I've found Ubuntu's Unity to be really non-intuitive and awkward to use ... even after several years of using it I've never got used to it and generally found it frustrating to use. Cinnamon is an absolute joy to use in comparison - just does its job and gets out of the way.
Sounds like Mint is a sort of "unbuntu-without-unity" which is worth its weight in gold in my opinion. Wish I could change my work's distro to use it!
I've used Mint and Cinnamon for over a year... after I stopped using it and started using GNOME on Debian I started realizing how un-polished every part of that GUI was. GNOME is a lightyear ahead of Cinnamon in terms of UX/UI design IMHO.
I really like Cinnamon, but I found it had a habit of randomly chewing up CPU cycles for no reason. That was a bit over a year ago, and I switched to XFCE.
Anyone had similar problems and found it has improved or not?
All the Ubuntu's have terminal GUI problems. They just keep tinkering and changing things. Gnome did this to itself, too, and thus, we're left with all these weird GUIs that aspire to be Windows 8, or Mac OS, when Gnome 2 was fucking perfect and shoulda been left alone.
> All the Ubuntu's have terminal GUI problems. They just keep tinkering and changing things.
Xubuntu doesn't. 4.12 in 15.04/15.10 was much the same as 4.10 in 14.04 (other than bug fixes and some small tweaks to fix stuff they where near identical).
The XFCE folks reached rough parity with Gnome 2 in terms of desktop usability then just focussed on small increment improvements and bug fixes and that has been a major win imo as I can use a desktop that supports modern linux distro's, is fast on everything and rarely surprises me.
I was a happy Gnome 2 user for years, and am now a happy Mate user. I don't think the weird GUIs aspire to be Windows 8 or Mac OS. They just aspire to be weird.
Since the Ubuntu/Unity/Gnome3 disaster happened I switched to XUbuntu and I have been extremely happy with it. Xfce with XUbuntu is very much like the olden days of Ubuntu/Gnome2.
The only real issue with XUbuntu is the lack of window resize control. The window borders are a single pixel wide and it can be extremely frustrating to resize a window. The only way to reasonably get it done is by using the either one of the top window corners but if you use the left window corner you have to be careful not to accidentally close the window.
> Xfce with XUbuntu is very much like the olden days of Ubuntu/Gnome2
I had RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 6.5 forced on me in a workplace, and it has Gnome2. Having that side-by-side with recent xubuntu on my laptop, Xfce is way ahead, much better than Gnome2.
I use this now, but I also try to use it on some seriously old Dell laptops at my non-profit. Sadly, that means I must first install Ubuntu, vanilla. This means I then must login to Unity and install Gnome-Flashback.
Normally, this takes about 10 seconds on a modern machine. On these 10 year old Dells? Unity chugs... A task that should take me 5 minutes takes an hour because Unity lags so far behind the mouse and slows every single process on the machine to an absolute crawl.
I cussed out Canonical for this a few years ago when they asked me some survey questions. They wanted to know why Ubuntu was not more popular on the server. My answer was that Unity was such a crock of shit that no one wanted to go near damn thing, even if they were just going to make the machine into a headless server. It's that freakin' bad.
If the HW is the same, you could create a custom NixOS based desktop image based on Fluxbox (or awesome) with just the programs you need (1 browser, skype, mail program, etc.).
Then you can manage updates automatically, probably just security updates.
I understand the appeal for sticking with what you know (because ease-of-use is most often just "what I'm used to"), but I don't really find the modern Gnome UI and desktop problematic. It has some pretty big annoyances, in terms of notifications (some of which are seemingly impossible to disable), and the screen dimming thing that it does when using any menus (which also effects the secondary display, meaning you simply can't use a Gnome desktop for any professional video or presentation task).
Nonetheless, I'm not choosing a distro based on the desktop; Fedora has spins for every major desktop I'd want to use (though no good tiling WM options, with good integration, unfortunately, but nobody seems to build something like that).
I do like that they're building based on the LTS release of Ubuntu. The life cycle of a standard Ubuntu release is too short for comfort, IMHO. (Fedora, too, though security updates stick around long enough for me.)
As someone whose desktop needs are pretty simple, I agree with this assessment. If you want a *nix that's point-and-click configurable, looks nice, makes it easy to install software, and generally doesn't get in your way, Mint is definitely the way to go. I've tried all the popular distros, from (X/K)ubuntu, to Debian, to Fedora, to Arch and others, and I inevitably keep coming back to Mint. Just my 2 cents.
Last time I looked on Mint there was no support for upgrading the system. It doesn't matter how easy installs are, I'm not going to tell my mother-in-law to reinstall twice per year.
This review consists of someone who clicks through an installation and tell what it looks like. That's not very interesting. You only install once, and colors are configurable, if you care about those things. Supported hardware must work without configuration or drivers, but that's mostly a solved problem.
