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Topic: Linux Mint 16 (Read 7661 times)

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #1 –
Cinnamon is my favourite desktop. I have seen it on the previous Mint release and it's absolutely fabulous already there. Under the hood I tend to prefer anything else than something based on Ubuntu, but still Mint's installer is the comfiest I have seen, so it's obvious why it's so popular.

Manjaro is learning fast from Mint's style. Cinnamon has been ported to Manjaro and it looks like the Manjaro team is doing their best to work to make the installer the same, Mint-like. Unfortunately Cinnamon didn't look and feel as polished on Manjaro as on Mint.

So, your preferred desktop is Xfce. I tried and didn't find Xubuntu so likeable (stylewise - there's no other reason to try Xubuntu than the desktop, is there?). In the order of my own preference, Manjaro, Mint, and Lite all have easily superior Xfce desktops when compared to Xubuntu.

When I opened up Xubuntu the first time, the desktop looked terribly bleak and screamed for customisation. So, naturally I opened up the settings and got on with it, but the choice of themes was, well, not there. Lite also looks kind of bleak at first, but it's packed with many themes, so it's quick to customise the look, while other defaults were mostly sane and workable for me.

Normally Mint would easily be the winner in style out of the box, but when I installed Manjaro 0.8.7.1, I found the respective Xfce desktops on a par. I cannot recommend one over the other. They are both perfect. And people say that Manjaro 0.8.8 looks even better. Admittedly it's the Manjaro team copying the style from Mint, but when they are both perfect, I see no reason to complain. Let them compete in making the world a better place.

Then maybe you are not so aesthetically inclined. Neither am I, really. Xfce is functional and this matters far more in the end. I'm just linking here a good overview of some Xfce distros, just so that I know myself how to find it later, good if someone else is interested too http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.com/2013/01/best-linux-distro-of-2012-comparasion.html

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #2 –
Quote from: ersi on
So, your preferred desktop is Xfce. I tried and didn't find Xubuntu so likeable (stylewise - there's no other reason to try Xubuntu than the desktop, is there?). In the order of my own preference, Manjaro, Mint, and Lite all have easily superior Xfce desktops when compared to Xubuntu.

None of them are the way I like it, so it matters little one way or the other. I'll post a screenshot later but basically I use a bottom panel akin to Windows and a non-strutted top-right panel with the weather, time, and notification icons. This is a slightly different way of approaching a setup I had in Gnome 2 with Window Applets

Quote from: ersi on
When I opened up Xubuntu the first time, the desktop looked terribly bleak and screamed for customisation. So, naturally I opened up the settings and got on with it, but the choice of themes was, well, not there. Lite also looks kind of bleak at first, but it's packed with many themes, so it's quick to customise the look, while other defaults were mostly sane and workable for me.

I don't happen to care for the default Mint looks much, nor for its menu.

Quote from: ersi on
Then maybe you are not so aesthetically inclined.

Oh, I really like the Codename Opus XP style.

On Xubuntu I use the Graybird style coupled with the Daloa window manager theme. On Wheezy I use Xfce-basic coupled with Redmond. I'm not entirely sure why they don't install gtk2-engines-xfce and gtk3-engines-xfce in Xubuntu by default, but it hardly bothers me.

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #3 –
Quote from: Frenzie on

Apparently Cinnamon is really coming together. I personally settled on Debian Wheezy Xfce and Xubuntu, but it might well be worth a look—especially if you're looking for a different upgrade path than Windows 8.

http://www.linuxmint.com/
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-mint-petra.html


Cinnamon works well as a desktop. Mint itself committed an insta-kernal panic when I tried to boot off the livedvd. I'm not saying Mint is bad, just that something about it evidently doesn't get along with my hardware. So I put Cinnamon on Ubuntu. I did find it a little odd that Ubuntu works just fine for me, but Mint doesn't.

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #4 –
Quote from: Sanguinemoon on
Cinnamon works well as a desktop. Mint itself committed an insta-kernal panic when I tried to boot off the livedvd. I'm not saying Mint is bad, just that something about it evidently doesn't get along with my hardware. So I put Cinnamon on Ubuntu. I did find it a little odd that Ubuntu works just fine for me, but Mint doesn't.
I still haven't quite lived up to my words in the previous post. There's really no Cinnamon on the system that I use as a primary tool. I have only tried it occasionally on secondary installations. I liked it enough to plan to make it my main desktop.

On my primary laptop I have a preinstalled Ubuntu that jibes perfectly with the included hardware. Various other systems I have tried to install, all have their little problems, so my aim is to keep the perfect preinstalled Ubuntu, to skin it with Cinnamon and to convert it to Mint (not sure in which order) without screwing it up. Now with the new perfect Cinnamon I have no excuse to postpone my plan further. Must get on with it.

