back to article Linux Mint 17.2: If only all penguinista desktops were done this way

The underlying packages in Linux Mint 17.2, just released, are largely unchanged. What you will find are a lot of improvements and added polish in everyday tools like the update manager, login screen and the Software Sources app. Sticking with the Ubuntu 14.04 base has given Linux Mint developers the opportunity to focus their …

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          1. kryptylomese

            Re: Enough of Redmond, I want to make the switch, but all the flavors & choices leaves me lost...

            Photoshop run on Linux with wine:-

            https://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?appId=17

      1. frank ly

        Re: Enough of Redmond, I want to make the switch, but all the flavors & choices leaves me lost...

        If you really want to make the switch, as opposed to just having a play with Linux to see what it looks/feels like, I'd suggest that you buy a new (or second hand) SSD of 32GB (or more) and use that for a standalone installation. That way, you can play and explore to your heart's content and try what you like without risk of borking a dual boot setup.

        I'd 'caution' you that Linux (of whatever flavour) is very, very, very flexible and modular and so it offers you so many possibilities that you'll be tempted to experiment and thus make many mistakes. That's fine because you'll learn a lot and you can always restore from previously made system backups. (No licensing or internet activation hassles, etc).

        Linux Mint is a very good starting point because it's been developed with ease of use in mind and the Mint forums are well populated with useful discussion topics. Since it's based on Ubuntu, the Ubuntu forums are also a very useful source of help and information. If you have a problem, someone else will have had it and the answers (or suggestions) will be out there.

      2. JEDIDIAH
        Linux

        Re: Enough of Redmond, I want to make the switch, but all the flavors & choices leaves me lost...

        #1 - I didn't like the Firefox in the last copy of Ubuntu I installed so I downloaded the current release tarball from Mozilla. All I did to "install it" was to unzip the archive. It runs fine. I have Loki games from the dawn of time and 3 distros ago that I still run.

        #2 - The package manager handles any dependencies for any app you would care to install. You don't have to worry what API an application was coded with.

        #3 - Maya is available for Linux. Don't make baseless assumptions.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Enough of Redmond, I want to make the switch, but all the flavors & choices leaves me lost...

          Thanks so much for all the replies, especially the tips about apps related to game design. I put Ubuntu on a family laptop about 6 months ago. Mint is on there too as a dual boot, but we've stuck with Ubuntu out of habit mainly.

          I haven't looked under the hood yet. What are the relative risks of getting hit with malware or a virus vs. windows? Flash and Java are not installed, just a PDF reader replacement and a recent version of Firefox. I've used system monitor to look at running tasks, but I lack the knowledge to know what to look for, not that that it would help much against keylogger / rootkit type attacks anyway.

          Regarding info on KDE and mixing Linux versions to get at other tools such as Thunderbird. Please don't hold back. I've used Unix and Minix at college, and while I'm rusty I have chops as a developer. I won't jump in and just break stuff, but I do want to read ahead as it will help me later....

          'If you really want to make the switch'....Yes, I'm serious, but I want to get there in little steps over time. Right now I have a load of old XP netbooks for personal stuff and Unity3D games testing, but they're all close to end of life. In addition I have two Win7 Asus gaming rigs for Unreal dev, and an old Vista laptop which is now the sole Linux box. I want to flip that on its head, and have a single high-end box that can dual boot Linux / Win10 for PC dev and have the rest as Linux boxes.... Cheers again!

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Enough of Redmond, I want to make the switch, but all the flavors & choices leaves me lost...

            AC, you don;t have t 'mix Linux versions' to get particular pieces of software. , certainly not for something as common as Thunderbird. No matter which distro you;re using, all yu do is look in the reporsitory for that distro for teh software you want, then use the install tool you have available to install it. And aside from some of the very tiny distros intended to live on extremely old hardware, I;d be surprised if Thunderbird is absent.

