

Linux Mint Debian 201303 released - shared4you
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2346

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buster
I think it's time for me to switch from Ubuntu to LMDE. Lately i was thinking
a lot about Canonical and the many decisions they did, which i disagreed with
(i don't like Unity, i don't like the Mir "disaster", i think efforts should
be combined and not made to split the Linux community).

But it's not so easy to switch, because Ubuntu really is the most desktop
friendly Linux distro out there. I was considering Fedora (but i like dpkg!)
and Debian (but i like bleeding edge!). So this will give me the nicely
designed Cinnamon Desktop, the awesomeness of Debian, without too much
breakage by using debian testing..

Yep.. Good Bye, Canonical. After years of Ubuntu usage, after switching from
Debian to Ubuntu i'm switching back. Debian has goals i can identify with,
Canonical tries too much to create yet-another-incompatible-replacement-for-
XYZ instead of fixing stuff (upstart, lightdm, mir, unity come to mind).

~~~
trotsky
It's worth noting that cinnamon is an incompatible fork of gnome shell: they
don't upstream their changes, it requires mint to run, patch sets at least for
fedora are not fully functional, they don't appear to be interested in a
multi-distro source base.

Better than unity/cannonical by far, but not nearly as good as gnome/redhat
for the community. Consider that cinnamon wouldn't be possible without the
efforts of the gnome 3 team in targeting the whole community.

~~~
vacri
It doesn't require Mint to run - I'm posting this comment from Cinnamon
running on Debian Unstable. Cinnamon is also in the ubuntu 12.10 repos.

~~~
trotsky
They need to carry distro specific patches though, that was my point. This
also leads to most plugins not working without modification, at least on
fedora.

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untothebreach
I have done a lot of distro-jumping, but I have been using LMDE-xfce for quite
a while now, and love it. I _almost_ liked the Ubuntu-based version of Mint,
but in the end, I just like the Debian-Testing base much, much more than the
Ubuntu base.

Sometimes I like my distro to "just work," and sometimes I wanna get in there
and muck around a bit, and LMDE is the first distro I have used that seems ok
with both "modes."

~~~
chimeracoder
Can you elaborate what you like more about Debian-testing vs. the Ubuntu-based
version?

I use a different distro for myself, but I have my family running Mint (Ubuntu
version) on their computer. It works well, because they can just use it
without thinking about it, and I can handle all maintenance remotely.

They have incredibly basic needs, so I don't think they'd really notice the
difference, but I'm curious where the differences lie - I installed the Ubuntu
version without thinking much about it because it was the default (only?)
version at the time.

~~~
untothebreach
Hmm, let's see if I can do this without too much hand-waving on my part lol.
To be fair, most of what I like about the debian-testing backend will probably
not apply to your family (Based upon the "...they can just use it without
thinking about it..." part of your comment).

Probably the biggest thing I like about debian-testing as opposed to ubuntu is
the rolling releases. I really don't like the "run `do-release-upgrade` and
cross your fingers" method of upgrading.

For the most part though, the ubuntu-backed version seemed to "fight" me when
I would get into my "mucking-around" modes. I know, I know, it's all linux
underneath, but I just find the debian version so much easier to customize.

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stevecalifornia
This is an honest question: What is the use case for desktop Linux? Why would
you switch to Linux? I feel like none of the tools I use are in Linux and I
would spend most of my time trying workarounds rather than actually do work.
Does anyone use desktop Linux? What for and what are your main tools?

~~~
pan69
What developer tools? Visual Studio? If anything, a Linux desktop is probably
where you want to be as a developer (of non-Microsoft based software).

~~~
ditoa
Hell even for Windows development I still use Linux with a Windows VM for
Visual Studio. Windows 8 runs really smooth in VMware Workstation even on my 4
year old Core 2 Duo

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joshbaptiste
Currently my second favorite distro behind Arch..

brief history..

1999 - Slackware Loved compiling everything and troubleshooting

2004 - Fedora 2 - Blown away when I saw how easy it was to install packages
via RPM

2007 - Debian (Sarge?) - Blown away when I used apt* for the first time and
dependencies just auto magically installed

2011 - Linux Mint - Looked like *buntu without the extra cruft.

2012/13 - Arch - reminds me of my Slack days where less magic happening under
the hood but with great package management tools.

~~~
heidar
Slackware is a great distro. Did you never try Gentoo during that period?
Especially around 2002-2005 when the community was the most active. I'm asking
since you loved compiling and troubleshooting. :)

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caissy
Linux Mint seems to be a nice distribution, but I just don't see any benefits
of using it compared to Debian Testing. When I tried installing it, the
installer didn't even have an option to do full disk encryption, and I did not
have time to try doing it myself (à la gentoo).

My needs aren't really high, all I need is a great packet manager and a simple
window manager such as dwm.

~~~
wyclif
Sounds like you're a good candidate for Arch.

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microwise
Ubuntu has caused most of us to go on a distro-jumping spree, fact is the
linux community has gone through a lot of changes in the past 3 years but I
think most communities now know what they want cannonical/redhat,etc thus we
will see more stability and developments from now

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hack_edu
Honestly, I still find no reason to go to Mint after Cinnamon has been made
available in Ubuntu.

