Linux Mint is the new "normal"

[ayu]

Ubuntu has become even shittier than I thought, and thus I would like to promote something alternative for people to use.

Linux Mint, it's based on Ubuntu, but only has the good parts, and works a lot better

Code: Select all

http://linuxmint.com/

[lilrofl]

<== long time lover of mint, long time not lover of ubuntu

[bad_brain]

I always said "Ubuntu sucks"....but noooo....people don't listen to me....
the last time I used Ubuntu it was on your former netbook, and after the upgrade to the new version: no networking anymore...and the Ubuntu forum was crowded with people having the same problem. and now even more and more Ubuntu servers are online I heard....

I stick to my beloved Debian, but I heard only good things about Mint...

[ayu]

I stick to my beloved Debian, but I heard only good things about Mint...

Yup, same here

But when I convert friends to Linux, I will give them Mint from now on

[JohnB]

Even the mint developers have split from Ubuntu now. It's based directly off debian.

[lonewolf]

I'm going to have to try mint. I have heard about it but have not tried it yet.

[bergmann]

hey i running mint and it is a pretty nice os ,

[ayu]

hey i running mint and it is a pretty nice os ,

It is, isn't it?

[sherlock]

I'm using mint as well now. It is very user friendly , and drivers are so easy to install. Most are installed automatically.anyways...

I also switched from ubuntu.

[Lundis]

I installed Mint last week because I had broken all 3 of my old linux distros on my harddrive (yeah, it happens.. )

As expected it wasn't any godlike solution to all problems, although many ppl make it sound like that. The first "WTF" came when I was going to format my partitions. The GParted window wasn't resizable. I had over 10 partitions in total and I could view 3 at a time. It felt like they had tried to upgrade the GUI and left it halfway through without testing it.

After the install I started resizing my NTFS partition. After 4 hours the terminal I ran it from somehow crashed and I lost a bunch of files. I got most of it back with windows disc check, but a very large part of the files are corrupted. Now I mostly had anime on that drive, I didn't lose a single ebook

Later I resized it in windows. It took about 1½ minutes.

I also encountered a few annoying bugs, related to mouse-input (it stops interpreting mouse clicks - kinda annoying) and the sound daemon suddenly getting quiet without reporting any errors or restarting automatically. But then, what can one expect from pulseaudio? That shit's straight from hell, although it's getting closer to the ground level now, being able to play several sounds at the same time.

It won't play h264 videos by default and it doesn't seem to be "easily fixable" (clicking an OK button), or moderately easy (starting synaptic and install some plugins). Not even VLC plays them.

Apparently AMD cards don't work well with the gnome 3 shell, because no one bloody reported it correctly to AMD for nearly 6 months. The issues (corrupt graphics, flickering, bad performance) are supposed to be fixed with the catalyst 12.1 update though. In this aspect Mint did a good job, it let me install the latest catalyst drivers, not just whatever happened to be available when they rolled dice for what to include in the repos. Actually it gave me an error and claimed that it failed, but they still got installed. I'm getting an nvidia card next time.

As the gnome 3 shell is unusable with my gfx card I installed my favorite window manager, awesome, but it wouldn't work with netbeans or eclipse (eclipse's unusability, lagginess and retardness has reached new heights too ). Now I'm using MATE, which is pretty much like gnome 2, without a few essential features: if you remove the shitty version of nautilus that it uses as file manager, "coja" or something like that, you can't set a new default file manager in any intuitive way. The same is true for editing the panel, but that problem was also very outstanding in the gnome 3 shell. The menu's search feature doesn't let you start the application you searched for by pressing enter, how the hell did this pass any testing? At least the standard alt+F2 to run apps work.

I don't understand why people complained so much about KDE 4. It was much more complete than this even in the early versions (I used it from 4.1 to 4.3)

To sum it up, it's as shitty as everything else, but it works well once you've figured out how to ignore all of its weaknesses.

[lilrofl]

Well Lundis, at the risk of enraging you this fine morning, I don't think any Linux distro is a "Godlike" solution; however, Gnome3, GParted and Pulseaudio are really not so much a matter of Mint, as they are problems in their own right IMO, because they exist across the board on multiple distros.

I am with you on KDE4 though, I've been using it since it's inception and it has never been as broken as Gnome3 is today.

[Lundis]

Yeah, that's why I had so few complaints. You gotta try harder than that to enrage me

The point is, they could have chosen to use more stable and well-tested versions or other well-working software instead. That is very well within the power of the distro builders

[computathug]

My Mom even runs Mint on her laptop now