            In the case of Mint, the Software Centre gives you a graphical means of locating software that you can install. Now, personally, the way that works doesn't quite float my boat and I find myself using Synaptic which I suspect newbies would find more confusing, but even there, it;s just a case of searching for teh name of the software you want to install, then once found, put a tick against it, and pres the install/update button. Synaptic will then tell you if it needs to install anything else to make it work, and lets you review such things if you wish in case it might inbclude anything you don;t approve of for whatever reason. If still happy, press the go button, and a short while later, it;s all done. No firkling with code written for other distros at all. On the very rare occasion I;ve wanted to do something obscure and wanted teh very latest package I have found myself doing things like installing a .deb archive using gdebi - but even that's very easy, generally on a par with installing WIndows software. Can;t recall when last I tried installing an RPM package on a DEB system (or was it the other way around? Can't recall) - it was many years ago, and things are simply much much better than they were.

            My advice would be - at this stage don't worry about such things. Dive in and see what you CAN do from where you are - you may well find that the things you thought would be problematic simply are not. Of course, at your kind of level, being a developer, you may well find other problems instead, but then you've doubtless the skill to overcome them. Good luck with your venture into Penguin Territory! :-}

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Enough of Redmond, I want to make the switch, but all the flavors & choices leaves me lost...

              Cheers Esme!

  1. Carl W

    I'm not seeing it

    No update available in Update Manager (currently on 17.1 -- just in a VM to see what it's like).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @Carl W - Re: I'm not seeing it

      They say on their website it will come up sometime next week.

      1. Carl W

        Re: @Carl W - I'm not seeing it

        The article says "You can update to Mint 17.2 directly from Update Manager." which implies now. No problem though, I've downloaded and installed it. Doesn't appear to be a lot different from 17.1 IMHO.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Lack of upgrades is a killer for me

    I've tried Mint, liked it, but when the next version came out there was no in-place upgrade option. WTF? It's nice to hear that there's a limited ability to upgrade this time, within the 17.x family, but the prospect of being forced to do a fresh install when 18 comes along is enough to make me stick with Ubuntu, for all its many and various faults.

    1. CAPS LOCK

      Re: Lack of upgrades is a killer for me

      Backup is your friend.

    2. Nate Amsden

      Re: Lack of upgrades is a killer for me

      I was thinking similar before I switched to Mint from Ubuntu..then I realized I hadn't upgraded Ubuntu in several years (I stayed on way past the 10.04 LTS desktop support ended because I didn't want Unity among other things). So I figure I won't be upgrading to another major version of Mint unless I get new hardware which means new install for me anyway. My personal laptop is 5 years old now, maybe it has another year or two left to it. But maybe I will go with Mint 17 again when I replace it, like I kept going with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS long after 12.x came out.

      looks like I am on 17.1 at the moment.

    3. James Loughner
      Linux

      Re: Lack of upgrades is a killer for me

      That's why you should always have a separate home partition. BTW for uninitiated all personal stuff is always in home.

      Personally I keep two root partition one for current OS and one for next. I install the new OS into the next one and test. Once I am happy that all works great on my hardware I switch the home partition to be mounted on the new OS and the old partition becomes the one waiting for next.

      Two advantages a new clean install cleans out all the old crud that accumulates like programs installed but never used again. I don't have old system config files from 6 versions back laying around giving the new binaries fits. Second I can be sure all works before committing to the new version and can drop back if need be.

      It generally takes less then an hour to remember and install my main programs. Forget some it takes a couple of minuets to install once noticed.

      Much better then trying to muck around with potential bad configs and other things from old system. And it only costs 30 or so gig for the second partition. (note I still use ext4 not convinced about BTRFS yet)

      1. frank ly

        @James Loughner Re: Lack of upgrades is a killer for me

        "And it only costs 30 or so gig for the second partition."

        My root partition is 12GB and has 4GB free. This is pure system; I have separate partitions for home and personal data. I'm wondering why you need a 30GB partition for what you seem to describe as a system root partition. Just idle curiosity .....

        1. gv

          Re: @James Loughner Lack of upgrades is a killer for me

          Linux is basically like a box of sweets: some of us like to try all of them, even the strawberry cremes.

          1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
            Devil

            Re: @James Loughner Lack of upgrades is a killer for me

            Linux is basically like a box of sweets: some of us like to try all of them, even the strawberry cremes.

            Pervert!

            I bet you eat those filthy coffee ones as well. You disgust me!

