Linux Mint 17 'Qiana' Released

New submitter Tailhook writes: "Linux Mint 17 'Qiana', a long term support edition of Linux Mint, has been released. Mint 17 is available in both MATE and Cinnamon editions. Mint 17 is derived from Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) and will receive security updates until April, 2019. The Cinnamon edition provides Cinnamon 2.2, with a much improved update manager, driver manager, HiDPI display support and many usability refinements. This release of Mint establishes a baseline on which the next several releases will be based: 'Until 2016 the development team won't start working on a new base and will be fully focused on this one; future versions of Linux Mint will use the same package base as Linux Mint 17, making it trivial for people to upgrade.'"

Comments

This is so 1990s

[Lawrence_Bird]

Honestly are distro updates really news anymore? Certainly not front page type news.

Re:This is so 1990s

[MrBingoBoingo]

Not for every distro, but for a few it still is. It's a combination of popularity and infrequency of releases that determines if the update is newsworthy,

Re:This is so 1990s

[Anonymous Coward]

Mint is the number 1 distro according to Distrowatch. So imagine the possibility that someone else does care.

Re:This is so 1990s

[xeno]

For a major update to this distro it is. Mint is the reasonable middle ground in a sea of partisan battles and "UX" disasters. The past couple of years has seen Shuttleworth slam Ubuntu's rudder over to starboard with Unity as the ONE-true-way, then MS followed suit with Metro as the MORE-ONE-true bastard child of Unity and IOS, and Gnome passed the Jonestown kool-aid with Gnome3 as the ONEST-true-way. I've lost count of the number of major companies and orgs that decided to shove their half-baked ideas into production; usability and feedback be damned.

By contrast, Mint's "Mr Neutral" Clem provided support for a variety of GUIs while focusing on the underlying stability and functionality of the OS. Remember way back when Gates derided the notion of an OS that just improved stability and performance without introducing a slew of new features? He said Microsoft would never do that, and this was a dumb idea. Well, Clem did the reasonable thing -- he and the team worked on stability ad performance... with a *choice* of new UI features. Take it leave it, love it or hate it, you can't deny that Mint gives you tons of operational/UI choice while resolving much of the technical bustedness that has been a weak spot for Linux acceptance.

I'm typing this on a fully configured Mint 17 system. I booted from a live USB drive at 8:38pm, and the install from bare metal was complete by 8:44. Connected to the wifi and had all updates pulled and installed by 8:55pm. A few quick tweaks that any newbie could do, and I'm up and running with a fully current system, office suite, media tools, with tunes playing in the background, and *everything* just works -- in about 20 minutes. (I played with it over the weekend on a bench full of systems, and have yet to find a recent HP, Lenovo, or Dell not fully supported.) With Mint I get the "just works" simplicity of OSX with the ass-kicking power of Linux, and in another 20min I'll have Wine installed with my genuine copy of MS Office (Visio if nothing else). And I still have the linux-just-rocks no-click configuration of my office scanner without downloading the 350mb driver package for Windows. Mint is happiness for total luddites who want stuff to look like WIn95, while maintaining compatibility and app-management consistency with faux-modern-minimalists who want the UI to look like an empty white room. Take your pick... it just works. I actually *enjoy* using Mint.... and so do the less-geeky people who just want to click and do stuff.

This is what an OS should be.

Re:This is so 1990s

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

I'm not sure, but was the KDE 4.0 disaster in 2008 not started for the same ONE reason?

It made me switch to Gnome...

Re:This is so 1990s

[Anonymous Coward]

the ass-kicking power of Linux

Which all sounds very exciting until you realize that doesn't really mean anything significant. Let's face it, once you've launched your programs you really don't care about the underlying OS so if it has a funny launcher it's no big deal - normal people dont care about the OS, it is there to run their applications and once you're in Counterstrike or WoW or Photoshop or AutoCAD or Maya or Premiere or MS Office or LibreOffice or iWork or Firefox the OS it is running on is pretty much irrelevant.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Stormwatch]

The thing about KDE was that 4.0 was still very incomplete. It should have been called "beta" until 4.2 came out.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Xolvix]

(Visio if nothing else)

I don't want to be "that guy", but can LibreOffice Draw act as a reasonable substitute to Visio? Apart from the benefit of being a native app, it seems to load up Visio documents fine and has all the same functionality, at least from my own uses of it. If it's not suitable yet, are you trying to learn it at least so you can transition from Visio to Draw? I only ask because Wine is best used as a transition tool to help in the meantime while one learns to use equivalent native apps; relying on it long-erm is asking for trouble given its nature for regressions in each new version (among other problems).

In my experience, what keeps me off Linux is if I feel I need to use certain Windows-only tools. Given there's nothing in Linux that's Linux-only which I can't find an equivalent for in Windows, I end up staying with Windows because it supports everything including the edge cases, whereas Linux doesn't. I've been working towards cross-platform independence though for many years (even with games) for this very reason, so I guess I just humble recommend giving LO Draw another go if you haven't already. If you have and think it sucks, please disregard everything I've said. :)

Re:This is so 1990s

[Anonymous Coward]

Which all sounds very exciting until you realize that doesn't really mean anything significant. Let's face it, once you've launched your programs you really don't care about the underlying OS so if it has a funny launcher it's no big deal

Exactly. And with that in mind, since we left the 90's it has been really hard to find a good program launcher that isn't incredibly bloaty and that doesn't hinder my workflow.

