I run Mint 14 "Nadia" on one of my machines. I have no intention to upgrade to Mint 15 at this point.
The problem is, Ubuntu 13.04 is only supported for 9 months, and it's already been a month since the release. Since Mint recommends fresh installs rather than upgrading between releases, it means you'll have less than 8 months to play with it before you must wipe it and move to Mint 16. That's a rather short shelf life for an "ambitious" release.
Since Canonical seems unwilling to support any non-LTS release for more than a few months anymore, it might be a good idea for the Mint team to reconsider their release cycles as well. Perhaps they should stick to LTS releases and work more aggressively on backporting stuff. Perhaps they should finally switch their main distro to a rolling release based on Debian (LMDE). In either case, I don't think there's much point following Ubuntu releases as closely as Mint has done so far.
I agree. I think they should switch to at least Debian testing, if not Sid. There's really nothing to be gained by staying, especially since Mint is currently at the top of Distrowatch.
I use Arch, and I find rolling to be amazing. I love it when I run updates and I get an upgrade to my DE without having to go through a 30-minute or longer upgrade process.
The problem with using Sid is that it's, you know, unstable. Ubuntu does a lot of work to stabilize Sid before each release. If Mint did the same, there would be a lot of duplicated effort so they might as well just use Ubuntu as a base.
The problem with using Debian testing is that it gets stuck in a freeze for 6-10 months every 2 years. It's like stop-and-go traffic. And then, right after a release, testing becomes flooded with so many new packages that it becomes difficult to test them for security or stability. A few serious breaks in the past forced LMDE to adopt an "update pack" approach that lags Debian testing by a few weeks.
If the "always-releasable Debian testing" [1] idea becomes reality, it might be possible to have Linux Mint follow Debian testing and still be highly stable.
I have used sid as my main desktop for over a decade now. To be honest I actually run a mixed system with a few packages (not just one-offs but big things like xmonad/iceweasel/awesome/git/pandoc/git-annex/gitit) from experimental. If it has been a long time (5-7 years) since you tried unstable you can think of experimental as what unstable used to be. When was the last time you tried sid?
When I first made the switch from RH to debian there were occasional issues but these went away as I became more experienced with debian. It has been years since I encountered a bug that caused me to lose more than an hour of productivity. The most recent issue that I have had with unstable was over a year ago and it was simply a matter of pinning a version of libcairo. The only reason I remember this so well is that someone else on HN was having trouble and my comment[1] on how to fix it was my highest rated comment at the time.
I think the point was that it is not their main effort. I was under the impression that LMDE was intended as a parallel effort for the sake of giving the Mint team options in case there is a problem with Ubuntu in the same way that there was an imperfect PowerPC build of Windows NT or an Intel build of OS X long before Apple switched.
Regardless of whether I am completely of base about the intentions, when I last tried LMDE a year ago, I found it easy to break during updates. Though it wasn't difficult to fix my mistakes, the ease with which I was able to make them seemed contrary to the spirit of Mint, as though it didn't yet have a much polish as the main efforts. Things definitely could have changed though.
I share your sentiment. Their progress with the Cinnamon is really cool, and I am really tempted to switch, but at the same time, I don't want to miss out on their (hopefully) even more exciting work on future versions.
So this article seems to say the biggest new features are support for HTML-based login screens and a new driver manager that "uses the Ubuntu back-end but Clem says it 'looks a bit better'"?
this was the issue I had with using a Linux OS (ubuntu, mint) full time and why I switched back to Windows (and run a VM). many of the distros are focused on replicating basic OS features over and over again.
They seem to be focused on providing features 99% of Linux users don't want or need instead of fixing the plethora of bugs that are creeping in. Last time I tried to install Ubuntu, I ran into several bugs in the installer, which Linux Mint inherited. The hard disk encryption setup failed, for example. When I finally got the installer to work, I was greeted with several background apps crashing. Months later, these bugs still aren't fixed. The quality has really gone down in the last 2 years, to the point where I'm thinking I'll have to give Debian or Fedora Core a shot next time.
I wish these people would focus on being more minimal: do one thing and do it well. Instead, they've been trying to tailor their desktop OS to run on tablets. Who the f* runs Ubuntu on a tablet anyways? (if you do, please respond) They're alienating most of their users for a potential market they realistically have almost no chance of getting into.
I definitely agree.
One grave mistake I made had resulted in all my data being lost.
I have always been Fedora fan and mostly I am not disappointed, (although Fedora suffers from equally annoying bugs as well, like sound). But overall it's a great distro, and installs nicely.
Now I am doing development work, so tend to try and stay up to date as much as possible, since the software I use is very unstable and just beginning to mature so they can play fast and loose with the upgrade cycle.
Now typically Fedora installs are easy, I can allocate free space or it knows about other distros and I can replace them.
Now I had a perfect running system with Fedora 18 and Linux Mint 13(Maya), and probably longest running without upgrade. After this long period I had forgotten that if I want Linux Mint, I have to manually partition for it to behave properly. I had forgotten this and selected the option to replace the existing Linux Mint like I always do in Fedora for like the last 4 releases.
For whatever reason it automatically chooses my raid partiton(sda), instead of my SSD(sdb) which I store my OSes on to format, and I loose about 1.5TB of data I have been collecting for sometime.
Not to mention it is incapable of behaving nicely with Fedora(possibly due to LVM structure) and in the end I loose everything and have to go back to scratch. It also makes a new partition for the bootloader then cannot boot Fedora, I cannot even repair the grub bootloader for both oses to work together.