Casual users care about longevity. Will my software stop working because of an upgrade? Will something move because of a redesign, so I don't know how to use it anymore? Are those things there for Linux Mint yet?
> Last time I looked on Mint there was no support for upgrading the system.
Some years ago, the recommended way to upgrade Mint was indeed to do a full reinstall [1]. For a couple past years, there has been a simpler way, involving a bit of command line acrobatics [2]. Still not good for your mother-in-law.
Apparently [3] only in 2015 Mint finally started to have the "normal" way, where you just click on an upgrade button, and the system upgrades itself. But even now, this does not upgrade the kernel. Weird.
> Level 4 and 5 updates are not recommended unless they bring solutions to issues you're facing
What's a level 4 update? And how do I know if it solves an issue I'm facing? I haven't got the faintest idea what they are talking about and I dare say I'm an experienced user otherwise. What could my in-laws possibly do with that information?
> Upgrade for a reason
> "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it".
So don't upgrade it is. Will then bugs continue to be fixed to my system? Will there be timely security fixes? As an end user, I only want things not to break.
> Should you decide to upgrade to 17.2's recommended kernel you can do so
So not only are you encouraged not to upgrade, but to mix kernel versions as well. Not helpful. Their users must run an awful lot of combinations.
I think I'll pass, again. But thanks for digging this up! It does indeed look like the project is moving forward, and looks a lot improved. There is still room for an easy-to-use Debian for end users, which Ubuntu managed to be for a number of years.
These concerns are exactly why I don't install or recommend Mint to others. Terrifying that they haven't fixed it after all those years. It seems more of an attitude rather than technical issue.
> There is still room for an easy-to-use Debian for end users
Does it have to be Debian? I'm looking forward to the inevitable "non-free" Guix fork that my grandmother can use. That will surely be the year of the Linux desktop.
> It seems more of an attitude rather than technical issue.
Indeed. All the above concerned what looks like official communication from the project only, not what they choose to spend their time on. But it's important to give a fair picture of yoru project to the outside world, if not for other reasons than simply to avoid hordes of thankless users demanding support.
It's a bit unfortunate when articles like the Ars one paints this as a desktop operating system for end users. It's clearly not what they're aiming for, and it only reinforces the commonly held view that Linux is somehow for nerds only.
Ubuntu seems to still be the desktop operating system to recommend for non-technical users, but between Unity and the shopping lenses we desperately need a plan B.
> Does it have to be Debian?
No, but Debian does bring so much of the solid foundation "for free" that I feel it is probably the easiest way to get there. Debian has had a mostly working upgrade path for some 20 years now, which is simply outstanding.
What's missing is mainly a well polished default GUI, including the ability to discover and install new software. Debian is simply too flexible for a non-technical user. It must probably also take care not to break the most non-free software.
I've smoked a few installs doing the acrobatics, and I'd consider myself a pretty decent Linux admin. This stuff is very much still in the 1% nerd camp.
Not sure what you mean by 'support'. There is an extremely easy and stable upgrade process as well as guides, forum help, etc. However, it isn't necessary to upgrade frequently if you go on the LTS track.
As for 'reinstalling twice per year' again, not sure where you're getting this from. Linux mint 17.3 is supported until April 2019. That's almost 3 and a half years before you need to upgrade.
Whatever "support" means for an open source system, but is it recommended and is it well tested? The official documentation said "don't upgrade, do a clean install". That alone made me not consider it at the time.
Three and a half years of support is impressive for a community project and I wonder how they manage. However that matters little for a consumer operating system if you can only do n+1 upgrades anyway. What matters is that upgrades are automated and well tested.
I run cinnamon on one of my thinkpads. It's interesting to me how there are a ton of things is does usability wise better than my work OS X laptop:
* The desktop overview 'expose' like thing gives me a large 2x3 grid of mini desktops, each containing mini windows that I can drag between different desktops. OS X displays a tiny 1x6 list of desktops and you can't drag windows between desktops directly.
* When I click the date in my panel I get a mini calendar popup.
* When I click the volume applet it has a entry right there for switching output devices. on OS X you have to option click the volume thing to get the hidden menu. Right click on an external mouse does not work.
Those are just the ones I notice on a daily basis..
Cool.. That didn't end up working for me since I use dark mode, but I followed their suggestion to try http://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/ instead which is working nicely.
I installed Mint 17.3 Cinnamon a couple weeks ago. Every time I've installed a Linux distro in the past 10 years, I have run into major issues with drivers, and this was no exception. It's related to having both an onboard Intel graphics card and an Nvidia video card. If I disable the Nvidia card, performance is fine but I am unable to hookup a second monitor. If I use the Nvidia card, I can hook up a second monitor, but there are major issues with screen tearing. If not for this issue, I would be quite satisfied with this OS.