Re:This is so 1990s

[captainpanic]

The long term support version of Linux Mint is indeed newsworthy. I think it is the upcoming popular Linux for the desktop. Why? Because it works, without any unnecessary fancy stuff.

In fact, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to upgrade an old WinXP computer to something more 2014. From experience I can say that installation is really easy, and it will allow you to go online, email, watch movies, listen music or write any documents/excel sheets just like XP did.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Chrisq]

Mint is the number 1 distro according to Distrowatch. So imagine the possibility that someone else does care.

An according to users, cinnamon is "number two".

Re:This is so 1990s

[klui]

Did they fix the update printing out diffs based on Mint's modifications of some configuration files and one needs to choose the conflict resolution?

Re:This is so 1990s

[Chrisq]

Given there's nothing in Linux that's Linux-only which I can't find an equivalent for in Windows, I end up staying with Windows because it supports everything including the edge cases, whereas Linux doesn't

There are a few - I haven't found anything as easy for simple video editing as OpenShot for example. Admittedley this is a niche program for people who want to edit and caption and use a few preset "fades" but don't need to learn to use a full-featured video suite.

Re:This is so 1990s

[biloute]

I noticed the same benefits using Xubuntu 14.04. A lightweight user interface, very fast and easy to use. The OS is also very fast to install, very fast to boot, everything just works and updating is smooth. It may not be as "fancy" as regular Ubuntu or Mint, but I find Xubuntu very stable and polished (our usage is file and compute servers/clusters, desktops, mostly software development and office work).

Re:This is so 1990s

[Anonymous Coward]

This is news to me. I use Debian at home, but installed Mint&Mate on few relatives and friends machines when they need to replace Windows XP. The Mint with mate is really a good replacement for XP, as it is as stable and updates itself automatically. What is the most important, it can be used from day one by anyone who has used some Windows before. I would never have installed Windows 8 to them, as it would have caused daily support calls to perform even the easiest tasks.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny; i had the same experience last week. Until i installed skype from the included software manager. Install fine, nice icon added to start it up. However, it didnt work. No errors. Only further investigation in the console brought up something about a library missing which could then be fixed.

So yes, if you dont need any other 3rd party apps its fine. When you need 3rd party apps, it's still very much Linux as we expect it. (trying to copy content to an iPhone was also a disaster)

Re:This is so 1990s

[r_a_trip]

***Exactly. And with that in mind, since we left the 90's it has been really hard to find a good program launcher that isn't incredibly bloaty and that doesn't hinder my workflow.***

Exactly this. It's the same for me. I'm not necesarilly married to the "Win95" paradigm, but if I'm going to dump it, I expect the replacement to enhance my daily workflow, not drive me up the wall with distracting and context breaking view switches.

It may be the modern thing on mobile phones, but there it is not a matter of innovation, but of working around restraints of the (still) limited mobile hardware.

As long as nothing better comes along, I'll be on Cinnamon.

Re:This is so 1990s

[aliquis]

Did they fix the update printing out diffs based on Mint's modifications of some configuration files and one needs to choose the conflict resolution?

How should they fix it?

I think that is straight from Debian.

Re:This is so 1990s

[aliquis]

And what matters are likely still Debian, Redhat, openSUSE and Slackware or more used derivates of those =P

Re:This is so 1990s

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear you. Mint is a truly great thing. Switched my Linux desktop to Mint from Ubuntu when the Unity trainwreck was thrust upon us.

However.....

Once you've got this splendid system up and running you'll soon find that you can't do fully professional image work, you can't do fully professional audio work, etc. etc. etc....

Why ? Because the programs available on Linux are simply not good enough.

When will the Linux developer community get this basic point ?

Instead of endlessly fucking around with the basic interface (which has had several flavours that have been good enough to use since the 1980s) why don't they write some actual useful, productive, professional quality APPLICATIONS.

Fuck all this endless GUI reconfiguration. Where are the APPLICATIONS ??????????????????????

Re:This is so 1990s

[danbuter]

But it wasn't. After the fact, people tried to say that it was "for devs only", but when 4.0 was released, they were trumpeting it like crazy. I LOVED KDE3. I wish KDE4 had never been made.

Re:This is so 1990s

[danbuter]

Because that would be hard. Linux has thousands of programs that are 90% done. Very, very few that would qualify as 100% ready, though.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Ol Olsoc]

Once you've got this splendid system up and running you'll soon find that you can't do fully professional image work, you can't do fully professional audio work, etc. etc. etc...

For those, I have my Mac. Unix-like based OS, and it pretty much does what you ask for.

But my other computers are all Linux, and that's just fine. I'm going to have more than one, because I'm surely not going to do photo or video work on a small screen. So everything has OO on it, they are compatible - something MSO never was between OS's, and they all do their thing very well.

Plus just one terminal language to use now.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Anonymous Coward]

If was still the 1990's this would have been called Mint 0.14a04 Beta

Re:This is so 1990s

[damnbunni]

I wonder how the port of OpenShot to Windows and Mac is coming along. They raised $45,000 in a Kickstarter last year for that purpose.

Re:This is so 1990s

[number6x]

Exactly! Without viewing the diffs, how would you know which config to choose? I don't want updates overwriting any of my custom configs. Then you have to spend time setting things back the way you want. By showing the diffs, you get to chosse to keep your config pr let the update re-set it.

