Linux Mint 12 Release Candidate - I'm Not Sure This Will Be My Next OS.... – 559 days old

[ZemaTalon]

I'm a little less than impressed with Mint 12 so far. I'll try to reserve total judgement until the final version is released, but usually an RC is pretty close to what we can expect.

The live CD boots straight to the desktop now, the same as the recent Ubuntu releases. The first thing I noticed - the lack of any menus. I played around with it, you really can't do much of anything. Maybe things will get better after it's actually installed....



Installation seemed pretty routine:





until I tried to partition the hard drive. For some reason, it kept refusing to resize the root partition to allow free space for a swap partition.



But finally after struggling with it for a while, I found it would allow resizing the partition if I increased the amount of resulting free space from the 4GB I was originally attempting to over 5GB. I then was able to create a swap partition using the resulting free space:





Here's the logon screen after the first boot. It looks a lot like Ubuntu's:



Here are the logon options. It defaults to Gnome on the first boot:



Here's the desktop with 'Gnome'. As with the live CD, there's no menus, not really much you can do that's obvious:



Opening the home folder gives you this. You can't move the window around at all,
or resize it. It's fixed just like it is, because it's not a window.



Now here's how it looks with Mate. There's a bottom panel now, and a menu. But not a very impressive menu, compared to what we normally get from Mint:



But at least it can be customized a bit, even if with a few issues:



Panel transparency works, but it's either all the way on, or all the way off, you can't adjust it:



This is all about Mate:



Mate is supposed to be very configurable. This is apparently the tool to use for that purpose - the Configuration Editor:



It may require spending some time playing with the options

Finally I tried Gnome Classic. This gives you a desktop with a top panel and menu, but once again, just a basic standard Gnome menu, and the panel cannot be customised. You also cannot customise much of anything else, other than the wallpaper. You can launch the Configuration Editor, but in the brief time I spent with it I couldn't find anyway to mod very much of Gnome itself.



LMDE is looking more and more like a better option all the time. I don't understand the new obsession in the GUI world with restriction. At least Mate does make it more tolerable, and it'll probably get better over time. But the sad thing is that we even need an overlay like Mate.

[Michael_Horatio]

thanks for the early review Zema, I don't see anything yet that makes me want to leave mint 11. Post back later in the month when the final comes out if you have time...mh

[floppybootstomp]

Yes, thanks for that Zema. I've been trying to d/l this for DVD 64 Bit but the one I got hold of says it's based on Debian and the md5 for Mint 12 DVD 64 Bit doesn't match, not sure what's going on there, will have to have another look. The iso I got was 1.1Gb btw.

Also just noticed a couple of quirks in Mint 11, which is all up to date. Sometimes I can't close a window by clicking the little cross top right and have to right click it's display in the task bar and select 'close' to close it. And the other thing is I can't export my bookmarks from the Opera browser using the Opera settings menu. I've had no trouble doing that in the past but this one is not playing ball. I think the file I need is in the usr folder it's called 'bookmarks.adr' I shall have to have a look in there.

Once I get hold of the version I want I will install it to a hard disk all to itself as I use a hard disk caddy to swap things around. But must confess that what you've shown here does not seem encouraging Mr Zema.

[Bad Haircut]

You wanna see the pannin' Fedora 16 gets at Distrowatch today. Gnome 3 lack of easy useability on laptop and desktop being principal bitch.

[floppybootstomp]

Have now installed Mint 12 DVD version 64 Bit. Well, it's different. Applied updates and installed Nvidia drivers but haven't messed around with it yet.

Took me a while to find the Shut Down, but there it was, on a drop down menu from my name, which is positioned top right of the screen. Will explore further later.

[LoneWolf_53]

I've spent a day playing with Mint 12 64Bit and not sure what to make of it yet Zema.

I'd like a bit more ability to play with the top and bottom bar.

Unless I've missed something I haven't found a way to put an icon like FireFox onto the bottom bar for quick launch.

When it comes to playing with themes and compiz it seems that the last couple of distro's have been fraught with issues that don't appear to be solved yet.

I did notice that when you go into proprietary hardware and activate the Nvidia Drivers they actually show as being in use now so that's a step forward.

