Mint 13 Reviews Roundup

Reviews give us a lot of feedback and we pay special attention to them. They boost our motivation when talking about the good and help us pinpoint areas of improvement when talking about the bad.  They also give us an opportunity to react to some of the points they make and to start a discussion where we can explain certain things, justify decisions and give you an insight on what is going on behind the curtain when preparing for a release.

I’d like to say thank you to all reviewers for giving people an overview of our work, and for giving the feedback we need to improve Linux Mint release after release. Here are some of the Linux Mint 13 reviews.

Dedoimedo

“Perfect once again”

This is the perfect desktop, 10/10

Review of the Cinnamon edition: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-mint-maya.html

Comments:

The big moment has come. If this isn’t it, then nothing will ever be. One year after discovering the fickle truth of the would-be modern desktop, the Mint team has decided to go back to its roots and offer the users what they want – functionality. And so, a whole new desktop concept was born.

Then again, I praised Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin mightily. And with Cinnamon, it was even better, almost perfect. No, it was perfect. Can you beat that? Is there anything left to contemplate? Maybe. Linux Mint 13 Maya might just be the super-distro we’ve all been waiting for so many years. And almost every time, we’ve got a tiny, tiny bit disappointed.

I think we’ll always get disappointed. The fact that Linux isn’t united and that upstream projects and distributions all evolve separately creates a lot of regressions and some really annoying breakages now and then, but it’s also what gives us such a high pace in innovation and so much variety to choose from. It’s our job to try and make everything work together as best as possible, we’ll always give it our best shot but it will never be perfect. We could dumb things down, remove functionality, control the hardware, and every piece of software that we use and do like Apple and offer an experience that works because it’s limited and easy to maintain, but we’d probably wouldn’t do it as well as they do and it’s not what we’re interested in.

The lack of functionality is a deal breaker. Beside looking good and feeling great, your computer needs to do what you want it to do, efficiently, easily, fast and when it’s told to do so. One of the reason we don’t use Gnome Shell is because it lacks some of the functionality we think is required in any operating system.

Linux Mint has always forked off Ubuntu, for good or bad. But it seems the good turned mostly to bad with the creation of Unity. Disillusioned, the Mint team decided to search for alternatives that would offer modern looks and productivity combined on the classic computing device. They first tried Gnome 3 and pimped the shell with their extensions, but they weren’t satisfied. Then, they created an almost perfect Gnome 2 clone called MATE. And finally, they went for Cinnamon.

Unity was developed for and by Ubuntu, it never had anything to do with Linux Mint. So there was no disillusion or disappointment here, Unity was never relevant to us. The real question was whether Gnome 3 was going to be a suitable replacement for Gnome 2 going forward, and it wasn’t. Gnome “Classic” is a mere shadow of the former Gnome and only there as a “Fallback”. Gnome Shell requires so much tweaking and maintenance to implement our vision of the Linux Mint desktop, it’s not an option. I’d like to stress the fact that both of these desktops are great at what they do, they’re extremely innovative and high quality desktops… but they’re not useful to us. Although Gnome isn’t a proper distribution, it no longer produces a desktop that is configurable in such a way that distributions can integrate it. Gnome produces its own product, its own experience, one that is certainly great, but also one that is different than the one we’re interested in providing ourselves. Both Ubuntu and Gnome got closer to their own vision of what a Linux desktop could be, both projects got more innovative and better at implementing their vision, both achieved fantastic results, and when it’s down to Linux Mint, we have the same ambition. We know what we want, we know how to implement it, and we’ll produce exactly what we need, whether it’s using upstream components, adapting them or creating our own.

I personally wasn’t satisfied with MGSE and Linux Mint 12. I’m still proud of the work and efforts we put in, but it’s a huge relief for me to see Linux Mint back on track with this latest release.

Although I’m personally involved in their development team, MATE isn’t a Linux Mint project. It’s an independent project which was started by Perberos.

A year later, the competition was much more difficult, and even all the extra hard effort by the Mint team could not undo the plentitude of insurmountable Gnome 3 problems, forcing the distribution down a whole four places on the chart.

This is going to sound extremely harsh… but I think it’s fair, because at the time whether it was Ubuntu with Unity, Mint with MGSE or alternatives with Shell, many distributions were shipping with brand new technology which wasn’t completely mature and wasn’t properly integrated. Functionality was lacking (and still is lacking to a certain extent), some features were broken, and I would say Linux Mint was amongst the least broken desktops at the time. Gnome 2 was a fantastic DE and its loss came as a shock (or at least, should have come as a shock) to many distributors out there. Today, MATE, Shell and Unity are much better than they were, and we got Cinnamon as well. We can offer a rock solid MATE experience which will be less likely to suffer regressions and more likely to evolve incrementally, as well as an exciting new desktop which development pace is extremely fast.