Re:This is so 1990s

[colfer]

Cinnamon or Mate?

Re:This is so 1990s

[jbolden]

No KDE4 was just an upgrade to KDE3 with lots of new features. They just didn't make it clear that distributions should not switch and so there was huge backlash as the bugs got worked out.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Chrisq]

I wonder how the port of OpenShot to Windows and Mac is coming along. They raised $45,000 in a Kickstarter last year for that purpose.

Since its Qt based I would have thought that a port would be relatively easy

Re:This is so 1990s

[Nimey]

I was a GNOME 2 diehard, then I preferred MATE, but Cinnamon's really growing on me.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Walter White]

Where are the APPLICATIONS ??????????????????????

Here's one: http://entertainment.slashdot....

I suppose this only counts if you count Pixar as professionals.

Re:This is so 1990s

[AthanasiusKircher]

I think it is the upcoming popular Linux for the desktop.

Upcoming?

Linux Mint has received the most hits of any distro over at DistroWatch for the past 2.5 years or so, after it surpassed Ubuntu.

There's no way to get hard numbers on this sort of stuff, but Mint has already been one of the most popular Linux desktop distros for years, and some have claimed (based on DistroWatch and other sites with hit counts) that it has been #1 (or close to it) for a few years already.

I'm sure others will chime in here with some other data, but my anecdotal evidence is that I know four friends who switched to Linux in the past couple years. While I'm sure I talked about Linux with them, I wasn't involved in their decision, and I don't think any of them had a lot of guidance from other friends about which distro to go with... they just wanted to try Linux. And all four have ended up using Mint. Some checked out Ubuntu but didn't like it, or read articles saying Mint was better, so they decided to try Mint instead.

Again, I'm not claiming this is hard proof of anything. But there's been a lot of buzz around Mint, and it clearly has had enough positive press to pull in some of my friends who were looking to try Linux.

In fact, I would recommend it to anyone who wants to upgrade an old WinXP computer to something more 2014.

Agreed. Even 5 years ago, I would NOT have recommended desktop Linux as a serious replacement, unless the person had some family member or friend who could be "tech support" when something weird went wrong and the fix required editing a bunch of text files on the command line. I certainly wouldn't recommend any inexperienced users try to install it by themselves, unless they were technologically savvy and had some command line experience. (Someone might get lucky, though, and get a system working immediately with no tweaking.)

But today? It may not be the perennial "Year of the Linux desktop," but we do finally have things that "just work" in many more user cases than ever before. I hopped from distro to distro for years, trying to find something I didn't have to tinker with all the time or worry whether multimedia would randomly not work or whether an upgrade would break half of the things I spent hours fixing for last upgrade. Linux Mint was the first to approach a relatively stable "just works" philosophy for the casual desktop user.

I even installed it on an older useless underpowered laptop for a clueless family member over the holidays (Windows had slowed the point that it wasn't useful, and they were tired of Windows). I didn't make any special tweaks other than putting a few shortcuts on the desktop. I knew I only see these people over the holidays, so I wouldn't be around for random tech support. But I wasn't concerned because they had basically just stopped using this computer, so the worst case scenario was that it remained useless. Recently, I heard it was still working great... and if Mint can survive as a useful system for 6 months on the machine of a clueless relative who never used Linux before, well, I'd say that's an achievement.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Anonymous Coward]

(I played with it over the weekend on a bench full of systems, and have yet to find a recent HP, Lenovo, or Dell not fully supported.)

Acer S7 with striped SSD's? And it won't destroy my battery life? And won't make my fan blow like crazy 24/7??

Re:This is so 1990s

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh great, so now windows users aren't the only stupid ones anymore? Now you're starting to pick on Linux users too?
That's just great!

Re:This is so 1990s

[Anonymous Coward]

... the OS it is running on is pretty much irrelevant.

Exactly. This is why I feel an operating system should be as bare as possible. I just need Windows for loading programs that I want to use. I don't need Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Modern UI, Movie Maker, and the many other things MS throws in. The only extras in Windows that I use are calc.exe, notepad.exe and explorer.exe, which I can easily find good replacements for. Due to changes with explorer.exe in Windows 7, I've been using FreeCommander and Directory Opus more often.

Re:This is so 1990s

[BrendaEM]

Yes, it's still news if you want to get work done, and don't care for Windows 8, and don't want want to buy Apple's disposable computers.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Grishnakh]

Instead of endlessly fucking around with the basic interface (which has had several flavours that have been good enough to use since the 1980s) why don't they write some actual useful, productive, professional quality APPLICATIONS.

That's because the people who make the desktop environments just work on those, rather than building applications. It's the same problem in corporations: once you've hired some people into a team to do X, they need to keep doing X forever, until you finally lay them all off. You can't just call X "done" and move on to something else, because then some managers will throw a fit because they're no longer relevant. So those managers will come up with stuff for their teams to do so they continue to look relevant. It's basically the same with groups like GNOME. They're already got an organization set up, so they're going to continue doing what they know, which is UI stuff. They don't know anything about pro audio or pro image work, so they can't very easily switch over to that.

Re:This is so 1990s

[kodomo]

You sure have not used MATE for desktop.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever read an actual newspaper and wonder how much of that is "news"?

Front page articles about how "Beiber stubbed his toe". The thing is it might not be news to you, and you can just not read it.