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #5 –
In addition to already linked reviews, I am also linking here a talkie video about Mint 16 Cinnamon. The desktop in the video is already customised a bit. The structure of the video is basically to go over the official release notes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx1ZK_XwUiA

And here's Cinnamon 2 on Manjaro. This video has the same structure, going over the official release notes of Mint. The guy doesn't directly say this in the video, but I know that he has installed Cinnamon 2 on Manjaro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmj25juB5-w

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #6 –
Good videos. I think Cinnamon is winning the race to be my default desktop. I refused to be believe that Gnome 3 is as unconfigurable and inflexible as it appears, so I've tinkered with it and made it almost as workable a Cinnamon. Almost. I found the shell extension for a taskbar at the bottom, but I don't care for panels both at the top and the bottom. Lack of of a minimize button on window decorations (you can right-click to minimize) and little things like that both get on my nerves and interfere with my workflow. (Hear that, Opera? Lack of little things the user even doesn't necessarily need everyday cause them to not stick with your product...sorry :p )

Edit: Okay, I overlooked the obvious yet again. It's typical me. If it's the solution to the problem is too easy, I'll miss it completely. I'm sometimes the type that will spot a tiny can 3/4 of the way down aisle in the supermarket but miss the ten pound bag of sugar right in front me :p In this case, in the Tweaktool, under shell > Arrangement of  Buttons in Titlebbar, there is an option to add the expected controls. Still like Cinnamon better, though.

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #7 –
Quote from: Sanguinemoon on
(Hear that, Opera? Lack of little things the user even doesn't necessarily need everyday cause them to not stick with your product...sorry :p )

For instance, I use IRC something like twice a year, but it's there.

I find Gnome Shell horrible for window management. It's like they expect you to use only fullscreen apps. This is my desktop (or even my netbook), not my phone with a screen so small that just about everything has to be fullscreen.

KDE actually seems to understand that different devices require different input mechanisms. Gnome Shell is something of a tablet UI on desktop, and Windows 8 is more like a phone UI on desktop. Yet the same Metro UI (or whatever it's called now) works great on phones.

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #8 –
I remember a review of Gnome 3 comparing it to MSDOS because you it does seem to expect just what you said.  http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fedora-16-gnome-3-review,3155-27.html thisreview of Fedora and Gnome 3 pretty well nailed it. I'm not sure why he bothered mentioning Fedora because his observations apply to any distro. You can get it more usable as a desktop than it appears at first, but I don't think most users wind to spend as much time on that as I did. On the plus side, I managed to get a prettier theme for Gnome 3 than KDE :p . Obviously that means nothing if the workflow annoys you all night long. In short, Gnome 3, like Chropera, is good users that want to play of Facebook all night but not if you want to get any work done.

That isn't to say that KDE doesn't have issues. I've been a long-time KDE 3 user stuck in Windows hell for a couple years because my former ISP's USB dongle didn't have a Linux driver (even ndiswrapper didn't work) and I had few things to learn about KDE 4.  Based on that, I think a Windows 7 user so disgusted by Windows 8 that he switches would be frustrated once he starts tinkering with it. He might also find that menu fonts need to be tinkered with to look reasonable and not small and jagged-looking.

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #9 –
Around the turn of the calendar year, I added Mint main and backport repos to my Ubuntu 12.04 installation and this enabled me to install the latest Cinnamon 2. I took the meta package and also Mdm because my aim is to mintify this installation as far as possible. Unfortunately I ended up with glitches.

There's a cosmetic glitch around the ClipIt icon which sometimes affects also the CPU graph left to it (see the pic). More serious is that logout causes X.org to crash irrecoverably (reboot required). (I'm not sure my diagnosis is correct, but the symptoms are: the DE logs out, followed by blank screen where nothing works)

Does anyone know how to troubleshoot X concerning logout crashes?

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #10 –
Other than trying to remove a few relevant config files to see if it helps I have nothing to offer.

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #11 –
Another serious issue is that changing to consoles (Ctrl+Alt+F1, F2, etc) cause the same crash.

I created another user account. Logging in and out and changing to console and back is trouble-free there. I will migrate to the new account, if I can't figure out how to repair the old one.

Edit: In conclusion, looks like Cinnamon 2 backported to Ubuntu 12.04 doesn't work so seamlessly and effortlessly, at least not when you install the meta package and Mdm. Cinnamon 2 was made for a later version, Mint 16 (Petra), whose Ubuntu equivalent is 13.10 (Saucy).

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #12 –
Yeah, that's the problem with LTS releases. I do wish Linux had a bit more of the Windows thing where updating applications doesn't require updating system libraries—although to what extent Cinnamon is system and to what extent it's application is not necessarily a straightforward question to answer.

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #13 –
Quote from: ersi on

Does anyone know how to troubleshoot X concerning logout crashes?

See /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old, that's the log file from the previous Xserver run and may contain some hints on what exactly crashed it. Assuming the Xserver actually crashed and not some client.

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #14 –
Quote from: Macallan on

Quote from: ersi on

Does anyone know how to troubleshoot X concerning logout crashes?

See /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old, that's the log file from the previous Xserver run and may contain some hints on what exactly crashed it. Assuming the Xserver actually crashed and not some client.
I don't see any hints there of anything crashing.

What is a client? Is gnome-session-daemon or cinnamon-session-daemon a client?

Re: Linux Mint 16

Reply #16 –
Quote from: ersi on

What is a client? Is gnome-session-daemon or cinnamon-session-daemon a client?

Anything that talks to the Xserver, by opening windows, managing sessions or anything else. So, yes, they're both clients.
If there's nothing in the log that says 'caught signal 11, exiting' or somesuch, and it shut down normally, it probably isn't the Xserver that's causing the problem.
You may want to look for core files in your home directory.