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Speed-Ups, Small Fixes Earn Good Marks From Ars For Mint 17.2
Ars Technica reviews the newest release from Linux MInt -- version 17.2, offered with either the Cinnamon desktop, or the lighter-weight MATE, which feels like what Gnome 2 might feel in an alternate universe where Gnome 3 never happened. Reviewer Scott Gilbertson has mostly good things to say about either variety, and notes a few small drawbacks, too. The nits seem to be minor ones, though they might bite some people more than others: Mint, based on Ubuntu deep down, is almost perfectly compatible with Ubuntu packages, but not every one, and this newest version of Mint ships with the 3.16 kernel of Ubuntu 14.04, which means slightly less advanced hardware support. (Gilbertson notes, though, that going with 3.16 means Mint may be the ideal distro if you want to avoid systemd.) "This release sees the Cinnamon developers focusing on some of what are sometimes call "paper cut" fixes, which just means there's been a lot of attention to the details, particularly the small, but annoying problems. For example, this release adds a new panel applet called "inhibit" which temporarily bans all notifications. It also turns off screen locking and stops any auto dimming you have set up, making it a great tool for when you want to watch a video or play a game."
More "paper cut" fixes include improved multi-panel options, graphics-refresh tweaks, a way to restart the Cinnamon desktop without killing the contents of a session, graphics-refresh tweaks, and other speed-ups that make this release "noticeably snappier than its predecessor on the same hardware."
For example, this release adds a new panel applet called "inhibit" which temporarily bans all notifications. It also turns off screen locking and stops any auto dimming you have set up, making it a great tool for when you want to watch a video or play a game.
Facepalm. That should happen automatically without having the need for a panel applet. Let me guess that they actually added it because the normal lock/dim inhibition is too broken.
Great to have a distro (or any open source project for that matter) that values user feedback and tries to meet needs, rather than having "churn and feature churn for change and hype's sake", and also for taking conservative approach to radical new things that are yet immature or just badly engineered
No issues with Cinnamon or Mint 17.2. Everything works great, and I could not imagine using anything else right now. I have settled into Mint and Cinnamon since I like the interface and it is compatible with Ubuntu. Over the years, I have jumped around and tried different distros, but I have been with Mint now for years since they do everything right.
Aside from Linux Mint, pretty much every major Linux distro, from Fedora through to Debian, has switched to systemd recently, or will be switching soon.
The other modern Linux distros that haven't switched yet are impractical for serious use because they're extremely primitive (Slackware), or impractical because they sometimes require extensive compilation of packages (Gentoo), or are otherwise unsuitable because they are niche distro projects that may not be around next month.
Systemd is just not suitable for many Linux users. Maybe it's fine for somebody's workstation, where failing to boot or downtime are considered tolerable. But admins running production Linux servers cannot put up with bullshit like that. They need simple software that will work, and in the rare cases when it doesn't then it needs to be easy to debug. Practical experience with systemd has shown that it has some severe problems. A cursory reading of the Debian mailing lists and bug reports will highlight numerous examples of things going very wrong with it, and its poor architecture then making it difficult to diagnose and fix such problems.
So serious Linux users are facing a small number of choices:
1. To continue to use older, pre-systemd Linux distros for as long as is practically possible.
2. To use Linux Mint, which for the time being is the only major and usable modern Linux distro that isn't forcing systemd on its users.
3. Move to some other operating system, typically one of the BSDs, or even Windows.
Collectively, modern Linux distros are quickly becoming a systemd monoculture, and experience has shown us that monocultures are dangerous, especially in the context of software.
It's very likely that Mint switches to systemd with Mint 18 and LMDE 3 (i.e. those on Ubuntu 16.04 and the debian after jessie)
After testing out a dozen or so current releases, I have been really impressed with the current state of the Linux desktop/laptop experience.
My Brazilian grandma-in-law's laptop just bit the dust, and I wanted to set her up with something from my aging arsenal of dust collectors. I pulled out an Asus 900A (2009 Intel Atom based netbook with 4GB 1st-generation SSD) which ran terribly with any OS back when I last used it in 2011. So I installed Porteus Linux on it, a distro that allows you to generate your own installation using their simple generator at build.porteus.org, and now it freaking flies. It's snappy, has 3.5GB of free space, and to my amazement the sound and video hardware was set up automatically. She can Skype, FB, and browse with it right out of the box.
I also recently found what looked to be a nice laptop left in my building's recycling area, so I took it home and fired it up. It was a HP Pavillion DV2-1019AX with Windows 7 installed, and it ran horribly. 240p streaming video brought it to a stuttering standstill. I loaded Mint 17.1 XFCE and all of the sudden it feels like a powerhouse. It does 1080p video without flinching and everything else you'd want a laptop to do without blinking. In short, I'm very impressed with the current state of Linux for desktop environments. It's only been a few years since I last tried one out, but those old distros now seem like ancient history. These are modern, efficient, luxurious looking operating systems.
Just updated to Mint 17.2 and use MATE. Nice - it is a bit snappier. The only aggravation is the start menu still lags on first opening (a "paper cut" issue, but it's been around for a while).
I am a Windows XP EOL refugee that transitioned to Linux Mint last year (but I have used UNIX and Fedora at work for some time). At the time I had no idea what would be the best home desktop distro for me out of all the Linux distros available. Mint with MATE behaves a lot like XP; UI is similar enough that the transition from XP was very painless. I put a lot of different distros on a stick and checked them all out, and Mint/MATE worked for me.
This is one of the bigger problems preventing Linux desktop adoption IMO; there is an overwhelming number of Linux flavors, and very little guidance available as to what are the pros and cons of each, so casual users just suffer on with Windows because it is a simpler decision. Few really want to put in the effort to explore that whole ecosystem to find one that they like (and fewer know that they can even test the variants without installing), so Windows is the default experience.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
In hindsight, it's now obvious that Linus should have used his position of leadership and influence to put an end to systemd earlier, for the sake of the Linux community. It's also obvious that a major distro like Debian should not have switched to systemd, as the process of doing this fractured its community beyond repair.
Why would he have done that? He may have issues with the way the developers work and a few things that systemd has done, but is overall not against systemd. As he stated in the interview responses:
Yeah, I've had some personality issues with some of the maintainers, but that's about how you handle bug reports and accept blame (or not) for when things go wrong. If people thought that meant that I dislike systemd, I will have to disappoint you guys.
So it doesn't seem "obvious" at all that he should have done that based on his own statements.