Re:This is so 1990s

[aliquis]

I've booted Live CDs of both flavours of Linux Mint and I have nothing against Linux Mint. I just haven't made a decision for what is better and imagine I'd be able to use both Unity and Gnome 3 shell if I tried it out enough / bothered learning how to use them. I would likely end up using Gnome 3 of the four though Cinnemon, MATE and LXDE and such will of course be familiar from the beginning.

I use KDE, Enlightenment och Razor-Qt (not now waiting for LXDE-Qt.)

I know Ubuntu have side-stepped somewhat from Debian and maybe they end up getting the same with systemd for instance soon.

I'd still consider both Ubuntu and Linux Mint Debian derivatives.

Both Fedora and Linux Mint covered by more popular derivatives of Redhat and Debian.

Re:This is so 1990s

[kodomo]

I use linux as the day-to-day desktop at work since ubuntu 9.10.

In thoose days I used to let the laptop on for the entire week.. and was not a problem. But then.... well we all have an idea, I needed two or three reboots per week because the sistem thrashed a lot of memory.. tried alternatives, kubuntu, xubuntu, but they all lack stability.

MATE is a simple, neat destop that ... "just works". I'm just old fashoined and don't need a fancy UI.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Kjella]

That's because the people who make the desktop environments just work on those, rather than building applications. It's the same problem in corporations: once you've hired some people into a team to do X, they need to keep doing X forever, until you finally lay them all off. You can't just call X "done" and move on to something else, because then some managers will throw a fit because they're no longer relevant.

Desktop environments are not "done", true my desktop might on the surface resemble Win95, but a lot has happened under the hood on system management tools. Yes, a lot of that is happening deep down in a driver stack but very often it involves exposing new functionality or removing old functionality in control panels, system settings, control applets or whatever. That's just boring maintenance work though, the problem is the UI coders want to do something cool and innovative - they're mostly volunteers after all, not paid to tweak old code based to accommodate changes in other software. I think it's the exact opposite problem, it's work that doesn't get done unless you pay them to do it not busywork done to justify the paycheck. What you have is exactly what you get when people only do the parts of the job they like.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Grishnakh]

You'd think, but Windows Metro shows that there's no shortage of teams of professionals who want to do major re-vamps of already-finished stuff just because they think it's "cool and innovative".

Re:This is so 1990s

[Parker Lewis]

underlying stability and functionality of the OS

Which came from Ubuntu, which is based on Debian.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Parker Lewis]

Other way to compare is the G+ community members: more than 140k for Ubuntu, 9.6k for Mint.

Re:This is so 1990s

[MrNiceguy_KS]

>

I suppose this only counts if you count Pixar as professionals.

I don't know. I've seen Cars 2.

Re:This is so 1990s

[MrNiceguy_KS]

You know, I think this is the first time I've seen Metro and professional used in the same sentence. At least, the first time where the sentence didn't end with, "my ass!"

Re:This is so 1990s

[Anonymous Coward]

Cinnamon is a desktop environment, not a distro. LinuxMint is the distro and you chose the desktop environment you prefer. My preference is the Mate desktop (I liked the old gnome 2 before they wrecked it with gnome 3). Cinnamon is another very popular, up and coming, desktop. Your preference can be anything you like and there are a few to chose from going clear back to the likes of Motif. This is a huge departure from the windows world where the desktop is an integrated piece of the operating system and you have no choice.

Re:This is so 1990s

[spitzak]

Yes I would agree. Linux desktops have been broken like this forever.

If I launch a program from the desktop and it exits with an error, can you PLEASE put up a window containing whatever was printed to stderr? It is NOT user-friendly to have nothing to happen. And no, a user is not going to figure this out by "reading the logs".

Re:This is so 1990s

[Grishnakh]

Metro is professional.

The problem is that, for some odd reason, in American culture, the term "professional" somehow gets equated with "good", "high quality", etc., which that is frequently just not the case, and "amateur" has been equated with "half-assed". In reality, amateurs frequently do much, much better work than professionals, because 1) they have an interest in doing it well, frequently to perfectionist standards, and 2) professionals only care about maximizing profit, so they'll only do a job "good enough" to get paid.

In my own work, I do much better work for my personal projects than for just about anything I've done professionally. The professional stuff is always tainted by deadlines, managerial requirements, etc. The "amateur" stuff doesn't have these limitations, and I can do them as well as I want. Professional car mechanics are infamous for screwing things up, sabotaging cars, doing half-assed jobs, and doing unnecessary repair work, but amateurs do utterly amazing restoration jobs.

Metro is professional: it was made by professional software developers and professional UI/UX "experts". That doesn't mean it's any good though.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Voyager529]

Since its Qt based I would have thought that a port would be relatively easy

I genuinely don't know, but it's possible that the issue isn't "get the program to compile on Windows" as much as it's a "get the program to run like an actual Windows application". Har harr, I don't mean 'it crashes every five seconds" or "has a metric ton of DRM" or "litters stuff all over your file system". There are other aspects of a QT application on Windows that go beyond just getting it to compile...

1.) Codec support. Windows users will fully expect files from their devices to get onto a timeline, and this includes MPEG-4, AVCHD, and Quicktime files. If Openshot is going to work on Windows, 'working with the dominant file types on that platform' is a prerequisite. A word processor on Linux that didn't support ODT wouldn't get too far...same principle here.

2.) the 'open' and 'save' dialogs of QT applications on Windows applications are very Linux-y. I'm generally okay with this, but the absence of shortcuts on the left side, along with the necessity of going through the complete file structure to get to the user's profile folders, are decisively not-Windows behavior.

