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Linux Mint 14 Is Out
New submitter medge_42 sends words that Linux Mint 14 has been released. Check out their list of features and release notes to see what's new. One version uses MATE 1.4, which includes some long-needed bug fixes as well as functional bluetooth and mate-keyring, its own character map, fast alt-tabbing, and improvements to Caja. The other version uses Cinnamon 1.6, which contains a huge number of fixes and new features including its own file browser, persistent workspaces and a window quicklist to go with them, a notifications applet, an improved sound applet, and alt-tab graphical improvements. MDM now supports legacy GDM 2 themes and userlists, and has improved user switching. Gedit 2.30 has replaced Gedit 3, and MintStick replaces USB-ImageWriter.
It has too many things that help content creation. The gui supports the mouse, gives you the ability to change it, and worse lets you have more than one Windows open at a time!
Screw that. Where is the crappy cell phone interface? I want to be hip and have my productivity limited so I can save 10 whole pixels on my 27 inch dual screens and tweet to my friends, which is why I purchased my Icore7 extreme edition! Now I can read a document and cut and paste things into another app at the same time which is sooo 2000s.
This is too technical to get my brain around Mate and this whole concept of multitasking that I need my shiny things back. Going back to WIndows 8.
http://saveie6.com/
Ramblings ...
I love my KDE 4.9x/Kubuntu 12.10 install except for the flakiness that the poxy virtuoso/nepomuk/akonadi brings to it. Thats what I find attractive about the gnome derivatives - they haven't bet the farm on integrating their environments with the buggy unstable CPU hogging piece of crap that is nepomuk/virtuoso.
But I find gnome unattractive compared to KDE and I dislike Unity & Gnome Shell. But I do like where Cinnamon is going and this latest rev looks quite good.
If only I could find a decent gnome based Pim - I love Kontact, when its not being ass reamed by nepomuk/virtuoso. Thunderbird is getting creaky, Evolution is OK but not as slick as Kontact.
Why would the newer versions be less capable?
New versions are all fine except for the problem of BLOAT
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Not directly, since the upgrade tool packaged is for Ubuntu, and well create a horrible mix of Ubuntu Quantal and Mint 13 if used (if it even worked at all). There are alternate instructions provided at http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2
They tend to require more resources. Also, newer versions of drivers aren't as throughly tested on old hardware and can act very funny. Believe it or not, getting any modern Linux distro to run well on my old Athlon XP is actually a bit of a challenge (video and usb ports can be particularly problematic). And now, with llvmpipe being en vogue (the only thing it renders on slower machines is them unusable), things are worsening rapidly. Also, older ditros fit on CDs and lots of old machines don't even have DVD drives. Having said that, my favorite course of action on slower machines is Debian stable, with select packages from testing or unstable (which is getting harder to do, for some reason - it's very annoying and unexplicable when apt won't update hplip without pulling gnome-shell).
I switched to Mint when Ubuntu forced Gnome 3/Unity on me. Been extremely happy except one big issue. Mate uses GTK 2 but newer apps use GTK 3, so you get stuck in this world of mixed themes that looks bad. Found a nice gtk 2/3 clearlooks compatible theme, so I end up with Mate DM with GTK 3 apps looking normal again. Best thing, Compiz still works...
While I'm very grateful of what Canonical has done for the Linux community and have paid for services and software to show my support, I cant take the design choices or direction the company has went seriously. Gnome 3 has chosen a new direction, one that I don't need or want. Ubuntu is embracing that direction.
Mint right now is the best balance I can find out there. Keeps the popular Ubuntu base, but with Mint or Cinnamon DE which is hands down superior to Gnome 3 for the desktop.
Better yet, keep system and home on separate partitions. Then you just only reformat the system partition during reinstall.