It's a shame because one release ago everything was fine.
But now I have sworn of Ubuntu and Linux Mint unless I am forced to.
It's come to a point where I just want to create the same packages for Fedora and maintain it myself. I am sick and tired of this constant upgrading and loosing your shit. I am use to it as a developer, but it's really starting to kill a lot of time having to re-setup my system.
Mint never ceases to impress me. Mint 15 runs faster off of a live cd for me than ubuntu 12.04 LTS does natively. I presume this is something to do with unity and all the underlying bloat that is becoming more and more of a defining characteristic of ubuntu these days. I don't have anything against unity in user interface terms; I think it's a pretty decent GUI and doesn't deserve the flak it gets from the linux community. Nevertheless, Cinnamon is a triumph of clean, simple, and utilitarian UI design and trumps any other conventional UI on GNU/Linux I've ever used, and the underlying design of Mint seems to ensure there's never any slow down getting in the way of getting things done.
Linux Mint has sucked since 11, and I mean that. It sucks.
Mint 10 (julia) was awesome, and I refuse to tolerate Mint beyond that version. Mint 11 was awful, and I feel the same way about everything thereafter.
Bad, ugly themes. Strictly enforced interface, with settings locked away from user customization. Everything was unnecessarily new and different, and previous experience was not compatible with the new interface. (yes, I know about how everyone (actually, just snob developers) hated Gnome 3, and there was a revolt, and migration to Mate Cinnamon, XFCE, blah blah blah. They all suck. I hate them. They are not good.)
Before you argue with me, consider that the only thing Mint has to offer is it's desktop/windowing interface. Otherwise, it's merely yet another Linux flavor, and if I have to relearn and resort to the command line for ANYTHING, why not just use some other Linux distribution, and deal with everything from the command line in the first place? Which is exactly what I did.
Mint is currently my favorite distro. But the lack of encryption in the installer really makes it a pain to install. Manual mounting, chroot, setting up cryptsetup an all that stuff. So for a quick install I still prefer Debian which supports encryption out of the box.
Does anybody know about the encryption support in Mint 15?
You can do that. FDE commonly means an encrypted partition even though that's not what the name implies. It's never truly full disk as you have to have an unencrypted partition for the boot loader. There's also no restriction on having other unencrypted partitions. I've had this set up this way since Mint 14. I'm not sure why you're having an issue. You just set this up when you're creating your partitions (manually).
I have three main partitions: the unencrypted /boot partition, a LUKS encrypted partition that contains my / partition, and an unencrypted NTFS partition for Windows. Works like a charm.
The way to do it is to run `sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade` (or `apt-get upgrade`) before running the installer when you're in the live environment. There's a newer version of the installer in the repositories that has the option for FDE. I can't speak for Mint 15 because I didn't do a fresh install, just did an upgrade and never saw the installer. I expect it'll be something similar, or perhaps included by default.
I am still running Mint 13 Maya LTS for now, and I don't really want to go stray from the LTS, but their work with Cinnamon is really tempting me.
If they have put in windows tiling and the ability to dock the panel to the right, I would switch right away.
I have tiling in cinnamon with gtile. Have you tried installing it?
For me the mint community has been a big difference. I have gotten great text support on irc from volunteers, much better than I got with Ubuntu in various places online, where people seem to be swamped with new and clueless users.
I am worried that unity integration will become fully incompatible with the gnome backend, making cinnamon as a de problematic. But so far so good.
Though I am also experimenting with getting fbterm and potentially tmux to play nice when I boot to text console and just ignore the DE altogether for some serious power savings. tmux seems to not allow fbterm to use its 256 color capabilities though. But I have digress.
Ultimately I feel like mint has a lot going for it. Some of the design decisions are not quite what I would do, but the mint team has been awesome about working with other distributions/forks, and even collaboration on shared components.
Same here. Well, it can't be any-old tiling mechanism, but nonetheless I'd be willing to try. Currently use awesome, though, which by and large is quite good. Do you use a tiling UI right now?
I do somehow prefer a more "mainstream" UI though, just because devs don't tend to think about awesome users (users of awesome, that is, and other minority UIs), and certain things just don't and probably will never work that well in awesome.
I enjoyed using an earlier version of Linux Mint, but the default gnome-shell UI had a massive memory leak ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/930402 ) which was never fixed and "upgrades" to the next version are wipe-and-reinstall. So, I wiped it and installed Ubuntu 12.10 which I dist-upgrade to 13.04 without incident.
With no support and no upgrade path, I don't see what the draw is.
They forgot to mention the best new feature - changing the code name from Nadia to Olivia. Olivia sounds much more... stable.
On the other hand whenever I read support for HTML5, CSS, JS, it's like... something dies in me.
So, will be staying with Nadia for a little while longer.
The problem is, Ubuntu 13.04 is only supported for 9 months, and it's already been a month since the release. Since Mint recommends fresh installs rather than upgrading between releases, it means you'll have less than 8 months to play with it before you must wipe it and move to Mint 16. That's a rather short shelf life for an "ambitious" release.
Since Canonical seems unwilling to support any non-LTS release for more than a few months anymore, it might be a good idea for the Mint team to reconsider their release cycles as well. Perhaps they should stick to LTS releases and work more aggressively on backporting stuff. Perhaps they should finally switch their main distro to a rolling release based on Debian (LMDE). In either case, I don't think there's much point following Ubuntu releases as closely as Mint has done so far.