And there’s one more ingredient I haven’t mentioned still – it’s the dedication to its users. Linux Mint is more than just the sum of its parts. It’s actually an operating system designed to serve its audience, which is, as it should be. You can create software in a vacuum and then make business justifications until the end of time, or you can simply go with whatever your users demand. Best way of making money? Maybe. But it sure is the best way to build a core of loyal users, and then, slowly, carefully expand from there, using technology to enhance the experience rather than shape it.

We’re extremely proud of our community. I think it’s to the credit of the first people who joined us and created such a great spirit and ambiance, and of course to fantastic community managers such as Husse who passed away and left us a few years ago, and nowadays Oscar799 whose team is doing a wonderful job. The best ideas, the feedback, the funding, the motivation, everything comes from the community. There’s nothing more important and gratifying to us than releasing a version and seeing people love it. There was a time where I knew everybody in our community. We started small and we grew slowly. It’s gotten too big for the developers to interact with users directly and follow every conversation on the forums, but the spirit has not changed and we try to listen and communicate with as many people as we can, it’s extremely important to us.

The thing is, the Mint team chose to release their operating system in two flavors, MATE and Cinnamon. They could not quite decide which one is the best, so they gave us both

That would be subjective and they both come with pros and cons so it really depends on people. Stats indicate Cinnamon is the most popular and we’ve no shortage of ideas when it comes to implementing “wow” features in upcoming releases. Wisdom tells us Gnome 2 was, by far, the most popular desktop in the previous generation, that it worked great for everybody, on all graphics cards, that it’s what people wanted and that it’s new name is MATE. So as much as possible, we gave each edition as much backing as the other and it will be for you to tell us what you think, not the other way around. Of course then, there’s pragmatic considerations as well… no matter how popular Cinnamon gets, it will eventually need to work great for everybody, not some and not others, and its reliance of 3rd party technologies such as Clutter and Gnome need to be reviewed so we can guarantee its quality and its future before it can be considered a Main Edition like the Gnome 2 edition was.

Cinnamon looks lovely. Clean and crispy. You do have a handful of themes at your disposal. The visual differences are tiny overall[…]

As Linux Mint becomes more and more mainstream people interact with the desktop differently and come to it with less knowledge of what distinguishes its many components. I’ve noted at multiple occasions people expecting the Cinnamon theme to change the wallpaper and the overall look of the desktop (including the GTK theme). Without removing the ability to select individual sub-themes, I think that’s something we’ll need to take into account to see if we can simplify theme selections going forward.

The menu left and bottom padding is not equidistant, which interferes with my OCD pheromones.

It depends on the theme, but it really boils down to Cinnamon not providing themes with a way to treat the menu differently than other applets or to make applets stick to the edge of the screen. We’ll get that fixed in the future.

One of the super-strong points of Mint is that it offers everything out of the box. You need not install any codecs, they are all there. I tried everything, including Apple trailers in QuickTime format, or iTunes if you will or whatever, Microsoft Media Server (MMS) streaming, and more importantly, MP3 and Flash. Everything worked fine.

That’s true unless you’re using the non-codecs ISO (which are likely to be used by magazines in the USA and Japan). Also, online MP3 playback in Firefox isn’t functional by default. We’re using mozilla-totem because it offers really good playback (in particular on Apple Trailers), but it’s not working great with MP3. If playing MP3 online is important to you, remove that package and you’ll get better MP3 playback with the mplayer plugin (which is also installed by default and takes over once totem-mozilla is removed).

You also get the player integration with the system menu, adding style and class.

Oh yes. Credits go to a lot of people here. The Gnome Shell community featured some excellent sound menus and MPRIS controllers. We reused their code and integrated it within MGSE. Then in Cinnamon this extension became an applet and gained beautiful features, such as the ability to launch your music player or to switch the sound between speakers and headphones straight from the applet.

Oh yes, Wireless, Bluetooth, Samba, all working splendidly.

The Bluetooth backend isn’t working as well as it did before. This is an area where both Gnome 3 and MATE will need to improve.

I liked the revamped preparation stage, which does not mention updates or extra plugins.

