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Linux Mint 13 (Maya) Has Arrived
New submitter OceanMan7 writes "Linux Mint 13 (Maya) has just been released. DVDs come in four flavors — MATE (with and without codecs) and Cinnamon (with and without codecs) — in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The codec-free versions comply with U.S. and Japanese IP regulations. MATE 1.2 is Linux Mint's community-powered extension of Gnome 2. Cinnamon 1.4 is built upon Gnome 3, but has a more traditional look and feel. As with Ubuntu 12.04, upon which Linux Mint draws, all editions come with Long-term support (LTS) until April, 2017. The release notes provide a list of changes.
but isn't that 8 flavors? (2+2)*2? Or does processor architecture not count as a flavor?
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Mint == Ubuntu minus Unity Garbage
Mint, to me, is still a buggier and less supported version of Unbuntu.
Not to say I'm that pleased with Ubuntu but every time I've tried Mint I've come away with two hard realizations
1. If you have problems, they are harder to fix and it's harder to get support for them. /lot/ of reinstalling when it comes time to move to a new release.
2. I have more showstopping bugs than Ubuntu.
3. You end up doing a
I'm not a moron and I've deployed mint on Good hardware that run both windows and other distros just fine. Mint just has a very vocal fanbase that I don't happen to agree with.
That said, Ubuntu's not very useful to me either. It's UI has taken a trip to lala land and isnt very useful anymore. I'd accuse them of copying microft's new UI efforts.. Except that Ubuntu's breaking of the UI predates both win phone 7 and windows 8. Go fig.
I suggest that everyone go check out Fedora. No, it's not very romantic or cutting edge. But it does work. Very well. It's also very well supported.
Check out the "spins" where you can download an iso customized to the UI of your choice. I'm a fan of xfce, which makes even gnome3 look bloated and slow.
You know that you can replace Unity with whatever you want right?
apt-get install mythtv
MythTV through a package manager really is not that daunting. Even building it from scratch is not that hard since you can use the package manager to sort out dependencies.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That's precisely why it's so popular.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I have used Linux for 13 years now. I don't want to build stuff myself like when I was running Gentoo. I don't want to "./configure && make". I have contributed to mythtv code myself and like to have nightly/binightly builds so I can contribute to the testing for the developers.
MythBuntu provides more than the mythtv/mythbackend/mythfrontend packages. It provides a decent configuration UI and other minor integrations/apps that I don't want to deal with. Some of it is useless to me, since I have been running the same basic MythTV configuration for 6/7 years now.
I just tested out 32-bit linux mint cinnamon in VirtualBox.
Most of the text is missing!
http://i.imgur.com/F0af2.jpg
I tried Mint as a distro for a few of my relatives. I never really 'got' Mint but other than some codecs that are installed by default I don't think the newbie experience would be much better or worse than Ubuntu or one of the Ubuntu flavors. I believe that if you try to play something in Ubuntu it will issue a message that you don't have installed and do you want to install it yes/no... Really it comes down to if you prefer Mint's custom Gnome 3 desktop environment (I don't) or would prefer Ubuntu's Unity (I don't), Xubuntu (I do) or Kubuntu desktop environments. In short they're basically all the same with the same Debian style package management so burn a few livecds and see which graphical environment you like. If you want an everything works distro go with any of either of em. If you want to learn about Linux.. install Arch.
If you call it GNULinux, Ubuntu and its derivatives aren't for you anyway.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Mint has now come full circle: It was originally rolled up when Ubuntu stopped distributing codecs, now it has a codec free version. In other words, it's a distro based on a distro based on a distro that no longer has a purpose. Contribute upstream.
It's ubuntu, which is basically polished debian, without the seriously buggy 'I'm suited for touch screens, honest guv' new Unity interface. I tried out 12.04 the other day - I used to use SuSE/KDE then gentoo then debian as my primary desktop for a number of years; gave up after the KDE4 migration disaster and went to windows, and fairly recently to OSX; I tried it on a clean drive on my hackintosh (I have a real mac in the office, a somewhat elderly mac mini, and my own copy of Lion) which is a fairly bog-standard core i3 gigabyte system.