I can't quite figure out why when you launch a program the thing shows up in both the top and bottom bar? What's that about? Isn't one icon enough?

[ZemaTalon]

I've spent a day playing with Mint 12 64Bit and not sure what to make of it yet Zema.

I'd like a bit more ability to play with the top and bottom bar.

Unless I've missed something I haven't found a way to put an icon like FireFox onto the bottom bar for quick launch.

When it comes to playing with themes and compiz it seems that the last couple of distro's have been fraught with issues that don't appear to be solved yet.

I did notice that when you go into proprietary hardware and activate the Nvidia Drivers they actually show as being in use now so that's a step forward.

I can't quite figure out why when you launch a program the thing shows up in both the top and bottom bar? What's that about? Isn't one icon enough?

LoneWolf the bottom panel shows all running applications while the top panel shows which one currently has focus. Try opening two apps and then switch focus and watch how things change in the top panel.

Well I applied updates, and some stuff got fixed. I hadn't applied them at first since the RC had just been uploaded to the mirrors at the time I grabbed it. But since then there's a boat-load of updates. Gnome3 is now at least usable, with panels and menus, and applications open into their own discrete windows. Out of the box (the redone box), it doesn't look that bad now, though it's still not very configurable. But the panels, which weren't there before, already have transparency, and playing around with the different wallpapers, I noticed that the panels look good no matter which wallpaper I set, and menu text remains easy to read. Now if only they'd make it more mod-friendly

[LoneWolf_53]

Thanks Zema, I hadn't run multiple apps so it sort of looked like the top and bottom were doing the same thing.

I'm getting a little more comfortable using it and must say it's not too bad.

Cube won't work, but I didn't really expect it would as Mint 11 has issues with compiz too.

I agree with you that a little more user tweakability would be nice. I want my FireFox icon back on the bottom bar.

How did you get those icons in the right bottom bar?

[LoneWolf_53]

Zema I found a shell theme that I think makes Mint 12 look pretty decent, (I certainly like it better) in case you're interested.

http://satya164.deviantart.com/art/G...hine-266329752

To install just extract it and put the folder in /usr/share/themes then you'll see it come up as one of the options when you go Menu>advanced settings>theme

[ZemaTalon]

Kool, I'll check it out. The icons on the bottom right? I used VirtualBox to install it on a virtual machine, and those are just the VM status indicators.

[LoneWolf_53]

The official "Lisa" release is out now................

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1889

[Grogan]

I tried this in VirtualBox last night... blech. The UI is certainly better than Unity, but still gives me a bad rash. (To be fair, I'm not a Gnome fan to start with though)

This is nothing against Mint as a distro, I could fix that by installing a different desktop/window manager of my choice if I could be arsed.

[ZemaTalon]

The official "Lisa" release is out now................

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1889

Yeah, I seen that over the weekend. I applied all the current updates to the RC so it should be equivalent to the final, though when I have some time I'm going to redownload it to be sure. But it seemed a bit more polished, more so then with the last updates. The three start up choices are sure confusing, Gnome, Gnome Classic, and Mate. 'Gnome Classic' makes you expect Gnome 2, but it ain't that at all.

[LoneWolf_53]

I'm just using the Gnome one combined with the Dark Shine theme and a couple of shell extensions that provide what I'm accustomed to seeing like for example CPU temp at a glance.

I think as more shell extensions become available, and some existing ones get fine tuned, I won't mind this distro so much.

Whether we like it or not Gnome 3 is the direction most have gone in, and Mint is making every attempt to make the inevitable transition as painless as possible.

I find this easier to take than Unity which really annoys me.

It has forced me to get more competent at using keyboard shortcuts for doing things like launching FireFox and Thunderbird since there's no quick launch icon. I guess that's not entirely a bad thing.

Zema I did read a fair ways through the blog and for what it's worth, for users like you and me who have kept the RC up to date, there apparently is no need to install the final version.

[Michael_Horatio]

I tried it as well in Vbox and didn't like it at all. And I really hate Unity..
I've been playing with Xubuntu 11.10 64bit XFCE and really liking that as something to move on with. I'll give it a space on my main machine when I get some time. I think I can make it into something I'll get along with. Gnome 3 will be my ticket out of Mint I think...