The choice of codecs is done at download time, there are separate ISOs for this, so there is no need to decide this at a later stage within the installer. As for the updates, we believe that’s a really bad idea. Our policy on updates is clear, we don’t like uneducated updates. RCs are tested by the community, updates are filtered depending on how likely they are to break something on your system, users are recommended to be selective and to know which updates they’re taking, and why they’re taking them.

One small thing that bothered me was that there’s no dedicated webcam utility, although the camera works just fine. I had the option of mugshotting myself for the user login picture, and there’s the Pidgin integration. Cheese would be fine, though.

Thanks for the feedback on this. I suppose we do include a scanning tool even though not everybody has a scanner… I also noted the fact that the Ubiquity installer allows you to take a picture of yourself and the MDM isn’t taking advantage of it.

Mint uses the Software Manager as a replacement for the Ubuntu Software Center. The two programs offer the same functionality, including fancy screenshots, reviews and extras. As I’ve mentioned earlier, Synaptic is there, too.

Well yes, but that’s not phrased in a way that I can agree with. The Ubuntu Software Center didn’t exist when we wrote the Software Manager… it came a few releases later, it didn’t have all of the features we needed, it was branded and its code would have been much harder to maintain than ours. It looked great though, and with every Ubuntu release it gained features we wanted to add to our application. So we’re often catching up with it and learning from it, I don’t know whether it was inspired by us or by other implementations (PCBSD, Apple, Android…etc), but it’s an important part of any modern system. Of course it doesn’t replace power tools such as aptitude, gdebi, apturl and synaptic.

You can also install additional extensions if you want.

You can and there’s a few great extensions. Though, in the world of Cinnamon, it’s applets you’re more likely to look for.

All is peachy, it turns out. Not a single crash, nothing. The system is very quick, the transition effects are smooth. Suspend & resume work just fine. Mint tolls about 280MB of RAM when cold, which is a fairly low figure for a typical 64-bit system, almost half that of its parent. The CPU is also rather quiet most of the time. Now, there’s one extra glitch here, the background behind some of the icons. They are the wrong kind of gray, naughty, naughty Mint.

That’s noted. It looks like a theme problem. On Cinnamon itself, I think that’s the problem… it’s extremely stable, light and responsive for some but also extremely buggy, heavy and slow for others. It really depends on your hardware, and in particular on your graphics card. Cinnamon uses Gnome 3 and Clutter… and all 3 projects are brand new and need to mature.

The total time was a little under 13 seconds, an impressive number overall, but less so when comparing with Lisa, which managed a whole of four second less. At a first glance, you might find this annoying, but it is not so.

I need to be honest here, and I know this was something Ubuntu put a lot of efforts in. We don’t time it, we don’t benchmark it, it doesn’t matter all that much to us. With LMDE you’ll get roughly the same boot time as with Debian, with the other editions you’ll get roughly the same boot time as with Ubuntu. MDM, MATE, Cinnamon and the differences in the components we use might make things a little faster or slower than in Debian and Ubuntu, but as long as it boots reasonably “fast”, it’s not all that important to us.

Finally, after almost two years of unnecessary foreplays with Gnome 3 and other experimentations, Linux Mint is whole again. It is perfect as it should have been. True, there will always be dust and scratches to mar the excellence, but if all I can think of as being bad at the end of the review is some gray shading on an icon, seven displaced pixels and four seconds of your time, then things are looking much better than they ever had.

This is why we work hard and it makes me extremely happy to read something like this. This and that screenshot which just told me there was a new Anchorman movie coming, that just made my day! 🙂

Desktop Linux Reviews (Jim Lynch)

Linux Mint 13 MATE is an excellent addition to the Linux Mint tradition.

Review of the MATE edition: http://desktoplinuxreviews.com/2012/05/24/linux-mint-13/

Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon has an enormous amount to offer. Cinnamon 1.4 brings Mac-like features such as Expo and Scale to the Linux desktop. Other changes such as the menu improvements, settings applet, localization, and additional configuration options just make Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon that much better.

Review of the Cinnamon edition: http://desktoplinuxreviews.com/2012/05/24/linux-mint-13-cinnamon/

Comments:

Woohoo! It’s Linux Mint time again! Linux Mint 13 (wow, not exactly a lucky number!) has just been released, so I hopped right on it. Linux Mint has long been one of my favorite distros. We’ll find out in this review if the latest version measures up to its previous incarnations.

The “lucky” number made us change the “13” to “maya” in the default wallpaper, that’s as far as we went, we didn’t want to skip a version.