I got as far as getting dual screen working with X.org tweaks via the closed nvidia driver (have a geforce 210 in that rig) though it wouldn't stick past a reboot, which takes me back, then fixed sound as per usual. Then I discovered that clicking on a side-launcher button doesn't raise an active window up to the top; it just spawns a new one. In fact, I couldn't find anyway to bring a window to the top of the stack without manually shifting everything else off the top of it and gave up, it just wasn't worth the effort. So based on my admittedly short trial, Ubuntu isn't ready for the novice user any more. It's as hard as hacking OSX to work on my PC, and while the UI is pretty, it's just not very, well, functional.
So Mint is basically Ubuntu where they don't hate the user, and have stuck with gnome but with a decent amount of polish. I used to really like ubuntu, and still use their server platform as the LTS approach is a bit more modern than good old debian (so I get updated supported packages like node.js and nginx and php-fpm) while still offering a known long timeframe for support. But the new unity UI makes windows 8 look good, and that's saying something. You basically have a choice of the stable aka old gnome 2 MATE version, or the new shiny but not necessarily rock-solid gnome 3 Cinnamon version.
give it a try, and see how it copes with your hardware...
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Hmmn
Under important info: Boot hangs on systems with b43 wireless cards.
Guess it won't be going on my laptop anytime soon..
Clive DaSilva Email: clive.dasilva@gmail.com Ubuntu 18.10 Kernel 4.18
There is no linux for a novice.
There is only linux for people who want to learn the nuts and bolts of linux at a slower rate than others.
I've spent the past few months giving several different distros a week or so each on my laptop (a standard Dell lattitude e6400, circa 2009. nothing exotic at all) to make an impression on me.
I'll admit I haven't played with Maya yet, but I spent a week with Lisa & cinnamon, which is easily as broken on install as any other linux distro I've ever used. Cinnamon was like a slightly prettyed up version of gnome 2, which makes me wonder why they even bothered to switch to gnome 3. Of course, it was just as broken as unity, if not moreso. the taskbar was "refreshingly" retro, circa windows 2000. in all the worst ways. i ditched the stock application manager applet and downloaded one that would stack open windows under a single taskbar icon, like a modern GUI... and it worked at least 2/3 of the time. Sorry, but a 2/3 success rate on -clicking on a taskbar icon- is a little much to swallow, so I ditched that and got the stock one back, except now if I opened more than 7 windows, they would scroll the "start" button (sorry, don't know the linux name for it) off the left side of the screen. what the hell? I couldn't make this up! Oh, did I mention that after I changed the default icon and name of the "start" button, it would never display the entire name again, putting "..." at the end instead? google told me that had been a bug since the -previous- version of Mint. That's crazy. Nobody thought to fix that? it's a simple pixel offset based on the size of the icon!
Tip of the iceberg here.
by the way, LM:Debian Edition was so broken as to not even be worth discussing.
by comparison, ubuntu 12.04 was, of course as I expected by this point, broken upon instalation, but after several hours of googling, some time in irc, and a lot of console commands later, I've got a mostly working install. some stuff is still screwed up (like the apps that -are- running but don't show up on the launcher bar), but I've learned to just deal with it for now. I've had it going for 3 weeks now and it's useable. putting it to sleep is a gamble, but this thing isn't mission critical so I just roll the dice every time.
I'm curious how long I can stick it out before I give up and go back to windows 7, which I'll freely admit does everything I need an OS to do, and has no major or even minor bugs that impact me on any sort of regular basis.
I'm no fanboy, of any OS, or any distro. I call it like I see it, and Linux (really I should blame it on the GUI, as the linux kernal itself is stable as a rock for the most part) is for people who like to work the nuts and bolts of their OS, because you pretty much have to. even the most "beginner-friendly" distros like Mint and ubuntu seem to require time spent at the terminal just to do stuff other operating systems consider basic functions, like say disabling a touchpad (no, touchpad-indicator applet does NOT work, as you should well know if you've actually used it).
