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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.'"
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,
Mint is the number 1 distro according to Distrowatch. So imagine the possibility that someone else does care.
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.
I think not...(*poof*)
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...
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.
The thing about KDE was that 4.0 was still very incomplete. It should have been called "beta" until 4.2 came out.
Circumcision is child abuse.
No, Mint 17 is supported until 2019. The previous LTS (Mint 13) is supported until 2017.
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".
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.
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?
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).
***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.
# touch universe # chmod +rwx universe #
Mate, what's the foreign word you talking about? Bruce.
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.
Because that would be hard. Linux has thousands of programs that are 90% done. Very, very few that would qualify as 100% ready, though.
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
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Where are the APPLICATIONS ??????????????????????
Here's one: http://entertainment.slashdot....
I suppose this only counts if you count Pixar as professionals.
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.
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.
The final name is – Soylent News!
http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/05/31/1616210
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.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
>
I suppose this only counts if you count Pixar as professionals.
I don't know. I've seen Cars 2.
Redundancy is good And also good.
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.