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Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

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Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#141

Post by Gormo »

middus wrote: post #8
w1ntermute wrote: post #7

For those who don't want to shift to a new distro, Xubuntu is a great option. It's lightweight without losing any of the features you've come to expect from a fully-featured DE. And best of all, it's not going to pull the UI rug out from under you at a moment's notice.

Why switch to XFCE? Can't you just install Gnome?

Gnome 3? Not if you do want incremental improvements to your desktop environment but don't want a fundamental paradigm shift from installing the latest updates. If MATE takes off, maybe that will be a viable alternative.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#142

Post by tooearly »

pyre wrote: post #108
jolan wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GNOME/KDE development model is pretty strange. 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. XFCE does a better job. "XFCE4" has been around for 7 years and they provide small improvements but don't make any radical changes. Unity was pushed out before it was ready. I understand the need to g…

> Unity was pushed out before it was ready. I think that this is the real rub here.

Unity was first released in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition. And that was based on Ubuntu Netbook Remix, first released in 8.04 (they didn't necessarily share code, but the design was similar).

You would think that by 11.10, released a month ago, they would have something release-quality. I think it's just the design that people don't like. Canonical has the resources to fix bugs, but they don't necessarily have the desire to fix design defects.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#143

Post by drivebyacct2 »

keithpeter wrote: post #89
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't ever want Linux on the desktop to succeed then if I have to sacrifice choice. I'm thrilled with Ubuntu every day, and if I had to sacrifice any of the flexibiltiy and customization I enjoy... well, I'd just use OS X. Also, I have no freaking idea how your Ubuntu feels sluggish. Being in Ubuntu on my Quad/8GB is vastly faster than being in Windows.

cletus and drivebyacct2 I've discovered recently that its the video hardware and how that interacts with the precise (sic) choice of graphics driver that governs Unity speed. cletus: you can test my hypothesis by logging in with the Unity 2d session and seeing if the UI becomes more responsive. Scaling (super-s) will be 'ragged' without 3d effects but should be faster. drivebyacct2: what is your graphics card and wha…

Oh, sorry. I don't count Unity/Compiz. I thought you meant the general performance of Ubuntu is bad. I would highly, highly recommend you give Gnome-shell a shot. I have some el-cheap-o Nvidia card with the latest from the Ubuntu repos (they have a new repo that Jockey sees that will let you use the latest from Nvidia rather than the standard distro one)

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#144

Post by w1ntermute »

pekk wrote: post #23
w1ntermute wrote: post #7

For those who don't want to shift to a new distro, Xubuntu is a great option. It's lightweight without losing any of the features you've come to expect from a fully-featured DE. And best of all, it's not going to pull the UI rug out from under you at a moment's notice.

You can just apt-get install xubuntu-desktop. No need to reinstall everything (what a pain that would be). You can just install the xfce-* packages if you want to be more specific. The only reason I don't use unity is that it doesn't handle multiple monitors correctly on my desktop. Otherwise, I find it satisfactory. I approve of a new design which tries to keep clutter off my screen and tries to be keyboard-driven,…

> You can just apt-get install xubuntu-desktop. No need to reinstall everything

Yeah, that's what I meant - you don't have to switch distros, which necessitates a reinstall.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#146

Post by frou_dh »

bascule wrote: post #93

Desktop Linux users are flocking to a distro that looks like an uglier version of Windows 2000? "Tonight we're gonna GUI like it's 1999!" I guess if they had any aesthetic sense, they'd probably be switching to OS X...

I've seen worse (when I played around with Arch enough to realise that the Linux world + consistently good GUI is oil + water).

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#147

Post by notatoad »

sixtofour wrote: post #131
notatoad wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what does that have to do with anything? the parent suggested debian, not "some other debian-derived distro" linux mint debian edition is definitely not debian.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#148

Post by jiggy2011 »

ianb wrote: post #67
gcp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that being said; you can install gnome in ubuntu 11.10. You don't have to use unity. If it were this easy, nobody would be complaining. But as far as I can tell, Gnome Classic (without HW accel) is broken by default on Ubuntu 11.10, with the default Gnome Panel being entirely messed up. This wasn't the case in 11.04, which had a great fallback that I still use daily, and I think it's the reason the Unity complain…

If you install gnome-shell, everything works quite well.

I tried to use gnome-shell for a few days and my experience was not quite this.

The task switching interface is very much inferior to gnome2. In gnome2 I can setup some panels which span the bottom of both my monitors , giving me loads of space to switch tasks conveniently and have the panel group together similar apps to save space. I then have another panel with a set of shortcuts that I can use to launch my most common apps.

With gnome-shell you are stuck with having 1 "dock" panel on the far left of 1 monitor to switch apps, even though apps are grouped this makes it far less convenient to switch between them. Instead of 1 click to switch, it's press a button , scan the mouse to the far left then click and then usually click again for the window I want.

The big problem however is this, some of the apps I use are launched from shell scripts which will do something and then run some Java or python app. This is the way with many apps that are not installable through apt-get. IntelliJ IDEA is an example of this.

What I do in gnome2 is just create a new launcher that points to the script and add it to the panel, problem solved.

Now with gnome shell or unity , I can run my script from the terminal which will then cause the app to launch. However now when I want to dock the app for easy launch later it just won't let me.

This is probably because it doesn't understand the relationship between the shell script I ran and what it sees as the "application" and since there is nowhere else I can really put the app I am now relegated to having to launch some of my apps through the terminal each time because they cannot be docked into the main dock with the rest of my apps.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#149

Post by jiggy2011 »

keithpeter wrote: post #96
jcastro wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the fallback from GNOME. The old "classic" panel look has been deprecated upstream, it doesn't really exist any more so I don't know what you're expecting Ubuntu to do in this case.

I'd suggest 'panel people' have a look at Xubuntu. I don't expect Canonical to do anything, but I'd like them to include the Xubuntu desktop packages in the long term release support cycle as an option for users.

Xubuntu and Xfce is fine, but it's still a regression from gnome2 in allot of ways.

It doesn't group windows on the panel as well as gnome 2 does.

You lose allot of the nice easy features from gnome2 for doing things like using shared files or printers from windows computers.

The panel is allot less flexible and harder to configure. There are also less panel applets available.

Mouse-button back doesn't work in several parts of the interface.

I'm sure there are workarounds for many of these issues but for an out of the box experience it is still a regression.

Re: Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?

#150

Post by jiggy2011 »

pekk wrote: post #50
angersock wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that being said; you can install gnome in ubuntu 11.10. You don't have to use unity. Or, even more simply, we can install Mint. :)

I felt that Mint's defaults were the problem rather than the solution, but personal tastes do vary. Is it really that hard to run 'sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop'? Am I missing something here?

xubuntu isn't really a perfect replacement for gnome2 for reasons I've mentioned elsewhere here.

After installing Ubuntu 11.10 I spent the best part of a day setting up my desktop and getting it to a stage with Xfce which I felt was 'only slightly more crap than my experience with 10.10'

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