Linux Mint 13 Review – Ubuntu for Human Beings

I am so enraged my screen is hallucinating. Look, bluebirds!

@BernardSwiss: Thanks for the supportive comment. While I don't particularly care for Unity I don't hate it either. I think the strength of Linux is the fact that we do have choices and I simply make a different choice. Why people get so worked up over the default desktop choice or which side of a window the button is placed on has always been beyond me.

The last Ubuntu release that truly "just worked" for me was Edgy Eft. I keep trying and I keep being disappointed. The printer driver issue I wrote about two years ago at http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/04/ubuntu-is-a-poor-standa... is still NOT fixed in Ubuntu. If you go to the driver developer's website he warns Ubuntu users not to use the packages provided with the distro. Other distros have no such problem and haven't had for years. If Fedora or SUSE can get it right why can't Ubuntu?

Seriously, I would now be running KUbuntu 12.04, I downloaded it as soon as the final release was announced, and installed it to a USB stick. I then tested it on my main machine from the USB stick and it looked great, I even went to the trouble of uninstalling software I don't want and installing other software i do want, set up Multiple monitors and 9 virtual desktops with different background images etc. I looked great, I was quite impressed, so I went ahead and installed it.

The install went fine no issues. However, when I rebooted, it simply failed to recognise my mouse and keyboard, a major stopper, I think. After several attempts to install using boot to desktop and install without booting to desktop, I installed something else. Luckily I had Linux Mint 12 KDE on another USB stick so I installed that. It works perfectly, and with the KDE PPA I have KDE 2.8.3.

So now I'm just going to wait for Linux Mint 13 KDE, and stop being impatient.

>>>>It works perfectly, and with the KDE PPA I have KDE 2.8.3.

Gee, talk about being old-fashioned ( smile-grin )

Wow, if I run Slackware, does that mean I'm catatonic?

gus3 - nope, but possibly means you will be turning into a green giant soon and smash up the neighbourhood. Better call the FBI to put you on a watchlist.

> Better call the FBI to put you on a watchlist.

Well, I can't speak for gus3, but I'm pretty sure I'm already on most of the watch lists. Running Slackware is just the icing on the cake.

mmmm, cake

Well, currently on my two primary machines I have Ubuntu Studio 12.04. That just seems to end up being the easiest way to run a 64 bit distribution with a low latency kernel on this hardware (I might very well be running 64 Studio if they updated it to a kernel that recognized all the hardware on my 2 year old laptop). I also ran Linux Mint Debian with the Liquorix low latency kernel for a while.

Ubuntu Studio, of course, defaults to XFce, and I am leaving it that way for the moment (though I have run IceWM and Fluxbox with previous versions of Ubuntu Studio on this laptop).

I do also have a Slackware machine running. Does that make me a danger to my local community?

With all due respect to the Slackers, I'm quite certain that in the M$ world we would all be classified as threats.

What greater honor can they give?

I want to be a threat! Look, my scary face: =8-(

@tc: Sorry, that just looks like Dilbert to me :D

Darn it.

Phil, lord of Heck.

Wow did I write KDE 2.8.3., I really am as silly as a wheel.

@tc and skelband: It looks like Beaker from The Muppet Show to me.

@telanoc:

Hah! Me too!

Quoting:Well, I can't speak for gus3, but I'm pretty sure I'm already on most of the watch lists. Running Slackware is just the icing on the cake.

LOL. I expect I am too. Heck, I not only have a couple of Slackware derivatives running right now (SalixOS, Absolute Linux) but a Russian distribution (ROSA 2012 Marathon) and, of course, our Israeli-American one under development. I must be some sort of Zionist Commie subversive or something, LOL.

I gave the new Mint a try, liked the clean desktop - but Banshee and Tomboy (or anything mono for that matter) are show stoppers for me. Looking forward to the XFCE flavor though.

Banshee and Tomboy are me too applications in my opinion. Mono C# + MonoDevelop, on the other hand is a nice Programming environment. I usually remove mono, to get rid of those applications I don't want, then I can reinstall mono + MonoDevelop from a PPA and stay up to date.