We always keep an eye on what other operating systems and distributions are doing and we learn a lot from them, but ultimately we want to do better than previous Mint releases. We learn a lot from reviewers who are new to Mint, but also from reviewers who can compare our latest release with what they reviewed in the past. One of the main goals here was for Mint 13 to be better than Mint 11 and for MATE and Cinnamon to be ready to welcome those who hadn’t yet jumped away from Gnome 2.

Yahoo is now the default search engine in Linux Mint. There is apparently a revenue sharing arrangement between Yahoo and the Linux Mint developers.

Yes, although to be precise, it’s an agreement with DDC, which is a syndicator of Yahoo. I can’t share stats and figures on this but the sharing agreements in place are extremely good to us. Each time we add a search engine to Linux Mint we create a new income source. This one is our first major engine and the revenue it creates make a difference in the long term in terms of the size of the projects we can take on, our ambition and how much resources we can afford to have.

The MDM display manager is based on GDM 2.0.

2.20

If you click the Menu button, you’ll find the Mint Menu is there in all its glory.

We’re still developing and improving mintMenu and the version currently in Mint 13 works better in MATE than it previously did in Gnome 2. In future releases we’re hoping to port XFapplet so that it runs in Xfce, and we’ll be adding more and more of its features (for instance the ability to install and remove software) into the Cinnamon menu.

It’s always a good idea to make sure your system software is up to date before you start using a new version of a distro.

I strongly disagree with this statement. If things work don’t break them. If you need a fix, know which one and why you need it. Be selective with your updates, don’t take everything that comes up. Both the RC and the stable release go through a massive amount of testing. If the first thing you do is accept all upstream updates you open your system to any potential regression coming with them. Security doesn’t justify everything, especially when people don’t have a clue what security holes or bugs the updates they’re taking are supposed to fix. It’s important to know how to be safe and avoid problems, blindly taking updates is not something I would recommend.

One thing that some would consider a problem is how both desktops, MATE and Cinnamon, aren’t included by default the way they are with Linux Mint Debian Edition.

I like to use both and so I have both installed on my own system. LMDE came with both as well, but it took a lot of work to integrate both desktops on the same ISO. Whether it’s bluetooth, system tools, keyrings… some parts of MATE duplicate or conflict with Gnome. It’s possible to have both but by sticking with one and only one desktop we can achieve a better integration and a better out of the box experience.

Personally, I prefer Duck Duck Go to Yahoo. Duck Duck Go also has a revenue relationship with Linux Mint. So I think you can use either search engine and still feel like you are supporting the Linux Mint project.

Yes, very much so. We’ve got great deals with both search engines. One generates much more than the other because it’s a major engine, it’s used by more people and it comes with higher CPM/CPCs. We’re delighted to see Yahoo in Linux Mint, but we’re also really happy to continue with DuckDuckGo, we have a great relationship with them. There’s also a lot more engines out there which are not installed by default. Using Yahoo or DuckDuckGo is a great way to support Linux Mint, but if you don’t like them or if you’d rather use another engine, don’t hesitate to do so. The most important thing is that people enjoy their experience with Linux Mint, then after that, if we can draw an income as well, then even better.

If you’ve ever used a Mac, you’ll feel right at home with the Expo and Scale overviews since they are quite reminiscent of OS X’s Expose feature.

Both features were directly inspired by Compiz. Once they were both implemented we decided to add a Scale effect on mouse over “inside” the Expo feature… that made it unique in a way, although we’re still very much adding Compiz features to Cinnamon here. We also want to add perspective and reflection, maybe a grid layout and other features that were already there in Compiz. On top of that we have our own novelties such as workspace management (even though this looks a bit like Android, it was inspired by the multi-tabs design pioneered by web browsers) and the upcoming ability to name your workspaces and easily and visually recognize them.

Localization support means that Cinnamon 1.4 supports 39 languages, and includes support for right-to-left languages.

Yes, although we’re aware of a bug in the menu where the categories aren’t localized.

I hope future releases will let us name our workspaces. This would make it easier to specify which workspace is for which task. It would really make it better organizationally. The Linux Mint developers have already said that this is something that might show up in a future release, so I’m very happy to know they’ve already noticed the need for workspace naming.

Yes, definitely that’s on my wish-list as well 🙂

Muktware (Timothy Matias)

Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon: A Spectacular GNOME 3 Fork

Both as a Linux Mint release and a Linux distro, I can sincerely give it a critical rating of 10/10 stars. Check it out for yourself and see what I mean.

