its here.
It feels like a stability and performance upgrade more than a whiz-bang new stuff upgrade, which is fine with me. As a Linux noob, Mint has served me well, been easy to install and configure, and the forums are pretty helpful with any probs. Maybe it is just another distro, but for me it works pretty dang well and I wanna throw out a kudos to the Mint team.
(Score: 1) by lcklspckl on Sunday June 01 2014, @05:45AM
I had an old 2000 install that I wanted to turn into a server that served media. I looked around and not really getting Linux I chose Mint based on ease of install and general user friendliness I read about. I picked Cinnamon and it gacked multiple times so I switched to MATE. This worked. I'm on Olivia now after upgrading once which required a new install which annoyed me and I'm not inclined to bother again. The last update I performed required a bunch of CLI remediation which took me back to the 80s but I fixed it. It will boot 95 percent of the time, but I don't really have the patience to figure out the problem. So I cold cock it and it then boots fine. Not even to mention the bizarre graphics wiggediness.
I really want to like Mint and Linux but I so much wish it just worked. Updated. Played nice. I want to ditch Windows, but it's too much work. And forget about giving to my mum. Oh god, the support!
Keep up the good work. Someday will be the year of the Linux desktop!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 01 2014, @07:15AM
I wanted[...]a server[...]I picked Cinnamon and it gacked multiple times so I switched to MATE
For starters, that cuts the RAM usage by about half.
For those traversing a similar route:
netblue30's chart of the relative hefts of a bunch of DEs/WMs [wordpress.com]
(article; page 3 of 3) [wordpress.com]
...and, of course, the number goes to zero by using just a CLI.
I'll leave it to others to mock you mercilessly about a GUI on a server. ;-)
-- gewg_
(Score: -1) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 01 2014, @07:36AM
Because a windows 2k sever doesn't come with a GUI.
How's the weather up there on that high horse of your's?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Sunday June 01 2014, @05:52AM
I just want to get work done - no more compiling stuff from source, or endless fiddling with config files. Ubuntu worked well for me for several years, but I dislike Unity and some of the other things they have done: I'm not sure what they think they are doing, but their UI gets in the way of getting work done. Xubuntu is better, but XFCE just isn't quite stable, and has some odd behavior (e.g., with networked Samba-shares).
Hence Mint: I was very happy with Mint 15 and 16 with Cinnamon on my laptop: unobtrusive UI and they just work. I have been waiting for Mint 17 to put onto my desktop machine (replacing Xubuntu 12.04). Here's hoping it's as good as initial reviews indicate.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.