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Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon and MATE Editions Released

Posted by samzenpus on from the check-it-out dept.

linuxscreenshot writes The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 17.1 'Rebecca' MATE. Linux Mint 17.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use. Linux Mint 17.1 MATE edition comes with two window managers installed and configured by default: Marco (MATE's very own window manager, simple, fast and very stable); Compiz (an advanced compositing window manager which can do wonders if your hardware supports it). Among the various window managers available for Linux, Compiz is certainly the most impressive when it comes to desktop effects. Screenshots can be found here.

7 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Cinnamon and MATE by Laz10 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why is it that they keep having two so similar versions of Gnome? I can't really tell the difference.

  2. Cheers for Mint by meta-monkey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My wife's 83 year old grandmother was distraught because her computer was running so slow it would take five minutes to open a program. I told her I would come down and fix it for her, but it might require a wipe and reinstall, and she was fine with anything.

    It was a 5 year old HP running Vista, and I have never seen a computer so fucked in my entire life. There were viruses in her viruses. Toolbars, toolbars everywhere! I told her it was a lost cause and we needed to reinstall.

    Before I left home I burned a copy of Mint 17 Cinnamon. I had never used it before (I run Debian) but I had heard it was the simple, user-friendly Linux. I gave her two options, that she could reinstall Vista and eventually wind up right back here, or, I could install Linux Mint. I explained the free software ethos, in terms of both beer and speech, she got it, and said that's what she wanted. I installed it with no problem (except for the nouveau Nvidia drivers. They caused it to freeze up and I had to get the proprietary drivers instead), set everything up for her so she could get her gmail, web browse and skype. Her webcam worked right out of the box, too.

    I poked a hole in her firewall and set up vino so I could VNC in if she needed help. It's been three weeks and I haven't needed to once. She loves it and has had zero problems.

    Thank you, Mint team, for all your hard work. Thanks to you there's a new 83-year-old Linux h4xx0r.

    --
    We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
    1. Re:Cheers for Mint by yelvington · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Linux has been a great platform for the elderly for years.

      My mother, who also is in her 80s, bought a Toshiba Latitude in 2007. It came with Vista and not enough RAM to run anything other than Solitaire. I installed Ubuntu, which took about 15 minutes, and fixed the sound config, which took about two days, and she's been fine ever since.

      But her version of Ubuntu is no longer supported, and rather than try to upgrade -- she lives 12 hours away, so it's not exactly convenient -- we bought her a self-updating Chromebook on Black Friday. So far, so good, although she's going to have to switch to an HTML5 solitaire game instead of AisleRiot, which has been her go-to for the last seven years.

      I'm still running Ubuntu on my own laptop, but Cinnamon may lure me away. I need to upgrade, and I am not a fan of what Ubuntu has done to the UI.

    2. Re:Cheers for Mint by theskipper · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Cinnamon was the antidote to the dumbed-down interface craze for me. Switched to it a year ago and haven't looked back.

      Nemo alone is worth the switch, it's a file manager that doesn't treat you like a child and "hide the knives" (and trees in the sidebar are intuitive to me, ymmv). Workspace management via panel, hotkeys or OSD all work well. The system menu is usable and makes sense. Applets are actually easy to install and manage. A couple clicks and sane scrollbars are back. And simple things out of the box like being able to resize a window without the idiocy of trying to hit a single pixel in the lower right corner reflects the productivity mindset it targets.

      Maybe all this has been fixed in Unity/Gnome 3/etc. but I haven't paid attention and don't care at this point. Sure there's still bugs and features that need polishing but imho it's worth setting up a vm to test it out.

  3. Cinnamon on RHEL7 by Rob+Riggs · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been a Red Hat/RHEL/CentOS/Fedora user for a *very* long time. I've been trying to use Gnome Shell since Gnome3 came out, so I have given it more than a fair shake. This past month I was testing RHEL7 for desktop upgrades at work and found that Gnome Shell is way too much of a distraction. So, at home I switched my desktop to Cinnamon. Holy Cow! I have a usable desktop again. I found Cinnamon in EPEL7 and installed that at work. It is so much more usable on RHEL7. This is what we will be rolling out as the default desktop firm-wide when we upgrade.

    So -- a big *Thank You* to the Linux Mint team for making Cinnamon,

    --
    the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
    1. Re:Cinnamon on RHEL7 by RabidReindeer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Back in the time of Fairies and Unicorns, every software release was a visit from Santa Claus. Each new release was more wonderful and feature-laden than the one before.

      Then came Windows 2000. This was when it all changed, I think. ET began to "phone home" via the Internet, the software license keys weren't just something that you could type in - now they had to be "real" keys. And Microsoft decided that they would be selective about what multi-media formats they supported. As in, if they didn't "own" it, they wouldn't support it. The Grinch was beginning to appear.

      But the happy little penguins played on, and each new Linux release was Christmas.

      Until certain developers decided that they "knew" what was best for the unwashed masses. One of the first examples was when Nautilus lost one of its most popular window display options. That caused a mighty uproar, to the point where after many futile attempts to persuade the masses, a solution was presented that more or less restored what the Grinch had taken.

      Gnome3 brought the Grinch out into the open. Yes, it was a cleaner, more dynamic display. It was certainly prettier. But some of us aren't using our computers to look good, we're using them to (allegedly) be productive. And the Gnome3 Grinch stole our applets.

      As usual, the apologists had all sorts of excuses why I was wrong not to be properly awed. But all those grody little applets served very important purposes. Since they were in the margins of the display, they couldn't be covered up by sliding windows. They were always visible from every desktop. And this was important because when the machine went South, it was often the case that the reason could be seen from those applets even though the display was too paralyzed to permit switching to another desktop or launching a diagnostic app.

      Which is why I'm now a happy little Cinnamon user. It gave me my applets back. And, from what I can see, it's actually a lot easier to write Cinnamon applets than it ever was to write Gnome applets, should I be so inclined.

      But the Grinch is still creeping around. Gnome3 fixed a lot of the things that offended people, but as far as I know, the applets weren't among them. And now we have systemd playing Grinch as well. What's next? I shudder to think, but I may drop my longstanding relationship with Red Hat for Debian if systemd is going to stay the way it is.

      I whine. I complain loudly. But given a choice, I also vote with my feet. Which is why I'm running Cinnamon.

  4. And yet... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Despite a lot of hand-waving initially from the Mint folks about not containing the same "spyware" that Ubuntu does (i.e.the Dash Lens that submitted searches to Amazon, which incidentally had a rather obvious "switch" to turn it off), they still won't explain exactly what their "Mint Search Enhancer" extension for Firefox actually -does-...nor is the source provided for it anywhere by the people behind Mint. They offer a vague suggestion that you can e-mail a request for the source for any package on the website, but no one I know who has tried has actually received any source from them when requesting the Search Enhancer...not even a reply. Nor will they explain why the Search Enhancer is a dependency for the entire Linux Mint desktop and that removing it will also remove the desktop meta-package...that's easily explained though, they don't want you to be able to get rid of it easily. What isn't easily explained is why.

    So then, linuxmint.com, perhaps you'd like to explain? Because until someone does I wouldn't touch Mint. There's no other distribution I know of that's attempting so very hard to hide the functionality and purpose of a browser extension...even the source for Ubuntu's "Firefox Pack" are easily found, and more importanly easily removed.