Mint 17.3 may be the best Linux desktop distro yet • Hacker News Board

Re: Mint 17.3 may be the best Linux desktop distro yet

#41

Post by codezero » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 8:24 PM UTC

wtbob wrote: post #34

codezero wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS X is POSIX certified, no Linux distribution is but that's a minor point I assume.

True enough; I edited my comment to indicate that I mean all those features at once.

mostly unrelated – but I wouldn't have known/cared about POSIX compliance until I ran into it:

On OS X, getopt is POSIX compliant. GNU utilities tend not to enforce POSIX in getopt, as a result you can do things like ls .txt -la

On a POSIX complaint system, the optional arguments must come before any file arguments. This is super annoying to me, after having been using Linux for 15 years :)

Personally, I've been super happy with OS X for all purposes except servers, but to each their own, and that's where Linux (and the BSDs) shine – giving you access under the hood, which is awesome, but some of us just want the car to drive itself, so to speak.

Re: Mint 17.3 may be the best Linux desktop distro yet

#42

Post by norswap » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 8:25 PM UTC

eloy wrote: post #37

mattlondon wrote: post #7

+1 to Cinnamon being great. I've found Ubuntu's Unity to be really non-intuitive and awkward to use ... even after several years of using it I've never got used to it and generally found it frustrating to use. Cinnamon is an absolute joy to use in comparison - just does its job and gets out of the way. Sounds like Mint is a sort of "unbuntu-without-unity" which is worth its weight in gold in my opinion. Wish I could…

I've used Mint and Cinnamon for over a year... after I stopped using it and started using GNOME on Debian I started realizing how un-polished every part of that GUI was. GNOME is a lightyear ahead of Cinnamon in terms of UX/UI design IMHO.

Do you have some examples in mind? (I'm a user of neither, I use Windows & OSX, but I'm interested in UX questions)

Re: Mint 17.3 may be the best Linux desktop distro yet

#43

Post by jamespo » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 8:35 PM UTC

A distribution I'm keen on is the Arch / Gnome Shell based Apricity.

Re: Mint 17.3 may be the best Linux desktop distro yet

#44

Post by bachmeier » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 8:38 PM UTC

VonGuard wrote: post #17

oakhaven wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how about {x,k,l}ubuntu?

All the Ubuntu's have terminal GUI problems. They just keep tinkering and changing things. Gnome did this to itself, too, and thus, we're left with all these weird GUIs that aspire to be Windows 8, or Mac OS, when Gnome 2 was fucking perfect and shoulda been left alone.

I was a happy Gnome 2 user for years, and am now a happy Mate user. I don't think the weird GUIs aspire to be Windows 8 or Mac OS. They just aspire to be weird.

Re: Mint 17.3 may be the best Linux desktop distro yet

#45

Post by edent » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 8:41 PM UTC

Sniffnoy wrote: post #3

> it'd be nice to have a keyboard-based way to do this as well, perhaps using "enter" rather than return to trigger it Does F2 not work for renaming files? Maybe that's only a Caja thing, I don't know...

F2 works for me in Cinnamon / Nemo.

Running it on top of Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro - so I can't say for certain that it is standard!

Re: Mint 17.3 may be the best Linux desktop distro yet

#46

Post by pan69 » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 8:41 PM UTC

oakhaven wrote: post #8

mattlondon wrote: post #7

+1 to Cinnamon being great. I've found Ubuntu's Unity to be really non-intuitive and awkward to use ... even after several years of using it I've never got used to it and generally found it frustrating to use. Cinnamon is an absolute joy to use in comparison - just does its job and gets out of the way. Sounds like Mint is a sort of "unbuntu-without-unity" which is worth its weight in gold in my opinion. Wish I could…

how about {x,k,l}ubuntu?

Since the Ubuntu/Unity/Gnome3 disaster happened I switched to XUbuntu and I have been extremely happy with it. Xfce with XUbuntu is very much like the olden days of Ubuntu/Gnome2.

The only real issue with XUbuntu is the lack of window resize control. The window borders are a single pixel wide and it can be extremely frustrating to resize a window. The only way to reasonably get it done is by using the either one of the top window corners but if you use the left window corner you have to be careful not to accidentally close the window.

Other than that, super happy with XUbuntu!

Re: Mint 17.3 may be the best Linux desktop distro yet

#47

Post by collyw » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 8:44 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #7

+1 to Cinnamon being great. I've found Ubuntu's Unity to be really non-intuitive and awkward to use ... even after several years of using it I've never got used to it and generally found it frustrating to use. Cinnamon is an absolute joy to use in comparison - just does its job and gets out of the way. Sounds like Mint is a sort of "unbuntu-without-unity" which is worth its weight in gold in my opinion. Wish I could…

I really like Cinnamon, but I found it had a habit of randomly chewing up CPU cycles for no reason. That was a bit over a year ago, and I switched to XFCE.

Anyone had similar problems and found it has improved or not?

Re: Mint 17.3 may be the best Linux desktop distro yet

#48

Post by illuminated » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 8:46 PM UTC

I echo most of the author's excitements but for the ElementaryOS.

I've just stopped looking at any other distro after installing the latest, Freya, which is also based on 14.04.

Elementary doesn't have many of the UX shortcuts that the latest Mint has, and has far less developers working on it, but it's still such a joy to use.

Re: Mint 17.3 may be the best Linux desktop distro yet

#49

Post by sampo » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

pan69 wrote: post #46

oakhaven wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how about {x,k,l}ubuntu?

Since the Ubuntu/Unity/Gnome3 disaster happened I switched to XUbuntu and I have been extremely happy with it. Xfce with XUbuntu is very much like the olden days of Ubuntu/Gnome2. The only real issue with XUbuntu is the lack of window resize control. The window borders are a single pixel wide and it can be extremely frustrating to resize a window. The only way to reasonably get it done is by using the either one of t…

> Xfce with XUbuntu is very much like the olden days of Ubuntu/Gnome2

I had RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 6.5 forced on me in a workplace, and it has Gnome2. Having that side-by-side with recent xubuntu on my laptop, Xfce is way ahead, much better than Gnome2.

Re: Mint 17.3 may be the best Linux desktop distro yet

#50

Post by xorcist » Sat, Dec 26, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

Last time I looked on Mint there was no support for upgrading the system. It doesn't matter how easy installs are, I'm not going to tell my mother-in-law to reinstall twice per year.

This review consists of someone who clicks through an installation and tell what it looks like. That's not very interesting. You only install once, and colors are configurable, if you care about those things. Supported hardware must work without configuration or drivers, but that's mostly a solved problem.

Casual users care about longevity. Will my software stop working because of an upgrade? Will something move because of a redesign, so I don't know how to use it anymore? Are those things there for Linux Mint yet?