
Linux Mint 12 Released - The Peacemaker? - Garbage
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/jamies-mostly-linux-stuff-10006480/linux-mint-12-released-the-peacemaker-10024867/
======
tutysara
Waiting eagerly to try this out, especially the GNOME2 compatibility, after
experiencing distaste with the rough edges of Unity and GNOME3. Nice to see
that at-least these guys don't want their OS to be run on mobile devices ;-)

------
Indyan
The final release is still not out. This guy got fooled by the RC.

~~~
javipas
In fact, the final release's ISOs were available on Heatnet servers for some
hours (<http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/linuxmint.com/stable/12/>) but there was no
oficial announcement. I guess the real deal will come pretty soon.

------
pook1e
Wow, kudos to Mint for trying to stay as close to Gnome 2 as possible.
Hopefully this is something both Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 fans can agree on,
judging from the screenshots I've seen it seems to be the best of both worlds.
I can't wait to try it out.

------
elboru
Q: What do you think? Is Linux Mint a Ubuntu killer? Or Is Ubuntu killing
itself?

~~~
kijin
I don't think Ubuntu is killing itself. Ubuntu is just targeting a different
demographic from some of the "power users" who frequent HN. Grandma and
Grandpa don't care whether or not it's possible to open three windows of the
same app and switch between them with one keyboard shortcut. Give them a
browser, IM, and a decent media player, and that's it. This demographic is
also many times larger than the subset of power users who hate Unity.

One question that remains to be answered is: If Ubuntu continues to alienate
power users, will this have a noticeable effect on the quality of the user
community? One of the major benefits of Ubuntu is that it's very easy to find
help online. If power users stop using the default edition of Ubuntu, high-
quality help for the default edition might become harder to come by -- with
detrimental effects on everyone else. I've already encountered a few cases
where I wanted to troubleshoot an Ubuntu issue and found the answer in the
Mint forum instead.

~~~
guard-of-terra
What's ubuntu plan of accessing the grandma & grandpa audiences? You see, one
need a delivery method and a payload. They do have the payload. What's their
delivery?

Last time I checked, they didn't have one. The only audience really using
Ubuntu was one consisting of coders and geeks.

There's a famous russian chinese saying: When a rhino stares at the moon - he
is wasting his spleen flowers.

~~~
kijin
Last time I checked, Canonical was trying pretty hard to get PC manufacturers
in various parts of the world to ship their machines with Ubuntu installed.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Are they successful?

There used to be this practice when a PC manufacturer would put a free or
cheap Linux or eve DOS on its PCs to reduce its price by a 50-100$. Everybody
just erased whatever was on HDD and installed a pirated Windows.

But these days, with WGA and OEM Windows being really cheap, I guess it's
unfeasible.

------
zokier
I think it's good that distros try to differentiate themselves.

------
kijin
Thanks to MGSE, GNOME 3 finally looks a bit more "power user friendly". At the
very least, there is no more stupid assumption that one app is one window! But
even with MGSE, Mint 12's desktop environment is much less configurable than
Mint 11. If you happen to like the default look, that's fine; but if you
don't, there's not much you can do about it. I guess it will change as the
developers put in more config options, though. Mint has always been on the
side of people who like to tweak.

MATE, on the other hand, was a bit disappointing in the RC. I haven't updated
to the latest (pre-)release yet, but it felt rather unstable even with some of
the interim updates. It's a pity because MATE is what many of the "heavy
tweakers" will want to use for the time being. It's also not clear how long
MATE will be maintained, if at all. Kudos to the team for trying to keep GNOME
2 alive, but I suspect it's going to be a long twilight in MATE land.

I'll keep checking out Mint 12 from time to time, but for the time being I'll
stick with Mint 10/11 and Xubuntu for day-to-day computing. Xfce 4.8 is
conservative, lightweight, rock solid, and surprisingly configurable. It's not
at all difficult to make it look almost exactly like Mint 10/11. I can see why
Linus Torvalds publicly announced that he'd switch to Xfce: it's currently the
best "old-style" desktop environment out there. I wonder why the Mint team
didn't consider Xfce for an almost drop-in GNOME 2 replacement. Oh wait, they
already have a Debian Edition with Xfce.