        2. Ian 55

          Re: @James Loughner Lack of upgrades is a killer for me

          Celestia with all the graphics downloaded uses quite a bit of space, but yes.

          The only reason the SSD here also has Windows is that it'd look very, very empty if I just had the two Linux root partitions. I boot into it every couple of months, the update process reminds me why I stopped - you have to update programs individually!?! - and I restart into Linux again.

      2. itzman

        Re: Lack of upgrades is a killer for me

        I keep all my data on an old atom based debian thing somewhere else on the network

        The only stuff in /home/me is to do with the config fles for various apps.

        This is a delight when upgrading.

    4. asdf

      Re: Lack of upgrades is a killer for me

      >Lack of upgrades is a killer for me

      LMDE 2 is great but alas even the upgrade to LMDE 3 (and systemd but not for me) won't be completely trivial based on past experience. Still at least there is a rolling upgrade path but LMDE is definitely not for you if you are not comfortable with the CLI.

      1. asdf

        Re: Lack of upgrades is a killer for me

        Sorry wasn't clear in first post but that LMDE being a semi rolling release allows you to not have to do a massive upgrade every six months like regular Mint. More like every two years or more and unlike an LTS release you actually get constant software version upgrades not just security fixes. But again it's not really noob friendly though.

    5. Ian 55

      Re: Lack of upgrades is a killer for me

      It was that and a couple of things that were not quite working in Mint that meant I switched back to Ubuntu when Ubuntu MATE happened.

      Not regretted it for a second.

      And, of course, even though I changed everything - including going from 32-bit Linux Mint to 64-bit Ubuntu MATE - having a separate /home partition meant that my data and app settings were still safe. I don't want to think how much work it would have been with Windows.

  3. phuzz Silver badge
    Unhappy

    And there was me thinking that 17.1 was a good version to standardise a bunch of our customer's machines on. I haven't even finished rolling them all out yet :(

    Ho hum, hopefully most of the package updates should keep coming for a while yet.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      "And there was me thinking that 17.1 was a good version to standardise a bunch of our customer's machines on. I haven't even finished rolling them all out yet :(

      Ho hum, hopefully most of the package updates should keep coming for a while yet."

      ... and here's where I drop the fanboi pose and make a few suggestions: Don't rush to upgrade! You still get Ubuntu updates and also those that Mint themselves provide so you have a good, stable platform that will receive security updates to work with. Stick with what you have already and then plan for moving forwards.

      Find examples of a few nightmare users - the one's with big mailboxes etc and clone their machines or P2V them to a virty system. If necessary you can always use rsync -rav to get a copy of a system out to another to play with whilst they are using it. You might like to learn Arch or Gentoo to learn the way to do this and get away with it, ie create a skeletal system, slap files on it and get it to boot. Practice upgrading and then job's a good 'un.

      If the above is a little intimidating, it is probably a bit excessive. Make up a plan for an upgrade, try it, rinse, wash, repeat. However: remember there are loads of forums that will give you a hand. The Gentoo ones are generally pretty friendly to "foreigners" including Mint users, so don't restrict yourself to one lot.

      1. phuzz Silver badge

        Fortunately in the bit of testing I have done, 95% is unchanged. all the rest will just need a few "if lsbdistdescription = 'Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca'" bits in puppet to sort out the differences.

        It was more that I'd assumed that 17.1 was an LTS release, which doesn't look like the case now.

        1. Richard 22
          Stop

          17.0, 17.1 and 17.2 are all based on the same Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release, so they all have Long Term Support for the core system components. They are all marked as Long Term Support releases on the linux mint website (until 2019 - ie the same as the underlying 14.04 system). So just because they've released a newer, better version doesn't mean you have to update - it doesn't affect the support status of previous releases. They've only really updated the desktop components anyway, plus a few packages. If you've standardised on 17.1 and it's working then there's nothing requiring you to update.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    I've always had a soft spot for Minty

    ... although for some reason I stuck Arch on wifey's laptop when Win 7 pissed her and me off enough. I prefer a Gentoo experience but nowadays am grateful for a Core i7 + 16GB RAM on my lappy to crunch the code!

    To everyone else who asks what to try on a personal machine, I recommend Mint and it keeps getting better. Time for a download and another KVM I think.

