Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

extremetech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 194 posts

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#131

Post by sixtofour »

notatoad wrote: post #90
udp wrote: post #27

> it’s Ubuntu without someone else telling you what to do or taking the OS into a direction that you’re unwilling to follow Debian, anyone?

the prevailing theme in most comments regarding mint i've seen on reddit and various blogs is that people like mint because it's easy. one of mint's big selling points is that they include the ubuntu-restricted-extras package by default, rather than making people install it. if people can't install a single package, i don't think debian is for them.

And yet, Mint has a version that's directly downstream from Debian, not based on Ubuntu at all.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#133

Post by sixtofour »

dchest wrote: post #21
Alterlife wrote: post #6

Linux Mint has put Google custom search into the distribution in order to raise revenue. It's in firefox both from the address bar, the search box, and in the quick search from the 'start' menu. It's very annoying, and it isn't just a matter of opting out. Mint doesn't support an easy way to remove it from all three locations without getting technical. I used mint for a couple of months, the custom search engine came…

Also, this is absolutely unacceptable: Our goal is to give users a good search experience while funding ourselves by receiving a share of this income. Search engines who do not share the income generated by our users, are removed from Linux Mint and might get their ads blocked. http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851

"In Linux Mint 12 and upcoming releases we’re hoping to provide users with the following commercial search engines: Ask.com, Google, Amazon, eBay, and the non-commercial Wikipedia."

And I was all set to install Mint tonight.

I don't begrudge them the right to manage their distro how they want, but I really hate a distro messing with my browser and search like that.

So no, I guess.

Damn.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#134

Post by DanBC »

Gormo wrote: post #125
DanBC wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frankly, I'm not even sure it's possible to "drive off teh road to a new place" when it comes to desktop UX Sure it is. 3d file managers[1] never took off. With todays hardware they'd be a lot nicer to use. Users have been limited to quite small (sorry about my incorrect terminology here, I'm going to go read some man pages) total virtual screen size within which their windows were located. Now graphics cards, and…

3D file management never took off because no one has yet found a meaningful and intuitive use for three dimensions that couldn't be accomplished with two. The screenshots of FSV on that site show me a 2D interface that's been extruded into cubes and displayed isometrically. Usable, but the 3D is superfluous. All the other 3D file managers appear utterly unusable. What on earth is going on in this screenshot of Tactil…

Yes, 3d file managers were ugly, and hard to use, and didn't really serve any purpose.

But with modern hardware, and with a better HID, and with a better analogy / paradigm / idea, they could come back and be useful.

I don't know what that meaningful use for the 3rd dimension would be, but I'm pretty sure there is one.

(The tactile screenshot is awful. It appears to show a bunch of stuff ordered by name. The TDFSB2 screenshot shows someone "walking" through their home/leo/jpeg directory, with all the jpegs being displayed. Remember that these are tinkering toys, and that things like mice or GUIs were initially weird and horrid. Maybe getting a bunch of smart people working on them would generate useful results?)

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#135

Post by dylangs1030 »

keithpeter wrote: post #128
dylangs1030 wrote: post #58

One of Paul's imperatives is to make a few people very happy rather than a lot of people kind of happy. That in mind, I think this is a good move for Canonical to move to Unity in 11.10. If people want the user-friendliness of GNOME, they can go to other linux distributions. But Canonical is doing well with open source technology - they've actually moved linux to something beyond the more savvy users and hackers - it…

"it's accessible to anyone used to Windows, with a bit of tweaking." What? Have you tried handing a laptop running Unity to someone used to Windows 7 and asking them to complete a few tasks? I wish Ubuntu well. Wouldn't a customised GUI stack including Wayland and Unity be great? BUT like Windows it isn't!