3.) Some GPU acceleration can be done with OpenGL...but I don't think MPEG-4 encoding typically is. That's a bog standard feature in basically every video editing title on Windows...and is VERY handy for longer stuff.

I'm sure there's more, but 'compiling and shipping and slapping on an Installshield Wizard' isn't all there is.

Re:This is so 1990s

[hot soldering iron]

"normal people don't care about the OS". So? Why are you even bringing up "norms"? They don't come here, they don't know how to spell "OS", and don't know that a good OS can keep everything working like a fine watch ... or keep crashing your all-important app. You sound like a "norm" that's stumbled in here, and trying to sound "technical".

Re:This is so 1990s

[hubie]

You still see this behavior on Windows (7, at least, I haven't been on 8). No, I don't want Windows to search the Internet for the solutions (because it always comes back empty), no I don't want a crash report sent to Microsoft, and no, I don't want you to start the "Troubleshooter" because that is the least useful thing of all.

Re:This is so 1990s

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because there are more people asking how to remove the fucking "Mint Search" browser hijack and redirect that you get on Mint and not on Ubuntu. Also the other little annoyances they sprinkle around, like fucking with the fortune files (things like sticking in a ton of un-funny "Husse" quotes and other "Husse" quotes that you obviously needed to be there for; and when you try to remove them with the package manager, it wants to remove the whole fortune program and a few other files thrown in).

I left them a while ago because, although the appeal of it "just working" is very nice, and maybe it does "just work" right after you install it, but it will break, and break hard, when you upgrade ("You have 1743 packages that need to be updated"). That, and I finally got comfortable with the LMDE Xfce rolling distro, then they went and dropped it. For me, they are like going to a web site you really like (or, are trying really hard to like) and you have to keep putting up with the pop-up ads, self-starting video ads, a simple article spread over 13 one-paragraph "pages" you need to click through, etc. Each little thing is a tolerable annoyance, but after awhile the cumulative effect finally gets to you to overcome the activation energy it takes to move over to a new distribution.

Re:This is so 1990s

[TangoMargarine]

I especially love those "The program crashed. There's nothing you can do to fix this." popups you occasionally get.

Re:This is so 1990s

[jseale]

MATE is a simple, neat destop that ... "just works". I'm just old fashoined and don't need a fancy UI.

Using Xubuntu here for that same reason. Not to mention the fact that I have a lesser machine (an eMachines EL1358G) with not quite enough RAM to run full-on Ubuntu. Canonical seems to have done some nice things with its spin of XFCE used here.

Re:This is so 1990s

[klui]

They either need their own repository or clearly mark their changes. In the past, there have been changes where it's not clear what is Mint-specific.

Slow

[Anonymous Coward]

Bit slow to report this, aren't we, /.?

Upgraded to Qiana a couple of days ago.

Re:Slow

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, downvoted or pointing out that this is not news because it happened several days ago. The beta-lovers are here, I see.

Re:Slow

[Anonymous Coward]

No, down-voted for posting a douchebag comment about how something that happened ONLY several days ago is "old news". You're being a douche because you're trying to sound like you're l33t and in the know with your second sentence.

Not a criticism, I'm just keeping it real and trying to help. The More You Know

I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks KDE-enough to give it a shot. But this better be the last time I have to reinstall Mint, I've had to do it every release.

Re:I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[Extide]

Is the upgrader really that bad? I have a Ubuntu server that's been around since 2010 vintage and upgraded to every-single-release between now and then. It should be pretty much the same thing IMO

Re:I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[Anonymous Coward]

No you haven't. You just chose to not follow the instructions to upgrade. And those instructions are basically just "change one word in one file, then click the update icon."

Re: I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious now -- which word in which file? Is there any reason they couldn't automate this change in the upgrade tool?

Re: I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[Anonymous Coward]

add
format c: /q
to your autoexec.bat file, then reboot.

Re: I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[Anonymous Coward]

He's referring to changing the updater repositories over to the new version of Ubuntu. It's doable, if you don't mind having to clean up afterwards.

Re:I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[Anonymous Coward]

Mint 17 is an LTS. If I remember correctly it is supported until 2017.

Re:I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[Rob Simpson]

No, Mint 17 is supported until 2019. The previous LTS (Mint 13) is supported until 2017.

Re: I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[Electricity Likes Me]

Last couple of transitions have been pretty smooth for me. I've been running a mix of Cinnamon-git builds, Ubuntu trusty packages and Mint stuff without issue at all.

You only really get problems when configuration file syntax or layout changes.

Re:I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[aliquis]

If you want KDE and if Linux Mint don't use it why don't you use openSUSE?

I would expect both dists to be excellent.

Re:I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[websitebroke]

I figured that to be the case between KDE Mint 15 and 16, having come from Kubuntu. The Mint folks actively discourage upgrading and encourage fresh installs. Turns out they mean it. dist-upgrade did not work for me as it has for the past umpteen years with Kubuntu. That's one of a few reasons I'm switching back to Kubuntu.

Re:I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[Nimey]

Unless it's changed recently, the official recommendation is to use the backup utility on your Mint install (which backs up data and notes your installed packages), then do a clean reinstall of Mint, then lastly run the backup utility to restore data and packages. You can do it the other way but the Mint project's resources are limited and success is not guaranteed.

