Sneak Peek: Linux Mint 12

I tried the livecd gnome 3 version of Mint 12 and found it a vast improvement over unity and the regular gnome 3 shell.

The only criticism I would have is that the favourite icons should be in the bottom panel rather than in the mint menu because you want a one click access to favourites rather than 2 clicks.

Everything else is pretty intuitive.

Good job Clem!

MGSE is a great feat in itself. No doubt about that. However, without wanting to diminish MGSE, the resulting desktop is still a far cry from a usable and, dare I say it, modern desktop.

MGSE succeeds in removing the most violent reaction against Gnome 3. It doesn't succeed (yet?) in removing the overbearing philosophy of Gnome 3 that a user shouldn't have any say in his workflows. The whole desktop is still very sparse and minimal and highly resistant against user settings. This is absolutely not to blame on the Mint Shell Extensions. I do wonder if Extensions can be made powerful enough to defang the user hostility of Gnome 3.

The "fallback" in Mint 12, the Mate Desktop is a far better option. It has rough edges. It is young. It doesn't have a large team yet. It is GTK2 based. But it is built with the far more usable Gnome 2 codebase. I hope the Mate team succeeds in bringing that code base towards GTK 3.

(I must admit that a few dark voices in the back of my mind have whispered that a Minty fresh KDE at this point would be palatable too.)

Trip, if I were a betting man, I would wager that bringing MGSE into the Mint user base will spawn the extensions needed to make this desktop work. There is a large pool of talent within the Mint camp. One would wonder how much of the talent pool from Ubuntu will contribute to this as well. I understand there might have been a few defections in the past couple of months.

Helios, I sincerely hope you are right. I don't know how much time the MGS Extensions took to program, but they do change the user experience of Gnome 3 on a massive scale. I just hope the Extensions interface is flexible enough to take the desktop in a completely different direction.