Ah, you misunderstood me. I meant GNOME and pre-10.0 Ubuntu is accessible to native Windows users. Unity I admit requires more getting used to.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#136

Post by rjbond3rd »

jronkone wrote: post #112
gerggerg wrote: post #26

Canonical is genuinely trying to make linux the most user friendly it's ever been and make it ready for real mass adoption. It's not going to be easy and not everyone is going to like every change but you can't get so down on them for trying so hard. Saying the solution is to go backwards is the same as telling canonical to just stop trying all together. There's no point in stagnating and sticking with gnome. New use…

> Canonical is genuinely trying to make linux the most user friendly Either you, Canonical, or both are on drugs. > There's no point in stagnating and sticking with gnome. If the options are "stagnating" with Gnome, or going over 9000 steps backwards with Unity, I'm choosing to stagnate. > If you really care, get involved. Why? What's the incentive for me? Canonical has continuously proven to not care about it's curr…

> FOSS is doomed since it doesn't match the economic realities of producing high-quality end-user software.

Doomed how? There are more and more high-quality, end-user FOSS apps. The world does not revolve around Canonical and Ubuntu. Simply change distros, problem solved.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#137

Post by pyre »

SlipperySlope wrote: post #10
pekk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with installing xfce? It's only an apt-get away.

But I've grown use to Gnome apps and applets. I especially like the multi-tabbed terminal.

You can use gnome-terminal within XFCE just the same as I can use xfce4-terminal from within GNOME.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#138

Post by rookiejet22 »

rookiejet22 wrote: post #115
cletus wrote: post #81

It honestly boggles my mind that people can't read things like these and see that it's "choice" here that's why Linux on the desktop is doomed to be nothing more than a niche product for us geeks. Desktops succeed because they're consistent. Possibly the most important thing is to have a consistent API. X at this point is venerable. Nascent Linux desktops come complete with cruft. Lots of cruft. Honestly I can unders…

I am going to take a wild guess and say the sluggishness you are encountering is caused by the IO scheduler. It's the main cause of sluggishness on my desktop. In fact it's choking /right now/ as I type this due to a large file copy process in the background. BFQ, the other desktop scheduler for linux, is not included in the default kernel, and in my use has not fared any better.

I could not edit, so I will reply instead. If you work from the terminal I find that prefixing commands with a ``ionice'' priority settings helps keep IO hogs from slowing the desktop.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#139

Post by wmf »

rubinelli wrote: post #123
wmf wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They release a new major version that changes everything so they spend years fixing and stabilizing, and then they release another major version and repeat the process. This is inevitable when you either set your sights too low (and after a while realize that your current architecture will never get you where you need to be) or develop too slowly (so by the time something is finished the market has moved on).

Personally, I think it has more to do with the fact that very few people want to fix old bugs in an old codebase in their free time when they could be writing a brand new version with brand new bugs. "This time, we'll make better bugs!"

Yes, there's also that. http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#140

Post by Gormo »

DanBC wrote: post #134
Gormo wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3D file management never took off because no one has yet found a meaningful and intuitive use for three dimensions that couldn't be accomplished with two. The screenshots of FSV on that site show me a 2D interface that's been extruded into cubes and displayed isometrically. Usable, but the 3D is superfluous. All the other 3D file managers appear utterly unusable. What on earth is going on in this screenshot of Tactil…

Yes, 3d file managers were ugly, and hard to use, and didn't really serve any purpose. But with modern hardware, and with a better HID, and with a better analogy / paradigm / idea, they could come back and be useful. I don't know what that meaningful use for the 3rd dimension would be, but I'm pretty sure there is one. (The tactile screenshot is awful. It appears to show a bunch of stuff ordered by name. The TDFSB2 s…

Exactly - someone will have to design a new file management functionality that adds real value and also happens to leverage 3D technology.

Window management certainly has benefited from using the GPU, e.g. with real-time thumbnails of applications and enhanced virtual desktops. But these are solutions that were enabled by the GPU, not features that were tacked on simply because GPUs were around to use.

If someone comes up with a new and revolutionary file management paradigm, or even just a useful innovation on the margin of existing file management, and it's one that 3D makes sense for, then great. Until that happens, it's a solution in search of a problem.

Post reply on HN