[ZemaTalon]

There'll probably end up being an even bigger divide in the future when it comes to Linux desktop users as a result of this trend. Yeah KDE and XFCE are very good options. I used to think of KDE as being too bloated and unstable, and XFCE, at least as it came out of the box, too spartan. But the Mint versions weren't bad, and I've since discovered how very customizable XFCE is. Mint hasn't released a non-Gnome version since Mint 10, but we could just manually install whatever desktop environment into any version of Mint, giving us a tweakable desktop with all the codecs and stuff. It's too bad future Windows users won't have these options, they'll be stuck with nothing but the Windows 8 tiles But I agree, there'll be ever better 3rd party tweaks for these new limiting GUI's (Gnome 3, Unity, Win8 etc). That'll work & be plenty for a lot of folks, but not for a lot of others of us.

[ZemaTalon]

and....

Mint 12 - KDE:

Mint12_KDE.jpg

Mint 12 - XFCE:

Mint12_XFCE.jpg

[Bad Haircut]

You don't get any more customisable than KDE 4.7+. It's actually mind blowing starting from scratch what you can do with it. You can have it as simple or complex as you like. You could even argue it's too customisable and often your own imagination and lack of knowledge in how it works is the real limiting factor (can be a lesson in frustration at times). I know this having spent three days with it and am still only just scratching the surface.

What it does do brilliantly, if you don't like default, is force you to think about how you really work and work flow. And enable you to build an individual desktop from scratch specifically for given needs. Times that by as many desktops as you need and you get the idea.

[Grogan]

Yes, that's right, you can have whatever you want in Linux Mint 12

mint12blackbox.jpg

Fuck em

[Bad Haircut]

I used to crave for that in Windows I even ran Blackbox / Litestep for ages.

[Dark Angel]

Yes, that's right, you can have whatever you want in Linux Mint 12

mint12blackbox.jpg

Fuck em

Well ... it'd be fast at least!

[Grogan]

Bad Haircut, did you spend much time with KDE 3.x (e.g. 3.5.xx)? That really had a lot of knobs to tweak. I haven't tried current KDE 4 releases (I just use some KDE apps and require a KDE of some sort for them) but KDE 3 was way more customizable.

http://www.bitbenderforums.com/~grog...ungfu_blue.png

I'm going to have to do a new build of KDE soon so I can see it for myself. When I do that, I tend to use it for a few days to check it out (and justify the work to myself lol). I always go back to my XFCE set up, because that's suited my work flow for almost 10 years. (I still configure it similarly to the way it was when I first started using it. At least in terms of layout, anyway)

Shit... I just realized I still have a screenshot of that, already present

http://www.bitbenderforums.com/~grog...shots/xfce.jpg

It was GTK+ 1.x based back then, and still looked a lot like CDE (Note that the green is just me fucking around. I wanted that to be ugly at the time. It would have been the usual cream coloured beige by default like most things)

and here's a shot of KDE 1.1.2 from around 2000

http://www.bitbenderforums.com/~grog...ndrake7kde.png

[ZemaTalon]

Turns out, there is a version for Windows, replaces explorer: BB4Win

[Bad Haircut]

Good to know it's still about. Let's hope it's a little more stable than earlier incarnations.

Gro, yes, KDE 3.5 was the finished article in a lot of ways. Latest 4 versions are obviously widget and panel orientated but the choice is getting a lot wider and more useful, less ugly, less cartoon-y, but you've still got the infinite custom settings for windows, etc. And if you really knew what you were doing you could create a visual masterpiece just using KDE colour palettes, sizings etc. Then you've got, icon sets, themes. What I've found so far is it's a frustrating mind fuck and is going to take me at least a month of living with KDE full time to get fluent in it. I've been a hair away from sacking it totally, and only walking away from the screen and thinking about what I actually wanted from scratch that made me persevere. I'll give you 24 hours before you say fuck it, what I've got now works just fine.

[Michael_Horatio]

I've been playing for a few hours with xubuntu 11.10 xfce since installing it this afternoon. I don't know if I will keep it though. It's not bad, very quick to boot and snappy, but it's so long since I tried xfce, I have forgotten how to do things.
It is more customize-able than it used to be, but still nothing like gnome. But the more I play with it, the more I think I can live with it.