I was using Mint for over a year. New one is really glitchy on windowing or graphics. Sometimes it makes a weird pattern while keystrokes dont do anything. Also, dragging file save dialog to see a title in background causes entire window to unmaximize & hide behind dialog. Huh!?
About to ditch it entirely if I dont find work-arounds in a few days.
MATE or Cinnamon? Want to know before I install. I get weird ass errors like nobody when I install Linux. Currently, my Ubutntu 10/14 machine randomly decides to ignore keyboard inputs and replace them with random other letters. Happens right in the middle of me typing, and I do a lot of interviews. I've literally had to reboot the damn thing in the middle of an interview because my typing was onscreen as akusfhlasiuryieuhfisuhefuishfiushefiluhsufh. Never found a single forum post or bug report anywhere near this...
It sounds like you may have accidentally triggered a shortcut for switching keyboard layouts. Try looking through the keyboard shortcut settings for something too easy to press by accident.
Appreciate the tip. Ill check. You have a guess on why moving a Save File dialog messes with window for application itself? That's a new bug to me for Linux in general.
F2 for rename is a Windows idiom - as is the slow double click mentioned in the article. I'd be surprised if F2 didn't work, given the way Cinnamon apes Windows idioms.
(Not that that is a bad thing. I use Cinnamon by choice on Ubuntu 14.04 in my day job. I far prefer Windows idioms to the Mac conventions that much of Unity is aiming for.)
I echo most of the author's excitements but for the ElementaryOS.
I've just stopped looking at any other distro after installing the latest, Freya, which is also based on 14.04.
Elementary doesn't have many of the UX shortcuts that the latest Mint has, and has far less developers working on it, but it's still such a joy to use.
Not for many laptops as GTK doesn't handle non-integer scaling well, so it doesn't really support MidPPI-screens. It can work normally and work for HiPPI with x2 scaling, and that's it.
I'm unaware of any simple way to set larger widgets - I think GNOME had some knobs but in their quest to "simplify" UIs they were removed long time ago.
There are no theme-based workarounds in Mint (i.e. theme with larger widgets), either. Their theming team suggest if one's got a 13" FullHD screen they've just got to have small widgets (https://github.com/linuxmint/mint-themes/issues/90)
Qt has somewhat better support for such displays, but I think the last Mint KDE release is 17.2.
Reading this post I am reminded just how much more work it is to have a functional linux desktop that ends up running worse than a Mac or windows box. More for less. Less battery life, less games, less driver support. Old hardware. I've been running OS X for many years now but I think in the future I see myself going back to windows and using docker toolbox to get an easy to start and maintain linux development environment.
Lot's of Windows tools have matured and there are good terminal options now for sshing into a local lightweight vm to do dev. On the hardware of my choosing, no more being locked into overpriced boring silver apple hardware.
> Reading this post I am reminded just how much more work it is to have a functional linux desktop that ends up running worse than a Mac or windows box.
I'm extremely happy with stumpwm. It runs, it switches between emacs, Firefox and a good console just fine. It's infinitely more work to get Windows or an OS X box to the same level of functionality, because neither of them properly supports all of these key features: POSIX; a Common Lisp tiling window manager (which means I always have a REPL a slime-connect away); native X11.
mostly unrelated – but I wouldn't have known/cared about POSIX compliance until I ran into it:
On OS X, getopt is POSIX compliant. GNU utilities tend not to enforce POSIX in getopt, as a result you can do things like ls .txt -la
On a POSIX complaint system, the optional arguments must come before any file arguments. This is super annoying to me, after having been using Linux for 15 years :)
Personally, I've been super happy with OS X for all purposes except servers, but to each their own, and that's where Linux (and the BSDs) shine – giving you access under the hood, which is awesome, but some of us just want the car to drive itself, so to speak.
> Personally, I've been super happy with OS X for all purposes except servers, but to each their own, and that's where Linux (and the BSDs) shine – giving you access under the hood, which is awesome, but some of us just want the car to drive itself, so to speak.
I can understand that, but I just can't live without a tiling window manager. Every time I have to use a UI with movable windows I feel old-fashioned and clumsy. If you think about, tiling is the interface folks are used to with their phones and tablets already.
There's good UI research potential in discovering the ideal ways to indicate how to split, move &c. windows in a tiling WM.
There are a bunch of decent tiling window managers on OS X but I don't know if any support a Common Lisp connection. Which one do you use on Linux, I'd like to check it out.
I've tried tiling wms in the past but they never stick for me, probably because most of my work is isolated to the browser and email, and I typically have each maximized on separate displays. I've always preferred my terminals to be backgrounded when not in use and to have all the tabs consolidated.
