
Linux Mint 15 Most Ambitious Release Ever - Garbage
http://ostatic.com/blog/linux-mint-15-most-ambitious-release-ever
======
kijin
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.

~~~
itry
Did you consider using Mint LMDE? It seems to be what you want:

<http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php>

~~~
mayneack
That's my plan. I had head that it was a pain if I had UEFI. Any idea on how
much of a pain? I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

~~~
eikenberry
I don't think so. It took Debian a bit longer to get their UEFI stack working
but it is now with the release of wheezy.

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streptomycin
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'"?

My, that does sound ambitious.

~~~
douglasisshiny
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.

~~~
tachyonbeam
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.

~~~
TheLegace
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.

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_feda_
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.

Keep up the good work Mint

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mint10juliaFTW
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.

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itry
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?

~~~
kintamanimatt
FDE has been supported out of the box since Mint 14.

~~~
itry
Im not looking for FDE. I have several OS on my machine. What Im missing in
Mint is the ability to set up encrypted partitions during the install.

~~~
kintamanimatt
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.

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hdra
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.

~~~
lsiebert
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.

~~~
jmhain
+1 for gtile. Makes gnome shell worth using.

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postfuturist
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.

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luisivan
> The Mint Desktop Manager now has a choice of three "greeters." A new greeter
> for 15 supports code such as "HTML5, CSS, Javascript, [and] WebGL".

So that must be the most ambitious feature ever. I guess they're using
LightDM, and if they are, that feature has been there for years.

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waltz
Ambitious? It looks the same as always. Not that it's bad "if it's not broken
don't fix it"

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hadem
There seems to be a lot of complaining/negative comments from people about
software that is provided to them for free...

------
smanuel
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.

~~~
waltz
>whenever I read support for HTML5, CSS, JS, it's like... something dies in me

why do you hate your freedom?

