Linux Mint 18 'Sarah' Released, Supports Generic GTK X-Apps (linuxmint.com)

Slashdot reader Type44Q writes: The Linux Mint team announced the immediate availability of their latest release, Mint 18 "Sarah," in Cinnamon and MATE flavors. These follow on the heels of their respective beta versions, which have been out for nearly a month.
"Linux Mint 18 is a long-term support release which will be supported until 2021," the team announces on MATE's "new features" page, adding they've improved their update manager, included support for the Debian syntax of "apt", and are working on the "X-Apps" project to "produce generic applications for traditional GTK desktop environments...to replace applications which no longer integrate properly outside of a particular environment."

Comments

So they're fixing GNOME 3's fuck ups?

[Anonymous Coward]

"produce generic applications for traditional GTK desktop environments...to replace applications which no longer integrate properly outside of a particular environment."

Is that just a polite, politically-correct way of saying that they're fixing up all of the shit that the GNOME 3 and systemd crowd have broken over the past several years?

Re:So they're fixing GNOME 3's fuck ups?

[SurenEnfiajyan]

Exacly.

But where are the BENEFITS?

[petes_PoV]

OK, I went to the page that explained about all the stuff that has changed. Some apps have been substituted for different ones. Different artwork. A new daemon or two. New themes. And some different ways of doing stuff.

But where is the list of things that I couldn't do on older releases, that I will be able to do now? What new opportunities does this release open up to me, as a user? What extra functions does this release have?

In short, where is the compelling case to spend time and effort to install this release?

Re:Nice, but...

[AthanasiusKircher]

and just want a stable system on which I can get some work done. (I feel this way about trying to choose a distro too.) And want something I can use on both newer and older hardware

Those are precisely the reasons that I switched my primary home desktop OS from Ubuntu to Mint several years ago. (This was actually before the Unity debacle, but I could have seen something like that coming given poor choices Ubuntu had made before.)

I'm NOT trying to convert you. We all have our particular stories and needs. But Ubuntu for many years never actually satisfied the "just works" criterion I care most about -- they seemed too interested in showing off Wobbly Windows and other BS, while major functionality would often break on every upgrade. Particularly things like sound, video, codecs, etc. always seemed a pain to actually get working, and they were often unstable. (And I'm not kidding that EVERY new version broke things on my systems, and each time the breakage was different.)

I just got tired of it. I abandoned Ubuntu and went back to Debian for a while, though that had its own issues. Distro-hopped for a while, but nothing ever seemed stable and user-friendly. Then I tried Mint, and every computer I've installed it on in the past 6 years or so has "just worked." (And as for older hardware, the XFCE edition has worked great for me.)

I'm sure Ubuntu is probably more stable now, but I've seen no compelling reason to go back. Mint's interface is relatively stable and works. It's funny, but that's really all I give a crap about these days in an OS -- don't change stuff every year for no apparent reason, and make it work on standard hardware. And if possible give me a choice that runs as light as possible on system resources. I can get used to just about anything if it satisfies that criteria, but unfortunately most OSes don't.