Mint Linux gifts Unity haters with 'Nadia' ... plus her Mate Ubuntu users with a hankering for Gnome can take comfort: the latest version of Linux distro Mint has been released. Mint 14, codenamed Nadia, is based on Ubuntu 12.10 comes with Mate 1.4, an updated version of the Mint user interface with greater stability and bug fixes. Mint continued the Gnome 2 look with Mate 1.x, but it …
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Well that is the really great thing about Linux - if you don't like the direction a company is talking the desktop - just jump ship to another desktop - Unlike say Windows or Mac you have a choice.
I think Kubuntu is fine - all the applications you have for Ubuntu will still run (being the same underlining base). The default look is a bit crap but if you spend about 20 seconds you can sort that out.
It you spend most of your day logging into Linux servers your missing out by not using desktop Linux - Putty is just crap in comparison.
Kubuntu, which uses the extremely stable KDE desktop is a very nice 'workhorse' - in our office about 70% of people are running Kubuntu - Windows 7 on the same machine is slower at pretty much all tasks I do (and you can;t do a lot of things I want to) - the more you use KDE the better it becomes - unlike gnome3//unity where the most you use it the more you realise they your prevented on using the desktop as you like - unlike the other 2 KDE allows you to tweak most settings (if you can be arsed)
Cinnamon is pretty and is far better than other gnome3 based desktops but for working with KDE is the best desktop I have used on any OS , each release since about 4.2.x has been just that little bit better than the previous one.
Unlike say Windows or Mac you have a choice.
.. because you need one? One of the principal issues with Linux is exactly choice. Technical people see that as a benefit, end users see that as a problem because they don't know what to choose and on what parameters.
Originally, this is what Ubuntu brought: a sense of direction. Until they totally went the Microsoft way in ramming a concept down people's throat without any option to back out. Please don't tell me that there is Kubuntu et al, because you're just telling me you missed the point..
Although I like Mint (Xfce) and use it for quite a few things, my personal preference is the way the (Open)SuSE people solved the issue. It must be hard work to keep it in sync, but they made it somehow possible to switch between the various desktops as if they were merely themes - things still work. As a consequence, it's OK if your initial decision of which desktop to use wasn't optimal - you can change without too much pain.
They want choice, but the default option to be good enough that they don't feel obliged to learn about all the options before the system becomes usable.
Sticking with the defaults makes it easier to get help on forums and it makes it far more likely that you are using a configuration that plenty of other people have tested. But if the default is Unity or Metro, people want a choice.
>> Unlike say Windows or Mac you have a choice.
> .. because you need one? One of the principal issues with Linux is exactly choice. ... end users see that as a problem because they don't know what to choose and on what parameters.
So you are saying that the world would be a better place is _all_ computers were the same with, say, Windows 95, and all cars were Ford Pintos. I read a book like that once, it had a number as its name.
> Although I like Mint (Xfce)
Mint defaults to MATE which is Gnome 2 fork.
> but they made it somehow possible to switch between the various desktops
Almost *ALL* distros can have any of the several desktops. apt-get install xfce* kde* ... and then in the next login you can choose whichever you want.
It happens that XBuntu has the default of XFCE, KBuntu has KDE etc, but you can load these from the repository and switch to your preference.
You can't do that easily with Windows 8 because Microsoft wants to remove that choice.
"my personal preference is the way the (Open)SuSE people solved the issue. It must be hard work to keep it in sync, but they made it somehow possible to switch between the various desktops as if they were merely themes - things still work."
You can do this at the login screen on pretty much every major distro...
For those trying dists, if you quite like Mint then try Lubuntu as well. They are both fast and minimalist and being Ubuntu/deb based it is very easy to install stuff.
Two advices for newbies setting up a system.
1. Partition your system with a boot partition (eg 125MB), swap partition (eg 8GB), / partition (eg 20GB), /home (the rest) so you can change Linuxes by just telling the new install to reformat the / and install there.
2. Keep a text file with all the info you need to setup the system next time, eg:
# Install Samba, Samba Server configuration Tool
apt-get --yes --quiet install samba samba-common system-config-samba
# Install Application Configuration Editor, LIBREOFFICE, RHYTHMBOX, TCL and WISH, Gdebi command line
apt-get --yes --quiet install gconf-editor libreoffice rhythmbox tk8.5 gdebi-core
Well, my problem with KDE is that it's a major CPU and memory hog. It and it's programs takes noticeably longer to start up, and I noticed that my graphics cards (and mind you, this is a SLI-enabled box) were being taxed to the point where their fan spins at full speed all the time. I've since switched to XFCE. The fans no longer spins full speed unless I run some 3D game. Some people may not like how XFCE doesn't have bling like those fancy cube desktops and stuff, but will, I don't want bling. I just want to get things done.