Re:I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[PRMan]

I've had 3 Ubuntu systems that upgraded themselves to a black screen. Twice it took hours to recover. The third time I quit using Linux.

Re:I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[PRMan]

Honestly, I like this idea. Sounds a lot cleaner.

Re:I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[dkman]

That happened to me once. At that time I made some notes, so if it happened again I'd be able to recover easier.
Those notes are on Google Drive so I can get to them from any working device.

# to recover from a boot to blank screen (i think mine was all white)
# press "e" on grub screen to edit ubuntu boot command
# near end of "linux ..." line after "splash" add " radeon.modeset=0"
# for me it booted to command line, not gui
# then startx gave me a "no screens found" error
# see http://community.linuxmint.com... for more info/different video driver options

Honestly at the time I had this issue I didn't feel like fighting with it, and it wasn't that difficult for me to just back up my stuff and install the new version, so that's what I did. But I knew that I *could* have fixed it from the prompt or booted from live CD if i wanted a GUI.

Since then I have also switched from Mint Cinnamon to Lubuntu. I really haven't had any problems with Lubuntu.**

I love the look and feel of Cinnamon, and highly respect Clem's model/team/etc.
The reasons, not that any of these are major:
- I thought some older systems would prefer a light weight GUI
- In a VM Cinnamon complains that there's no hardware acceleration (though it still works fine)
- To move closer to the base platform (Debian to Ubuntu to Mint, there's a lag for something updated at the root...or at least a perception thereof)
Also at the time certain games in Steam launched in a window with no border and the mouse wouldn't leave the window to manipulate the desktop which annoyed me enough to see if other Linux flavors had the same issue. I actually haven't messed with those much since settling on Lubuntu so I can't say if it has the same issue.
** I take that back, I did have one log file that grew until the system couldn't boot. When that happened I booted to my Mint Mate partition, found the offender, deleted it, then went back to Lubuntu (because I have my apps installed and configured there). I'm not finding the name of the log file at the moment, but it was something that made sense and I think I made a change so it wouldn't grow out of control again.
The note for that looks like this:

# like WinDirStat
gdmap

Re:I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[hubie]

No, unless they just changed them, the instructions were to do a fresh install. They say if you want to try a upgrade in place, then they give you some steps (like changing to the proper apt repositories) to do, but they also let you know that YMMV and you're on your own if you hose it up.

Re:I guess I'll bite the bullet on Cinnamon

[Wolfrider]

--Sorry, I know Mint is one of the most popular distros and I'm a longtime user - but if you take a proper Debian base and modify it to the point where it can't be *upgraded* properly, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. I stopped using RPM-based distros exactly because of the upgrade headaches a long time ago.

--I went with Xubuntu this time around and haven't noticed the difference much - altho it appears to be much more stable than the last Mint(15/Olivia) I had on this laptop.

as seen on...

[tomp]

As covered on soylent last weekend:
http://soylentnews.org/article...

Re:as seen on...

[Threni]

Ah yes - the good site with the unfortunate name. (Have they worked out how they're going to let people know about what approach they're going to use for the vote on the new change yet?)

Re:as seen on...

[Opyros]

The final name is – Soylent News!
http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/05/31/1616210

Re:as seen on...

[Threni]

> For what it's worth, there were a lot of us that would have like to see the name
> change. The staff even had a chance to override this decision, but instead we
> decided to support the community's choice.

Yup. An obviously stupid name.

"But why?"
"Well, there was this stupid, forgettable film from the 1970s, where.."
"I know. But....but why?"

Re:as seen on...

[TangoMargarine]

Why not? As a Slashdot user, you're really going to criticize the naming of Soylent? Really?

fuck linux mint

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck linux mint

Re:fuck linux mint

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be one of those obnoxious kids running around with
paintcans spraying their ugly signature on arty things like statues.
Isn't is about time you for you to take off your diapers and put
on some real trousers, or are you still struggling with the safety pins ?

Re:fuck linux mint

[Ol Olsoc]

You must be one of those obnoxious kids running around with paintcans spraying their ugly signature on arty things like statues. Isn't is about time you for you to take off your diapers and put on some real trousers,

Silly - he couldn't be a Windows support tech if he did that!

Re:fuck linux mint

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot really is a strange place.
A poster responding to faul language by comparing the
original poster to a paint spraying kid gets modded down
while some other poster who can't even quote promotes the faul
poster to a Windows support technichian and get's modded up.
Better call the new site in beta Back(s)lash Dot.

fuck linux mint

[Anonymous Coward]

thank you for your comment

KDE?

[zeugma-amp]

I see Mate and Cinnamon editions.

Will there be a KDE spin that is LTS?

Re:KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's usually released about 30-40 days after the MATE and Cinnamon editions.

Re:KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Those are supposed to be coming sometime soon.

Re:KDE?

[Threni]

I hope not. The last (LTS) version of KDE Mint gave two errors after every install (one of which contained a typo). You had to disable some akoni-something nonsense or create an empty folder. Seriously. And the initial mandatory mint-update seemed to crash about half the time too.

Mint 17 Mate (released a couple of weeks ago; not sure why it's on the front page today; perhaps there are no Linus videos) "just works".

Re:KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope not. The last (LTS) version of KDE Mint gave two errors after every install (one of which contained a typo). You had to disable some akoni-something nonsense or create an empty folder. Seriously. And the initial mandatory mint-update seemed to crash about half the time too.