All I had done when I took the screenshot was the usual updates, video drivers, and installed half a dozen apps that I needed. Changed the wallpaper as the default on things are really about the worst I've seen...
I may dump it and try kubuntu, but will play for a week or so and see what to do.

http://www.mikeserv.org/gallery/Hora...d_002.png.html

[Bad Haircut]

Kubuntu 11.10 is about the best version I've tried out (obviously YMMV as with any distro). But I was actually pretty impressed with it, for once I didn't sit there slagging Canonical off for treating KDE as the deformed bastard child in the corner (no show stopping bugs and annioyances etc). If you want a pretty straight KDE nicely integrated on top of Ubuntu it's a good release to try out. If you don't want / need the admin controls luxury openSUSE 12.1 offers, Kubuntu is the better out of the box (or one click) polished experience, or so I've found, anyway. Both have a lot to offer though.

[Michael_Horatio]

Kubuntu 11.10 is about the best version I've tried out (obviously YMMV as with any distro). But I was actually pretty impressed with it, for once I didn't sit there slagging Canonical off for treating KDE as the deformed bastard child in the corner (no show stopping bugs and annioyances etc). If you want a pretty straight KDE nicely integrated on top of Ubuntu it's a good release to try out. If you don't want / need the admin controls luxury openSUSE 12.1 offers, Kubuntu is the better out of the box (or one click) polished experience, or so I've found, anyway. Both have a lot to offer though.

Funny you should mention Kubuntu. After messing with Xubuntu for a while, I thought I better have another look at KDE (ver. 4.7.2 here) before I put anymore time in on it. I liked it right out of the box, very slick, and very clean. There are shit loads of tweaks available to play with. I'm going to stick with it for a while.
this shot is the default theme with nothing done but a couple of widgets and a different background added. Other than that, I haven't had any time to do anything more yet. I like the way it looks.

http://www.mikeserv.org/gallery/Hora...nshot.png.html

BH what do you use for a music player....Amarok seems to be bloated monster now...Is XMMS still around, or something better?

[Bad Haircut]

LOL. If you've got the time you can make KDE look stunning, but bugger me, there's some experimenting to be done to get the right balance. And funny you mention music players. While I've been on this KDE kick I've gone through them all and the one that plays everything, including internet radio without any fuss or pissing about (just played first time), is Kaffeine. So between Kaffeine and SMPlayer I'm quite impressed. Originally I wanted KRadio for internet radio but there's a bug in it and it won't run, least not on openSUSE anyway. The spin off of XMMS is Audacious which was quite nice, but any player that plays radio without me having to think or RTFM gets the nod.

[MSUredux]

Screw it all, I'm just going to find something old that runs on the 0.1 Kernel

[Bad Haircut]

Quick return snapshot of KDE, that left side bar is a panel set to auto hide, with a quick launch app and the system monitor widget at the bottom. Quite like Rekonq as a backup webkit browser too.

[Grogan]

xmms 1.2.11 still compiles (even on x86_64) with patches. That's what I STILL use for audio (despite such things as Audacious that try to mimic xmms but are lacking in features and functionality that I like. Audacious also seems to choke on more audio files than xmms)

Check the repo, it might be available as a Debian package if not *buntu specific. It requires GTK+ 1.x though, so that would obviously be available as a dependency if so.

Not that it matters a great deal nowadays, but xmms also has the lowest CPU usage.

I absolutely cannot stand those big bloated playlist style players. I hate most of them almost as much as iTunes. I do like AmaroK as far as those go, but I won't use it unless I happen to be luxuriating in the bloat of KDE anyway. (I'm probably using KDE for entertainment purposes itself, checking out a new build or whatever)

I use mplayer (with the default GUI... gmplayer with that blue skin) for everything else. Built my way though, with all the "non free" codecs enabled.

[Michael_Horatio]

I absolutely cannot stand those big bloated playlist style players. I hate most of them almost as much as iTunes.

That's (Itunes) is what they remind me of..

yes. we love those "non free" codecs

XMMS is available at the Debian repos.