"Well, my problem with KDE is that it's a major CPU and memory hog. It and it's programs takes noticeably longer to start up, and I noticed that my graphics cards (and mind you, this is a SLI-enabled box) were being taxed to the point where their fan spins at full speed all the time. I've since switched to XFCE. The fans no longer spins full speed unless I run some 3D game. Some people may not like how XFCE doesn't have bling like those fancy cube desktops and stuff, but will, I don't want bling. I just want to get things done."
Another thumbs up here for XFCE. The Xubuntu interface is laid out like the old Ubuntu interface circa 10.10, though it uses its own light grey theme. I've got a custom theme running which copies the old dark Ubuntu Ambiance theme (though with the minimise, maximise and close buttons on the right side where any sane person would have them). I've been happily pretending Unity doesn't exist for over a year now.
The built in XFCE compositor does do some eye candy (window shadows, transparency, etc.) but if you want the cube desktops and such that you mention you can always install compiz.
Amazon ads are not baked into the desktop. You have a shopping lens that sends your search query to Amazon and returns search results based on what you typed in the dash. It takes 2 clicks in the privacy settings to disable it and it's been packaged as a separate package so that you can completely remove the shopping lens without affecting anything else (search for shopping lens in the software center). If you don't trust Canonical, you're welcome to go have a look at the code, it's on Launchpad: https://code.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity-lens-shopping
If you don't like the way Ubuntu is going with Unity, that's absolutely fine. But please stop spreading FUD.
Don't know if the author of this reads the comments but. He brings up about how the interface has been updated blah blah blah. Could you not perhaps put in a screenshot of the updated interface? Not everyone uses linux, and not all linux users use (or have even looked at) mint.
That and the post is so damn short it would make it look a little better at least.
I mean, I can't even summarize this post, the entire thing is a summary.
El Reg seems to be going that way at the minute. That and never proofreading. The number of silly little mistakes (spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc) which have been popping up recently do seem to have massive increased. Then again, I'm not sure if it's just me but the number of articles and breadth of topics covered does seem to have increased of late - maybe I should just stop moaning!
Back to the point, I agree. I'm a Kubuntu user (since Unity fecked me off) but would have appreciated a screenshot without having to go and search for it myself. Even a link to an example would have done - I had a very brief browse of the MintBox (just for pictures) but still don't know what the UI looks like! I know it's only 30 seconds to look, but it's more effort!!
Been using Linux on and off for quite a while now (I just wish certain large corporations would release Linux releases of ALL their software, not just bits of it) and I have gravitated towards Mint as a clean, consistent and easy to install/use distro.
Clement and his team seem to be VERY prompt in responding to comments both positive and negative which is very much in the tradition of the linux concept.
I just hope with people like Valve finally looking at major game titles on Linux we may actually get a real choice in desktop OS for both work and home.
This is actually what I'm hoping to get up and running on my new computer this weekend. Its a standard but high end desktop with an Nvidia GTX 670 as I understand Nvidia has marginally better Linux support than ATI. From what I gather, the Linux version of Steam has only been tested on Ubuntu but given Mint is a spin off of Ubuntu without the crapware, I shouldn't have too many problems, right?
It's the first time I'm using Linux on a desktop so any pointers would be appreciated (I have Windows 7 as a back up OS for the more system hungry stuff like Planetside 2).
> but given Mint is a spin off of Ubuntu without the crapware, I shouldn't have too many problems, right
As far as i'm aware that's correct...
However you will find FPS faster in KDE if you disable desktop effects (something you cannot do in cinnamon 3d) - however the new driver (not in Ubuntu yet) has apparently sorted issues with compositing desktops (and thus doubled users fps. - as I already did 2 simple tweaks (suspend desktop effects for fullscreen apps and disable VBLANK in nvidia-settings byy FPS were already doubled from a normal user)
Mint is good. I have had a few problems installing the 13 release and there seems to be a bug in it somewhere - the panels thing crashes occasionally - but its highly configurable and doesn't have to look like it does when you first install it.
Its good because its a later general release than Debian which I used to use, and the Mate desktop is gnome 2 with bugs being worked out. If you like gnome, you will like this. OTOH if you dont like gnome, its probably not a distro you would bother with otherwise.
"I understand Nvidia has marginally better Linux support than ATI"
At work we recently had a kind-of-trial (but in frontline service) project which required the use of very small form factor boxes stuck to the back of monitors on the VESA mount. We went for Acer Aspire Revo machines. All running Linux (Ubuntu/Debian).
Really nice machines to work with, Nvidia Ion chipsets, did everything we wanted. 25 of them in service, everyone happy.