Yea ok I used to like mint when ubuntu went "pants on head retarded", but I havent been lately
10 and anything before it works fine
11 constantly fucks up something on the desktop with a "your taskabar (or clock or whatever) has stopped working, would you like to delete it?" trap
12 ships with gnome 3 AND their clunky menu system, really how many start menus do I need ... MS apparently says zero so it could be worse
12 with gnome 2 suffers the random thing is going to break and you should delete it syndrome as 11
LXDE versions of them all plain suck, I view LXDE as a half finished pain in the ass version of XFCE that requires me to do dumb shit like open a file explorer to empty trash, or fart out a regular expression just to set the fucking clock format
so now that 13 is out, I say "not for me", too much trouble, xubuntu is doing great, thanks, and they just released a new LTS
Is it a good alternative to Ubuntu for a novice?
I would say yes.
I recently got a new computer and didn't want to spend the extra money for windows (the computer was a gift and the extra windows money would have made it hard to get a decent graphics card, a must for me.) I am a long time windows user and dabbled in Linux here and there throughout the years (as far back as early slackware) but no real experience and never for any reasonable length of time. I do have some experience from unix systems from way back though.
I installed Debian because I wanted a super stable system and it has a rep. for being just that. I however found that some things are a real pain in the ass because the Debian people are (damn near) zealots when it comes to open source (this is not a knock against them or that). After I spent a couple days trying to work them out and some I could not I looked up what other current distro's there are. I am not really a fan of Ubuntu so I was looking for something else. I noticed that Mint was "rated" pretty high from a usability standpoint and decided to try it.
Installing was easy (most Linux installs are easy now days though). Getting the device drivers all working most notably the proprietary Nvidia gfx drivers was actually painless. Getting Steam up and running was painless (mostly because of the great WineHQ pages on it) The software management tool is easy to use and I haven't had any problems with it. I use vim for programming so that was a non-issue anyhow.
Not having some of the more familiar and polished windows programs that I am used to using on a daily or weekly basis is a pain but I am working my way around that through time and experience with Linux. (I have resisted the urge to install a bunch of programs through wine beyond a few games I enjoy).
I have been using it for a few weeks now and so far my experience from a Linux newbie prospective has been very favorable in Mint.
thanks, Feltope
Wow...
I am not even sure where to start here except:
Linux Mint just works for me.
Ubuntu just works for me.
I have never had any problems with either, even running things like java applets, my web cam, music or... Yahoo Games when I want to play Cribbage with my sweety.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
you'd think so, but it's pretty hard to dismiss the problem as somehow being cause by me when:
A. I list the exact workflow, and at no time am I doing anything out of the ordinary
B. The bugs are confirmed in offical tracker logs.
That's the thing that gets me. I'm listing known and documented problems with the operating systems, and I'm getting downmodded like I'm making shit up.
Also, I'm curious to know which headaches you're running into with Windows 7, because I can't think of any offhand. XP? sure. Vista? Of course. 7? nothing comes to mind.
Sorry to read of all the difficulties you've been having. I've had my own small share of annoyances or breakage here and there; some combos of hardware seem to be idiotsycratic viz. a particular OS.
Yet I think it might be more fair to say that you're describing the modern Linux experience that _you_ have; it may not be valid to extend your experience to that of all users.
I suppose much boils down to what you need and how you want it. I've been lucky, the several desktops and laptops have been vanilla hardware; Ubuntu's been working well enough to be my host OS for going on five years.
I like and admire what the Mint folks offer; they've put a lot of work into providing choice. I've found no compelling reason to switch but I could just be getting old and more lazy.
There is no linux for a novice.
You have to work for Microsoft.
Hmmm...more like there is no Linux for morons. I've installed Linux on my mother's and an ex-girlfriend's computer and both love it. The ex-girlfriend even installed on someone else's computer when it was so infested with viruses as to be unusable. Just had to explain to her how to burn an ISO and she did the rest on her own. Because, you know, it just works. Unlike windows where you have to spend hours finding drivers and anti-virus and digging up all your CDs and keys so you can re-installing applications...
Both are very much novices. But neither is a moron.
Who is John Galt?
I think most people are aware that Linux Mint is just a customized version of Ubuntu. Nothing special in that regard. However, the reason Mint is so popular is because it has something very important that a lot of people desire - sensible defaults.