I mainly use Debian stable and Xfce, the latter of has a few annoying issues. I bought a cheap windows box, and hoped to use it as a work machine as you have described. But I have networking issues and other annoyances with my Intel wireless card. Bluetooth falls over as soon as the machine hits suspend, and when I loose WIFI signal, only a reboot recovers. Windows 8.1 is a crapfest, and it feels like a botched together repackaged version of Windows (the UI and admin UI is horrible). My Debian box is far more reliable. Anyway the grass isn't always greener... I remember when the Linux desktop space was really exciting and innovating. I'm still after something better.
It depends on your setup. I've had best results doing my development on a powerful workstation that, when coupled with a good LTS operating system like CentOS 7, doesn't give me any maintenance headaches (or at least amortises any headaches over a sufficiently long time that I don't care), and doesn't force me to deal with the battery issues you mentioned or the other fiddly bits of running Linux on a laptop.
This was pretty easy to setup and has run quite well without much administrative work beyond the initial installation (something I've never been able to say for Ubuntu, unfortunately), and when I'm away I can just SSH in from a Chromebook.
Tools? It took 2-3 hours of reading howtows, tweaking and experimenting before getting Win8 in a "workable" state on a computer without touchscreen. Its like Linux backwards: to make the system work have to go backwards, disable every single "new" feature! If you wanna automate something, good luck, with that... Are you going to launch a VM to run a ruby or py script??? Docker support came last to windows and many nice tools dont run on windows at all.
Windows make sense to me if you wanna do specific things but a dev/admin OS outside the MS ecosystem is a awful.
Last time I installed linux from scratch (ubuntu 13.10), which was about two years ago, it took me an entire day to figure out how to get a screen resolution that didn't immediately give me a headache, and the only way I fixed the issue of "trying to display a particular font crashes the entire x server" was to upgrade to 14.04.
Have to agree with this. I freshly installed windows 10, and the sleep feature is just not working when the lid is closed. I've tried several suggestions and still got the same results. Feels the same like setting up linux desktop, only I know in the end it will work.
I migrated from mint/ubuntu/debian insanity to FreeBSD for working and windows to play and share obediently my private data with criminals (government, marketing people, companies and VC included).
I stopped fixing stuff because it works, and since then I am happily bored again doing the minimum work expected from me without stress. Some stuff I don't have anymore (like weired chars in the console). But I never thought of it as a good idea in the first place I want ";" to be ";" not a greek question mark.
Bye bye linux(es). You are becoming an unusable bloatware.
I have to admit that the prospect of Ubuntu's future looking not so bright is a bit disconcerting. Does anyone have any insight into why the author of this article makes this claim? I know that there is a lot of controversy about Ubuntu's changes to try to build 'something new' that will compete with the big players, but I didn't think this meant that Ubuntu has an uncertain future.
I guess nobody has a time machine, but as a long-time user of Ubuntu, I'm intrigued by what those in the know feel about its future. Is Ubuntu jumping the shark?
Probably the fact that after they made Linux much user friendly and popular they focused on mobile and didn't really touch the desktop significantly again.
I don't think I've ever used Mint, or if I did it was brief. I've used Netrunner which was really nice, but ultimately fell in love with openSUSE. I may someday give Mint a try though. This is interesting news but the article is confusing to me at first glance as to what Mint is actually doing. Cinnamon isn't really for me though. I loved Gnome 2 because it was highly customizable but now that it's gone my only alternative is KDE or XFCE but XFCE feels like it's missing something everytime I use it.
The Mint updater has a menu option for upgrading. You click it, and it updates, reliably. The KDE version gets the update option later than the others, though.
I've been out of the desktop Linux world for a while. How does Arch compare to Mint? I rather like Arch's rolling release model, but Mint sounds like a seriously polished piece of work.
I looked at Arch but the install looked difficult, so I ended up on Manjaro. Arch based with an easy to use installer and package manager. Works great on the laptop I am currently typing on, but its a bit crashy on my Gigabyte brix (though Mint had problems on that box as well).
I've actually just installed Gnome + PaperGTK on a chromebook pixel LS running arch and I've never been happier with a linux box. Migrated over from a thinkpad x1 2015
In 17.3, is Flash still a dependency of the main codecs deb? In previous versions of 17.x, it was impossible to remove the Flash deb without uninstalling everything useful.
I've found Ubuntu's Unity to be really non-intuitive and awkward to use ... even after several years of using it I've never got used to it and generally found it frustrating to use. Cinnamon is an absolute joy to use in comparison - just does its job and gets out of the way.
Sounds like Mint is a sort of "unbuntu-without-unity" which is worth its weight in gold in my opinion. Wish I could change my work's distro to use it!