This month we were asked to extend the trial to 10 more locations. Could suddenly no longer purchase the Ion-based machines, and the only thing we could get our hands on had ATI cards onboard. OK, we expected some issues.
So they arrived, set them up, they didn't do the graphics processing out the box we required for the project. Downloaded, compiled, installed the official ATI driver. We were then left with a FUCKOFFMASSIVE box in the lower right corner of the screen saying we were using an unsupported driver. HOURS of Googling failed to resolve this. Same on both available choices of Linux flavour.
In the end we stole small PCs from elsewhere and hid them in the ceiling... :-(
I understand Nvidia has marginally better Linux support than ATI.
Thought this way 4-5 years ago too. Now what I see is that the AMD/ATI cards are pretty comfortable with the FOSS radeon driver. If you experience a problem with a current Ubuntu/Mint etc kernel, the chances are pretty good you get them fixed in the mainline latest upstream kernels, say from here (BTW, was very impressed with e300 amd apu's -- several hrs of watching hd youtube {mplayer+youtub-dl} @45 degrees)
As a comparison I am stuck with the constant memory leaking Xorg on nvidia chip I have on one of my machines.
as I did the switch recently too. My most troubles was to understand "linux update", the little shield in the bottom right, and "programs" (synaptic). the frontier between the two is blurry. Apart that I seldom lost time with mint, the occasional "where's that setting? how do I do that'?"
As it's new and fresh, you will want to play with it and install strange stuff. But beware, it's not because it's linux it's unbreakable, personally I got some funny version of "Kinnamon" after trying to install the kde file manager.
For me the best update from nadia is the ability to thin the panel bar. Nothing can beat even more empty space on your desktop.
Protip: When you next install, make a 20GB (or thereabouts, bigger if you want - make it ext4 and you can easily resize it anyway) partition for / and another much bigger one to mount as /home
Then when you reinstall the system to the small partition - don't format the /home partition, just tell the installer to mount it as /home - and when you boot up your fresh install all your files and settings (if not the actual apps which go with them, but that's easy to fix) will all still be there. It's slightly odd, and cool, installing a fresh copy of Firefox and booting it up to find all your bookmarks already there, even the tabs you had open before you reinstalled.
You can even have multiple systems installed sharing a single /home partition - I currently have a day-to-day-use Ubuntu, a messing-about Debian and a just-trying-it-out Fedora partition sharing the same /home partition on one disk. It's all fine.
Obviously keep backups of your stuff, but that goes without saying regardless of whether you're installing a new OS or now. Did I mention I make external hard disks which are perfect for the job of backups? http://etsy.com/shop/BeautifulComputers
> It's slightly odd, and cool, installing a fresh copy of Firefox and booting it up to find all your bookmarks already there, even the tabs you had open before you reinstalled.
? I'd find it very odd, and very uncool, if my configuration *wasn't* there after an upgrade. On every decent OS I've ever used.
Those of us used to using network fileservers just take this for granted, I suppose. I have one /home shared between Solaris (SPARC & x86), Debian, Redhat and SlugOS, and that's just my home network.
> I'd find it very odd, and very uncool, if my configuration *wasn't* there after an upgrade. On every decent OS I've ever used.
Well played sir. Of course, with a proper modern operating system it's not that odd or surprising. I've been doing this sort of thing for years myself too. I was, however, assuming the OP was a recovering Windows user, in which case this kind of thing can come as a bit of a shock.
Use Firefox Sync, and all your bookmarks and passwords can be there even on a brand new installation.
I go one step further. I keep my data files on yetanother partition, and that includes Thunderbird and Firefox profiles. By linking (ln -s) those directories to the ones that FF and ThB expect to find in my $HOME, I can have my browser and mail in any installation, even a temporary one.
There is just too much distribution/version-specific stuff in $HOME these days. I've moved out, and left it to the config files,
Yes, of course. I use Chrome and I do use sync as well. Again, I picked Firefox as an example of a piece of software a recovering Windows user might recognise. If I'd said OH HEY MY KDENLIVE CONFIGS ARE ALL THERE it might have added confusion.
I softlink all my things like .fonts .vimrc, .bashrc and custom .desktop files in from a Dropbox'd folder, which also contains a script to make all the links and then install all my preferred apps, run a few gsettings commands and suchlike. So on a new install I install Dropbox, let it sync, run a script and that's install/setup done. Next stage is really a Puppet server, but I think that might be approaching overkill-land..
> make it ext4 and you can easily resize it anyway
ext3 is just as easy to resize...
