
Linux Mint 16 “Petra” Xfce RC released - iamtechaddict
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2516
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kfk
I was very disappointed with the debian version of linux mint. It was just
awful. I have used archlinux for 2 years and I wanted a rolling release easy
to use, but mint debian was slow, had connection problems and overall crashed
way too many times.

I moved to crunchbang and it works very well. All out of the box. Fast, very
fast. Very nice design overall. I don't understand why its releases never
reach the front page of HN.

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w1ntermute
I'm about ready to move back (from Ubuntu) to Arch for the rolling release
support. Can't stand having to do "upgrades".

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klrr
Could not agree more, although I dislike Arch. The reason I do is since it's
extremely unsafe, I would want something as bleeding edge as Arch but with a
purely functional package manager like Nix or GNU Guix. (I know you can
install Nix on Arch but then I will still have to use Nixpkg repo.)

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w1ntermute
What do you mean by unsafe? It seems stable enough for a laptop. I wouldn't
run it on a production server though.

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mintplant
Many AUR packages just pull from the HEAD of some git repo or pull down X
random tarball from a URL.

With something like Debian, you have layers of package maintainers in the
middle to insulate against attacks, and specific, immutable bundles of data
included in the packages themselves. Also, the entire Debian infrastructure
(signing keys and all) being compromised, and such an incident going
unnoticed, is a much less likely occurrence than the same for the hosting site
some individual software author uses.

Sure, you can still add third-party repositories to Debian and install deb
packages from outside the main sources. But when you do that, you're making a
conscious decision to do so, on a package-by-package basis. Any package you
pull from AUR could be vulnerable, unless you manually check the source of
each and every one. When you install from the Debian repos, you can trust that
a certain standard of quality and security is being upheld.

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w1ntermute
How does this compare to the safety of Ubuntu? Is a rolling release distro
inherently less safe than a fixed release distro?

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brownbat
Is this somehow more notable than other distro + desktop releases?

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drcube
I'm wondering that myself. Mint doesn't normally use XFCE, or at least didn't
when I used it in the past. It was always a fork of GNOME. So maybe that's the
news?

Mint is also pretty popular as an alternative to Ubuntu for Linux newbs, so I
can see why people think it's interesting and upvote. We get a fair amount of
distro release announcements on HN.

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codfrantic
Indeed XFCE is a new option. It used to be only MaTe or Cinnamon desktop
environments.

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eigenvector
I know upgrades-in-place are not officially supported by Mint, but has anyone
done it for 15->16 without exploding their system?

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codfrantic
I swapped Ubuntu for Mint Cinnamon,

Mint Cinnamon for Xubuntu.

Maybe Mint with XFCE is what I really want :P Will try it for sure :)

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Justen
What was wrong with Mint Cinnamon? I've been using Mint 13 for a while and I
was just about to upgrade to 16.

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collyw
Its nice, but occasionally Cinnamon seems to grab the CPU and take a huge
amount of resources for no apparent reason.

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gorhill
Is it the nemo file manager? under some circumstances, nemo starts to hog
memory and CPU. It has to be killed. It will restart ok when you open the file
manager again. Aside that annoyance, all has been working fine. I don't recall
exactly but it is a known bug in 15, so I expect it to be fixed in 16.

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supermatou
One word, for those in the know ;-)

-Aptosid