  5. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Mint does what no other os/distro does

    Takes note of what users actually want, not what the devs think they should want.

    1. asdf

      Re: Mint does what no other os/distro does

      >Mint does what every other os/distro does or will soon do

      Join the Red Hat freedesktop.borg. Why because resistance is futile. Clem is great and so is Mint but alas he and it also will be assimilated.

    2. asdf

      Re: Mint does what no other os/distro does

      >not what the devs think they should want.

      Pretty obvious now in retrospect why Gnome so badly jumped the shark. A bit of corporate influence is all I will say.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Maybe...

    ...Just maybe someone will reinvent the OS/2 active desktop and all that entails in usefulness.

    I have a couple of Linux distros that I run in a VM just to see if they live up to expectations but after using them for a few hours I always reboot my machine back to OS/2 to get any work done. I could live with Linux if someone ported the OS/2 desktop and all that it does. I don't like windows fot the same reason - the shitty desktop which has got much worse since XP.

    1. asdf
      Trollface

      a not so innocent question

      So to get a quorum at user's group meetings do you have to combine with the AmigaOS and BeOS folks?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: a not so innocent question

        Actually no. You would be surprised at just how many OS/2 installations in industry there still are and those using it are not going to change any time soon. A working machine that has 30 to 40 years life left in it and costs several million euro to replace is not going to be replaced any time soon and neither is the OS controlling it.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: a not so innocent question

          Even in my industry (semiconductor) with million dollar production tools you hardly see any internal OS/2 computers today unlike 10 years ago. Yes I will concede there are still the occasional production OS/2 installs out in the wild but as far as people using as their desktop daily driver you my friend are not only rarer than a Windows Phone user but may be even rarer than a Sailfish OS user.

    2. itzman

      Re: Maybe...

      Well off you go. Lots of toolkits available for the OS/2 window manager to build upon

    3. kryptylomese

      Re: Maybe...

      Linux has MANY desktop environments and some are highly customisable. Which ones have you tried and did you try to customise them?

  7. This post has been deleted by its author

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I have installed Linux Mint 17.1

    on a 7 years old Dell Latitude laptop and it works great. An SSD hard drive was all it needed to add a few more years to its lifetime.

  9. choleric

    apt functionality

    From the article:

    "For example, if you want to install Calibre, you'd type "apt recommends calibre" to see what else you'll need to install."

    Not quite. "recommends" gives you a list of related packages that you might like to install. Stuff you _need_ for the package to work ("depends on") is installed automagically.

  10. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    he traditional desktop paradigmT

    "taskbar-like panels with applets, a start menu and system tray"

    This misses out the most significant part: the ability to put files, folders*, links or applications on the desktop. The current fashion in "user experience design" is that you must follow the designer's workflow whether it's relevant to you or not.

    Stuff designing my user experience, just provide a versatile user interface & I'll design my own experience.

  11. Wolfclaw
    WTF?

    Eh?

    LINUX, always thought that was government code word for deleting documents that show they have lied to the country.

  12. MJI Silver badge

    XP users

    I dual boot my home XP PC with Mint Cinnamon and Mint is more like XP to use than any version of Windows beginning with 8

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    WINDOWS 10 CRS-7 EDITION RTM FINAL

    Linux Users: Just continously search Google for

    'Windows 10 CRS-7 Edition RTM FINAL'

    so that Windows 10 and SpaceX's failed re-supply launch are intrinsically linked forever more.

    MS have reason to be worried:

    Linux Mint 17.2 is actually very good, a solid release with 4-5 years long term support, match it with the upcoming LibreOffice 5.0, once released around the 29th JULY 2015 (coincidentaly).

  14. MissingSecurity

    Making the switch

    Have been of Fedora 20 for a while, mostly because my last company ran RHEL, but I do believe it's time to move to a more enjoyable distro experience and this just might be it.

  15. AlbertH

    This is the one for me!

    I've just downloaded and installed Mint 17.2. I've resisted the move from Ubuntu (usually Kubuntu) for too long!

    This is the first distro version that really feels "easy to use". The installer is simple to operate, the selection of provided software is sensible (and there's plenty more available from the repos), and the installed system is quick and responsive, and everything Just Works™.

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