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Linux Mint 19.2 'Tina' is On the Way, But the Developers Seem Defeated and Depressed (betanews.com)
Brian Fagioli, reporting for BetaNews: Today should be happy times for the Linux Mint community, as we finally learn some new details about the upcoming version 19.2! It will be based on Ubuntu 18.04 and once again feature three desktop environments -- Xfce, Mate, and Cinnamon. We even found out the code name for Linux Mint 19.2 -- "Tina." And yet, it is hard to celebrate. Why? Because the developers seem to be depressed and defeated. They even appear to be a bit disenchanted with Free Software development overall. Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project, shared a very lengthy blog post today, and it really made me sad.
He wrote, "For a team to work, developers need to feel like heroes. They want the same things as users, they are users, they were 'only' users to start with. At some stage they decide to get involved and they start investing time, efforts and emotions into improving our project. What they're looking for the most is support and happiness. They need feedback and information to understand bugs or feature requests and when they're done implementing something, they need to feel like heroes, they literally do, that's part of the reason they're here really." Upon publication of the article, Jason Hicks, Muffin maintainer and member of the Linux Mint team, corroborated the claims made by others.
He wrote, "For a team to work, developers need to feel like heroes. They want the same things as users, they are users, they were 'only' users to start with. At some stage they decide to get involved and they start investing time, efforts and emotions into improving our project. What they're looking for the most is support and happiness. They need feedback and information to understand bugs or feature requests and when they're done implementing something, they need to feel like heroes, they literally do, that's part of the reason they're here really." Upon publication of the article, Jason Hicks, Muffin maintainer and member of the Linux Mint team, corroborated the claims made by others.
Hope some developers are reading. Using an older version, 17.3 Cinnamon.
I've used a ton, everything from total bootstraps Linux From Scratch to handholding Ubuntu and all that in between, including tangent OSes BSD and Plan9. Linux Mint is where I can forget about the OS and just do work.
That's about the best compliment I can give. It exceeds commercial OSes like Mac and Windows by a country mile, those are horrid in the meantime and never let me forget them as they try to put me in a straightjacket into their way of bullshit, whether it's procedural or upselling.
Thank You. I haven't expressed it enough. I will donate a $100 to you guys now because it deserves that a minimum. Use it as you want.
Yes! Coming rather late to the Linux-as-the-primary-desktop-OS party, I started with Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and was quite happy with it and converted all my machines to Linux soon after that, but then found too many unwelcome changes in Ubuntu Mate 18.04 when it came out (which even made it stop working well enough to be usable on some slower machines), then tried a few other Linux distros including other Ubuntu flavours which all were ok somehow but all had something I disliked enough to make me continue the search, then tried Mint 19 with xfce on slower machines and Cinnamon on more recent hardware, and I immediately kept it and now that's where I hope to be staying for the foreseeable future.
Beside it being arguably one of the best-maintained and most solid distros around, one of the things I find incredibly nice in Mint is that even the different flavours (Cinnamon and xfce in my case) have been successfully made to look and feel very similar, so that changing between machines which user different flavours is really easy on my nerves.
Well precisely because you have to hassle with installing Cinnamon. Then you have to hassle with unsupported tweaks and widgets for cinnamon. Tweaking isn't productive. Linux mint is simple to get working and maintain and customize. Their sofware manager is more of a wizard than synaptics detailed approach, and is in effect far superior to synaptic. But they also have synaptic available too for custom stuff. Personally I find that if I want to sweat the details I'll just go to the command line with Apt-get.
the obsession with mint is, like apple, it just works. When was the last time anyone said that about Linux?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
In other words, this development cycle wasn't fun and the devs feel too little appreciation in return.
Good thing their paychecks cleared the bank ... oh wait.
More seriously, this is the advantage of commercial software and corporate directed FOSS projects. Paychecks are how the non-fun parts get done and projects completed. Getting volunteers to diligently work on the non-fun parts of a project can be a major hurdle to overcome.
fwiw, I work on embedded systems where users will NEVER be allowed to login or install stuff to this system. its very static and industrial.
what is our init system?
systemd.
sigh ;(
it was not done that way because smart guys set our system up. likely, it was LAZY guys who didn't understand enough about what EMBEDDED means.
we've been stuck with systemd in our embedded system for over 3 years now. I am trying to make it change, but only a handful of us at my company 'get it' and its an uphill battle, for some strange reason.
systemd may be ok for when users will install random apps and the startup tree needs to be smarter. but who, here, would truly recommend systemd for static embedded systems?
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."