I'm coming to the position that ext4 should be avoided on laptops if at all possible. Laptops have a tendency to shut down uncleanly - particularly if they're as crap as mine are. ext3 can take a long time to clean up afterwards, but I've had quite a few situations on ext4 where fsck cannot sort the disk out. I've been dropped to a command prompt on many occasions, and I've lost quite a bit of data. Neither of these is a good situation, and for the novice user, an enforced CLI is a show-stopper.
ext4 is much quicker than ext3, but if there's a chance of losing power, I really wouldn't recommend it.
Vic.
It's slightly odd, and cool, installing a fresh copy of Firefox and booting it up to find all your bookmarks already there, even the tabs you had open before you reinstalled.
There is nothing to stop you creating a tarball of your ~/.mozilla directory and restoring it on another system.
I regularly do this when I create a new VM. SImply restore your tarball to a freshly created account before running Firefox and hey presto, all your bookmarks and setting are there.
Agree. Plus, it's an LTS, and runs lovely on my 12-year-old Compaq Deskpro, which can only have 512 smegs of RAM.
Agreed. I have Maya on a couple of oldish HP systems. A requirement of LM 14 Nadia is PAE required for 32-bit ISOs and I have yet to check whether my HPs can do that.
@Eadon wrote "no one wants to use the god awful Gnome 3, Mint forced gnome 3 guys to introduce .... a "classic mode, i.e. something like Gnome 2, which is what Linux Mint Mate forked."
What utter tripe, wrong on every count!
Firstly you do not appear to know what gnome 3 is as what you actually mean is the desktop UI gnome shell. In linux the desktop is interchangeable and has little to do with the underlying system. All (?) current gnome based linuxes run gnome 3 for the simple reason that gnome 2 is obsolete, what they don't all run is gnome shell on the desktop. Even the MATE desktop runs on top of gnome 3.
Secondly linuxmint had absolutely nothing to do with gnome fallback or classic mode. This was introduced by the Gnome devs on the transition to gnome 3 to cater for machines that didn't have the graphics hardware to run gnome shell, and will be phased out in later releases.
Lastly linuxmint did not fork anything to create MATE as it was developed independently by Perbeos on the Arch linux forums and only adopted by linuxmint.
"It’s based on Ubuntu and has seen some interest during the last year..."
Plus 1 for understatement.
From what I see on distrowatch Mint has kicked Ubuntu right off the top of the chart. 4379 page hits versus 1895 over the last 30 days.
As other have said, that's the joy of Linux, if you don't like one distro, there's always plenty more to try.
It would seem that Shuttleworth's attempts to branch out into new areas is failing to get users to go in the direction he wants and people are voting with their feet.
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Distrowatch is not a very good metric.A better one is visitor by o/s on any given site. For example:-
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm
Has
Linux Ubuntu 1,189M requests (0.69%) of all
Linux Mint 11 M requests (0.01%)
Windows 121,800 M requests (70.39%) - for comparison sake :-)
As Windows progresses by adding new features and a more intuitive and productive UI, Team Linux is racing to re-create Windows 95.
Never mind not being able to innovate, even the work Team Linux is copying is almost 20 years old.
And how's that 1% market share doing you? All that "choice" (what everyone else calls "fragmentation", "incompatibility" and "trouble") must be a real benefit is such a small puddle.
Hmm I think you'll find Linux desktop share is between 2 and 5%, although some think it may be as high at 10% worldwide. Supercomputers is over 90%, and mobile devices, well, Android seems quite popular. When you factor those numbers in to the total number of PC's around, it's still what's known in the trade as a 'really big number' - or puddle as you seem to like it phrased.
Since your numbers are out of date, perhaps you attitude is as well - have you taken a look at Unity or Gnome Shell recently?
"Since your numbers are out of date, perhaps you attitude is as well - have you taken a look at Unity or Gnome Shell recently?"
He has but it was different from Windows and therefore he didn't know how to do everything within 5 minutes. This challenged his self-image of being 'good with computers' and as a result he has to come and troll every Linux related topic in order to make himself feel better.
It's pretty sad really.
I have looked at unity and gnome shell recently. (Also Windows 8 and Server 2012).
Desktop effects messing up 3d performance I dunno why that would ever be desirable in any way shape or form. Adding latency to audio pointless and layer upon layer of abstraction (Although jackd is good pulseaudio is awful). udev they merged into systemd and proceeded to break totally.
The BSD's are still ok (Manage to work properly despite the Linux developers breaking everything all the time).
Windows is getting better Linux is getting worse fact.
I wouldn't say Metro is a more productive UI (In fact I think it is next to useless because you cannot pin something to a monitor and use the other monitor independent including start). But it doesn't break performance elsewhere which is the most important thing. (And stuff like powershell 3.0 is great).
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