Mint 17 Mate (released a couple of weeks ago; not sure why it's on the front page today; perhaps there are no Linus videos) "just works".

Once again, we see the randomness of open source quality assurance... You have to carefully pick your distro and DE to get a good experience.

Re:KDE?

[Threni]

Whereas commercial software quality is pretty consistent?

Re:KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Pretty consistent. Surely Windows and OS X have bugs too, but most of the time they don't have all sorts of weird glitches crawling on you randomly.

Re:KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

And you get absolutely no choices with those, so your point is moot.

Can you name a single version of Windows or OS X where you can opt for a different (but official) desktop environment?

Re:KDE?

[Nimey]

Yes, and there will be an Xfce one as well. It usually takes a month or two after MATE/Cinnamon releases for Mint to release ISOs with those DEs.

Re:KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am comfortable enough with the default desktops. It's only a good thing that I don't have to personally test 10 different ones to see which happens to work today without exploding.

Re:KDE?

[jtmach]

Very consistent, it's not like there were a mess of people that couldn't install the mandatory Windows 8.1 update. http://www.neowin.net/news/mic...

Re:KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

But no LXDE.. sigh.

Re:KDE?

[Grishnakh]

The rest of us think Metro is an unusable abomination.

Re:KDE?

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

I did a fresh install of M17 the day before yesterday. I had a couple of hard lockups running Cinnamon. LXDE was fine, and installing KDE is as simple as firing up synaptic and grabbing 'kde-standard'. I'm typing this from KDE right now. It's not as polished as SuSE's but it's stable (so far)

Re:KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

So your answer, then, is "No, I cannot".

Re:KDE?

[hoggoth]

Will someone explain to me why I would choose "Cinnamon" or "MATE" or "Xfce" or "LXDE" etc etc etc?
One would be for an old underpowered laptop, the other for a reasonably modern desktop.

It's really off-putting to hear how great Mint is, then go to the site and the first thing you need to do is decide which environment you will choose with no explanations of what that choice will mean to you. Are there programs that will only work under one environment and not the others? Are we just talking about differences in the file browser and config/update system?

Re:KDE?

[Nimey]

This is why I love virtual machines and broadband. Grab all the spins of Mint or whatever operating system that you're interested in and install them into virtual machines, then try them out until you're bored and delete the VM.

LXDE is for the really old computers, like the P4-based Celeron laptop my daughter uses.
Xfce is for older computers or those with low specs, or if you want something faster than the next few:
MATE is for those who remember GNOME 2 and the glory days of Ubuntu fondly. It's a continuation of the old GNOME 2 project.
Cinnamon is the new thing that the Mint devs want to (eventually) replace MATE with. The interfaces are fairly similar but it's got more modern underpinnings.
KDE is for the folks who want to customize ALL THE THINGS.

Generally they can run each other's programs, you'll just need the supporting packages to be installed, which your package manager should handle automatically when you install the program you want.

Re:KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I have used several Linux distros sporadically, but I'm not a regular at Club Linux. So while a lot of the names used in the Linux universe will register as vaguely familiary in what's left of my pathetic brain, they often don't have the immediate name recognition (for me) that they would if they were in the Windows ecosystem.

hoggoth's post is a good reminder that, especially for something like Mint that appeals to those who might be dipping their toes in the 'nix waters for the first time, it would be great to have a primer at hand or even a "New2Linux" portal to ease the transition.

Re:KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hilarious.
I get all sorts of weird random shit happening on Windows 7 all the time (on both my corporate desktop and corporate laptop).
Just to pick 3:
Outlook decides its not licensed; shuts down. Then it's OK for a few weeks.
I'm prompted for credentials/passwords at random times for no apparent reason.
WiFi stops working for no apparent reasons until I reboot.
I could go on.
And yes, I know some of this may not be MS's fault. In the same way that many/most Linux issues are not (e.g.) Linus's fault. In my experience I get more random shit in Win7 and its applications than I ever get in Linux and its applications.

Re:KDE?

[TangoMargarine]

I like XFCE because it's pretty close to the classic Windows desktop but you can still twaddle around with the bars a little without it getting in your face (KDE). That it's pseudolightweight is just an added bonus.

Re:KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

ALL THE THINGS

FYI, English does have a word for this concept: "everything". Strange, I know.

Re:KDE?

[Nimey]

There's this thing called "slang" that you should familiarize yourself with.

a bit like /. beta

[Anonymous Coward]

I've lost count of the number of major companies and orgs that decided to shove their half-baked ideas into production; usability and feedback be damned.

Reminds me of a certain 'news for nerds' website beta...

Thanks. Bad naming.

[Futurepower(R)]

Thanks for the explanation.

It amazes me how self-defeating open source software developers can be in naming their efforts. Mint Mate (mah-teh?) uses a foreign word with more than one foreign pronunciation, and a different pronunciation and meaning in English. The name discourages new users.

Re:Thanks. Bad naming.

[martin-boundary]

Mate, what's the foreign word you talking about? Bruce.

Re:Thanks. Bad naming.

[Threni]

Mate is a simple to pronounce, unambiguous word for most people. And if people pronounce it wrong, so what? Correct them, or let it go. If you're talking to someone about about a Linux distro, then from the context people are going to know you're not talking about a drink.

Is there a single word which is unambiguously pronounced around the world? My money's on no. Personally I think they should have called it Mint 17 Ghoti, which is of course pronounced "fish".