Sure, you can take a stock Ubuntu installation and replace Unity with MATE/Cinnamon, install additional codecs, move the window buttons to the left so that you don't have to readjust your muscle memory and so on, but Linux Mint has this performed for you out of the box. It also has other changes like an absence of purple in the GRUB, Plymouth and login/desktop screens, which might seem petty but the Mint color scheme whilst grey and somewhat boring, feels far more professional and less garish. Once again, chances you can make if you know how with Ubuntu, but Mint is already preset with them for you.
Mint feels like a distro where the developers aren't interested in futzing around with challenging traditional UI perceptions, and would instead rather provide a distro based on a (reasonably) solid foundation which anyone can use which still looks nice and doesn't force you to relearn how to perform efficiently in a foreign UI. The motivation for Canonical is to be on as many devices as possible - the motivation for the Mint team is to make a usable Linux distro for computers with as few hindrances as possible.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
you're not allowed to have a negative opinion of something unless you work for the competition?
you must work for red hat? see how silly that sounds?
I'm not sure what kind of OS you are trying to classify as an operating system for a moron, because I've had to support users who can't use any operating system, no matter how simple. they break everything they use. you wouldn't think they'd be able to screw up something like iOS, etc, but they do. you can't design an idiot-proof OS because the world will make a better idiot.
If all you want out of Linux is an OS that will launch firefox and thunderbird, maybe print or open a flash drive, then there are dozens (maybe hundreds) of distros that can do that without a problem. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about actual computer enthusiasts. People whom I assume you count yourself among, those who are spending several hours in front of their computer per day by choice, and not spending it all on facebook. People who are installing emulators, installing programs that aren't in the default repositories, customizing the interface to any degree beyond changing the wallpaper. adding a piece of hardware that doesn't have an apple logo on it. These things are very often broken in linux distros, and while you can often get them working, at least well enough to get by, it requires knowing the operating system very well already, or meticuliously following instructions that found on google and hoping that it is the correct fix for your problem, and not knowing why it worked if it did or didn't work if it didn't.
That's why there is no linux for novices. Eventually if you do anything other than web browsing, you're going to find yourself at a terminal prompt typing in sudo and hoping the line you're cutting and pasting after it won't hose your system.
Also your description of windows sounds suspiciously like XP, not 7.
For those wondering about Cinnamon vs Mate vs Unity vs KDE vs LXDE vs XFCE vs whatever, there is a new distro out called Hybryde. From the distrowatch announcement
Olivier Larrieu has announced the release of Hybryde Linux 1, a desktop Linux distribution with one unique feature - the ability to switch rapidly and fluidly between a number of desktop environments and window managers without logging out and without having to close open applications first. The list includes Enlightenment 17, GNOME Shell, GNOME 3 "Fallback" mode, KDE, LXDE, Openbox, Unity, Xfce and FVWM. The switching between desktops is achieved via a customisable Hy-menu which also allows launching applications and configuring the system. The project's website is in French and by default the distribution only supports the French language, but extra language packs can be installed from standard Ubuntu 12.04 repositories.
Okay, MATE and Cinnamon weren't among the listed options, so it might have been good had they forked off Mint, as opposed to Ubuntu, so that they could have included that as well. I'm guessing that they probably only offer liberated software, which is why complete GNOME 3 is not offered, since it requires 3D accelaration to work, for which liberated drivers are not available. Unless they're trying to get the FSF seal of approval, they might as well offer a full GNOME3, w/ an advisory that it's not a fully liberated DE.
Oh, and then there are all the other Ubuntu derivative Linuxes, such as Comice, dyne:bolic, ExTiX, gNewSense, LuninuX, Trisquel and Zorin.
Yup, this is how linux will get fixed. Deny there is an issue, call your users stupid and post anecdotal "evidence" that "i have no problem" thus there is no problem.
Its been like this for the past 10 years or so, and hasn't worked so far.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Also, I'm curious to know which headaches you're running into with Windows 7, because I can't think of any offhand. XP? sure. Vista? Of course. 7? nothing comes to mind.