I just lost all sound when I went back into this tonight. I think it probably happened after the last big upgrade to 11.10 because I know the sound worked fine before that.
I was able to fix it by backing up, then removing my .pulse directory and rebooting. Not sure really what was wrong with it.

BH,
thanks for those suggestions. I've got Kaffeine and will give that a try. I don't listen to Internet radio so that's not an issue for me.

[Dark Angel]

Currently I'm having good results with Dragon Player in Slackware. There's a bunch of others but that's the only one that reliably works with whatever I throw at it (DVD, MP3, ogg, CD ... whatever).

[Grogan]

I hate all the complexity associated with audio these days. ALSA is bad enough, but that pulseaudio on top of that takes the cake.

I miss the good old days where all you needed was a kernel driver (OSS)... e.g. "modprobe es1371" and that was all there was to it. Who cares if audio doesn't multiplex... I can only listen to one thing at a time anyway. (I never even liked to run sound servers like ARTS and ESD. If one program was using the audio, too fucking bad... nothing else could take it)

[Bad Haircut]

BH,
thanks for those suggestions. I've got Kaffeine and will give that a try. I don't listen to Internet radio so that's not an issue for me.

In Kubuntu you'll need to go get xine codec package from muon when you install Kaffeine , it is marked with an indicator. Yast just does it automatically when you update - but then Yast can simultaneously balance an elephant on it's head while juggling twenty one aggressive dwarfs and smoke a Cuban cigar.

[Michael_Horatio]

I hate all the complexity associated with audio these days. ALSA is bad enough, but that pulseaudio on top of that takes the cake.

I miss the good old days where all you needed was a kernel driver (OSS)... e.g. "modprobe es1371" and that was all there was to it. Who cares if audio doesn't multiplex... I can only listen to one thing at a time anyway. (I never even liked to run sound servers like ARTS and ESD. If one program was using the audio, too fucking bad... nothing else could take it)

I believe there is something buggy here. When I rebooted it this morning all sound was gone again. and it is acting up when you try to reboot or halt from the GUI or from the terminal. It just dims the screen and then sits there forever. I'll take another look tonight - have to go to work.

DA, thanks. I did try Dragon Player (it came in the box) and it works nice with movies didn't get a chance to try it with anything else.

BH. ha ha, I figured something was missing when it didn't make any noise..thanks for that.

[Michael_Horatio]

I believe there is something buggy here. When I rebooted it this morning all sound was gone again. and it is acting up when you try to reboot or halt from the GUI or from the terminal. It just dims the screen and then sits there forever.

Well I booted it up again tonight and everything is just fine, no sound problems, no problems at all. Haven't done any updates (there were none) so I don't know. Maybe it just knew how near it was to having its fat, bloated ass kicked of the property.. Its bought itself a few more days.

Got Kaffeine working and ran everything I could at it, even old .vob files extracted from little camera DVDs that I have had trouble getting some players to work with, every kind of video file, audio file and DVD movies. Everything plays properly. I will get around to trying some of the others too.

[Bad Haircut]

Couple of days in and I've noticed a load of the usual Kubuntu bugs, fortunately, fixable by re installation of KDM, PolicyKit, etc, but I sent bug reports back because it's got some nice strengths. Michael, if you use Firefox and it looks shit-awful (like it does in most linux distros) check Muon for 'firefox-kde-support' package and install it, then go to Mozilla add ons and get the Oxygen KDE 3.6 theme. Transforms it.

[Grogan]

What? You should never have to "reinstall" packages. That's fragile rubbish. It should not be a matter of course like "the usual kubuntu shit... I had to reinstall"

The day a distro broke itself for me was always the last day. Fuck man... I have run "from scratch" systems for years with no package management at all. Adding/removing/upgrading things by HAND and I've never broken it. (Other than, say, anticipated breakage like a glibc "make install" going bad and needing to be finished manually from off system).

So... it's not the shit itself that is fragile, it's their implementation of it.

[Bad Haircut]

I rushed through the install and partitioned the free space with Kubuntu's partitioner and in the process let it download all updates on the fly during the installation, it gave a choice of to or not, I remember thinking at the time whether or not I'd pay for it. I'll give it a week and see how it behaves if it doesn't iron out, it can go the way of every other Kubuntu I've ever installed.