Re:Thanks. Bad naming.

[Ol Olsoc]

It amazes me how self-defeating open source software developers can be in naming their efforts. Mint Mate (mah-teh?) uses a foreign word with more than one foreign pronunciation, and a different pronunciation and meaning in English. The name discourages new users.

We really are precious little snowflakes aren't we? I had to go into therapy the first time I saw the word Ubuntu.

Linux will never be successful until we have real American names like Hero OS, or Exceptionalism. Fox news can run contests to come up with the best, proper American names that will fill us all with pride, and finally allow people to come out fearlessly and install the OS.

I vote for Linux Patriot, myself

Re:Thanks. Bad naming.

[Anonymous Coward]

a foreign word with more than one foreign pronunciation

Mate was forked by an argentine.

Just reminding you that there are other countries outside your own and no, we moved past the abacus a while ago.

Re:Thanks. Bad naming.

[Anonymous Coward]

But you just are confortable with English out of habit. English words are a bad choice for non natives either. English spelling (and pronounciation from written word) is really hard, you don't realize because you already know. Remember those school spelling contests, don't you? In Spanish, and I guess Portuguese, Italian, German and most other languages there are no such thing.
So, Mate eventually discourages new English users. And of course, I'm not really sure if Mate (and Trinity) are the answer if you don't like KDE 4 or Gnome 3.

Re: Thanks. Bad naming.

[Type44Q]

we moved past the abacus a while ago

That was your big mistake; just wait till that solar flare comes*

*In my day, we burned yak butter to melt our solder.

Re: Thanks. Bad naming.

[Circlotron]

"Is there a single word which is unambiguously pronounced around the world? " Taxi?

Re: Thanks. Bad naming.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tah-she.

Re:Thanks. Bad naming.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't even pronounce "Mint" the right way, I say as in "grind" or "find" but then I found it is a regular "i" like in "bin". I still do as before because I find it easier to say.

Re: Thanks. Bad naming.

[MrNiceguy_KS]

I remember once hearing that, everywhere that golf is played, it's called golf. I'm not well-traveled enough to be able to confirm, though. Anybody who hasn't spent their entire life in midwest USA care to comment?

Re:Thanks. Bad naming.

[Larryish]

Any true North American Linux distro would have to be called "Participation Trophy Linux (R)(TM)" and a free CD would be distributed with every box of microwave food and with every package of diabetic test strips.

Re:Thanks. Bad naming.

[Ol Olsoc]

Any true North American Linux distro would have to be called "Participation Trophy Linux

Undeserved Self-Esteem Linux?

I know Qiana

[Anonymous Coward]

She be best friends with Lashondra. And she be Darnell's baby momma.

Old news is old.

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck? This was released in fucking May, Soulskill http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=08458 Why is Slashdot reporting this like it just came out today? Lurk more people. MOAR!

Confusing no matter where you are from

[Futurepower(R)]

Mate would be fine. The problem is that it's Mah-teh in Portuguese and another pronunciation in Spanish. So, it doesn't matter where you are from, it's confusing. In 3 languages.

Quietly Sweeping Windows Under a Rug

[zakkudo]

Well.... if the apps on your system actively hide the flaws of your OS that may be true. The reason why IDEs and all-encompasing single window programs are so popular in general is because they hide how bad the Windows shell is. Windows is playing no part in "just getting out of the way." It is being quietly swept under a rug. No one wants to interact with Windows on windows. Best to just maximize everything and use the taskbar.

Re:Quietly Sweeping Windows Under a Rug

[spitzak]

To be honest, most of the problems with Windows Shell have been slavishly copied by the Linux window managers. Being able to click without raising windows disappeared years ago, and along with that any ability to actually use overlapping windows. Lots of other bad stuff also copied "because it is user friendly" but that is the big one.

Re: Quietly Sweeping Windows Under a Rug

[zakkudo]

Agreed. I really wish this wasn't the case.

Re:Quietly Sweeping Windows Under a Rug

[TangoMargarine]

Being able to click without raising windows disappeared years ago, and along with that any ability to actually use overlapping windows.

A lot of DE setups allow you to pin windows on top/beneath and still interact with other windows. Not quite sure what you're describing (or why you want it), though. Could you elaborate?

Re:Quietly Sweeping Windows Under a Rug

[spitzak]

That is not the same.

What I want is to be able to push a button in one application (or select text) and not have it raise above the other application. I also want to eventually raise that first application (perhaps by clicking the title bar). "layers" does not do this, and in fact "layers" are a very very bad idea.

This is finally causing serious problems with drag & drop (as you cannot drag from a window without it raising) so they are finally starting to get a clue. Unfortunately I am seeing the "windows solution" rear it's ugly head: there are proposals that an app must communicate to the window manager the "drag start target regions" so that raise is prevented.

The real solution is TRIVIAL: don't raise the window when there is a click, and allow the application to raise *if it wants to* in response to a click. Unfortunately slavish copying of Windows has made this actually be considered politically incorrect, including incredible bone-headed statements like "the user will be confused by not knowing if the action will raise the window" (use "standards" to fix that), or that "programs should not raise unexpectedly" (again, use "standards", or you can ignore raise requests if not attached to a click event).

Linux Mint founder on Anti-Semitism

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to read about the Linux Mint founder's concern for anti-semitism.

https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=clement+lefebvre+israel