OK, I have one, but for me, it's a doozy. Searching for contents of a file doesn't work the way I want by default. Mainly because if you're searching in a non-indexed directory, there's no option to search the contents of a file. Even if you're in an indexed directory, only files with known AND selected types are searched. And if you want to search PDFs, you have to install one of two 3rd party iFilters (1 of which costs $600 if you want to search PDFs on your Win Server). WTF? No PDF search in Win 7? Even Vista allowed you to search ANY file. Changing the settings doesn't make it work even as well as Vista. Some people have VMs running Vista just so they can do better searches. I use a 3rd party app to search for contents of a file in Win 7, which is beyond irritating.
And MS hasn't addressed or fixed the search UI since people started complaining about it in 2009:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproui/thread/ecbecc00-f3e7-429f-87cd-8900fc313add/
Other than that, I actually like Win 7.
passetspike!
Lubuntu is Ubuntu w/ LXDE. Xubuntu is Ubuntu w/ XFCE, while Kubuntu is Ubuntu w/ KDE. Ubuntu itself now offers Unity, or one could opt for GNOME 3.
Mint is different from all of the above, in that it offers you the non-GNOME3 choices - MATE (GNOME 2 on GTK2) and Cinnamon (a fork of MGSE written in GTK3). Neither of these are offered by Ubuntu, so what Mint offers is unique.
Note that Mint also has KDE, LXDE and XFCE versions as well. From what I understand, they are just Mint w/ these DE's thrown in, wheras the *ubuntus above are all separate distros fine tuned towards their DE. Kubuntu, for instance, uses the KDE specific apps that are there e.g. prefering Rekonq/Konqueror to Firefox, and so on.
Also, I'm curious to know which headaches you're running into with Windows 7, because I can't think of any offhand. XP? sure. Vista? Of course. 7? nothing comes to mind.
The window Z-layering is frequently idiotic. I don't care one way or another how anyone feels about "click to focus" vs. "focus follows mouse" but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that if the DM is raising a window to the to top, it should, maybe, give it focus, and if it's going to raise it behind other windows, it shouldn't.
Of course, the apparent decision making between which it chooses seems to border on the non-deterministic. And, for added lulz, the windows "stick". Alt-tabbing or clicking on another overlapped window will give it focus, but NOT raise it. The fix I've found is to have to minimize it and re-raise it.
Total PITA. I would have thought it was my PC, but it happens on both mine and my machine at work.
Release notes: Boot hangs on systems with b43 wireless cards WHAT??? This is a very common set of cheap broadcom wireless chips used in tens-if-not-hundreds of 2-5 year laptop models. What a particularly strange thing NOT to fix before you ship a release to the public. Of every laptop I "refurbish" and install Linux Mint on, 1 out of 3 has the B43 chipset. I can't believe it. I have to see this with my own eyes. ... Ship a release that doesn't support the ess1869 of wireless chipsets
I recon it's the same the other way around though.
It is. I used Windows from 1995 to 2008, Win95 and WinXP. Then I switched to Ubuntu. When I have to use Win7 on somebody else's PC I realize I'm not as effective as I was with WinXP because many things have changed and I'm not familiar with them. When I have to use a Mac (rarely) sometimes I just don't know how to do some basic things and I have to ask or wander at random among windows and menus. The only easy interface is the one you know well. If you're a novice and don't know anything, every OS is difficult.
Actually he posted bug-reports.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
If you're ready to calm down and stop raging for a moment, I can give you your answer:
Right click desktop -> Personalize -> Window Color (bottom of window) -> Advanced appearance settings...
So there you go - Windows 7 still has the feature to change individual font sizes. People like to bash Windows before actually bothering to investigate if there's a solution. Having said that I will give you the benefit of the doubt here - there's absolutely no reason why the method for changing system fonts should be accessed through a button marked "Window Color". Very bad design there.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
Uh, I'm a (novice) Linux user, but to be fair, I've never experienced any of those problems. Resource hogging, slow system, more vulnerable to viruses and other malware, expensive and most of the time not good enough software, etc, but those seem to be (except the last one) hardware or screwed up install (or made up) problems. Particulary the last one seems pretty goddamn farfetched.
Oblivion Awaits
If you've spent enough time to have an opinion on a linux-centric geek debate, you're probably using Arch, Gentoo, Slackware, or Debian. Possibly Fedora if you've got to admin Red Hat boxes for work. At the very least you'll already be using Mint.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.