Review of the Cinnamon edition: http://www.muktware.com/3625/linux-mint-13-cinnamon-spectacular-gnome-3-fork

Comments:

When I first tried out Cinnamon, I was extremely disappointed to be honest. It was bloated, counterintuitive, and utterly incompatible with my netbook’s resolution of 1024×600 pixels. The latter issue is particularly what irked me, But with Clement’s upcoming Mint 13 release, all the above problems were fixed, Cinnamon became stable and fluid, and they added a host of other innovative and useful features that make Linux Mint 13 a truly stellar release.

Ok, be careful here. I don’t like making promise or selling things I can’t guarantee. I’d rather sound pessimistic here. 600px high is, by many standards, not very high at all. Like many upstream developers, I design applications in 1920×1200, sometimes I check to see if they fit in 1024×768 and at rare occasions in 800×600. It looks to me like Gnome and Ubuntu are targeting small resolutions, mobile devices and touch screens using bigger widgets, dumbed down interfaces and larger fonts. We’re a PC operating system, for desktops and laptops, but even net-books nowadays come with decent resolutions. If one of our application (or in this case, the menu) doesn’t fit in 600px, we would consider it a bug, but not a high priority one so it wouldn’t be enough to justify removing elements from the interface (although it was fixed in this particular case).

Applets are not movable by default; to change their position, activate “Panel Edit Mode” (see screenshot) and color-coded panel zones will appear, easing your ability to customize applets on the panel as you see fit. This feature is similar to the “lock/unlock taskbar” feature that was introduced in Windows XP.

This comes from a technical limitation we have with focus and mouse interaction. Some applets allow you to drag and drop elements within their content (for instance you can move windows around in the window list applet). This makes it hard to move the applet itself, so we have a “Panel Edit Mode” which ensures applets understand you want to move them, and not their content, when dragging them with the mouse.

The previous releases of Cinnamon were disappointing for me, as the overall experience was buggy, sluggish, visually-limited, and generally lacking in customization and functionality. For this release, all of the problems I had with it just “disappeared”, and what I got instead was a very satisfying and speedy experience, with customization becoming a strength instead of a weakness.

That’s our number one concern with Cinnamon. We know it’s great, but we can’t give the same experience to everybody. Some people experience “buggy, sluggish, visually-limited” even with 1.4 UP3, the underlying technology relies heavily on 3D acceleration, drivers and the GPU… and so Cinnamon is great to some people and not usable to others.

I would also like to note that overall Cinnamon integrates far better with Linux Mint than it does with Sabayon, likely because Cinnamon is the brainchild of Clement Lefebvre, the creator and lead developer of Linux Mint.

I’d like to give credit to Gwendal Le Bihan here also, as he’s put as much work into Cinnamon as I did. We received a lot of help from a lot of developers, but the core of the team is made of Gwendal and myself. I didn’t try it in Sabayon but I’d be happy to help them integrating it. Cinnamon is developed with other distributions in mind, but of course we know it from A to Z and we have a direct impact on its development, so it’s natural we achieve an excellent level of integration with it. If something doesn’t integrate well, we don’t send ourselves an “upstream” bug report, we just fix it. We have that relationship with the MATE developers as well. Things get fixed pretty fast… most of the bugs found in Cinnamon during the RC release were fixed and shipped in an UP, most of the bugs found in MATE were fixed and will be shipped in MATE 1.4.

Cinnamon was previously considered alpha software, but with the level of performance, stability, and feature-completeness I’m experiencing, I greatly approve its promotion to the “Stable” branch.

Provided you’ve got the right drivers, the right GPU and a bit of luck, it’s very stable and full of features. It works really well, but not everywhere.

This is one of the best-put-together menus I’ve seen, and now that they’ve fixed the problems with resolution scaling (they cleverly overcame this through the “shrinking icons” trick we’ve seen in the GNOME Shell / Unity sidebar), it’s damn near perfect. Cinnamon’s menu is aesthetically pleasing, feature-filled, and efficiently intuitive. Definitely WIN in my book.

I think it looks good and it’s certainly a good menu, but it’s missing a lot of features found in mintMenu. There’s still a long way to go.. we’ll add more and more features as we go along.

One of the major problems with Compiz, interestingly enough, is that it’s overused! For the individual user this level of customization isn’t a problem (it’s most definitely a good thing!), But for the Linux Mint team, I applaud them for providing a default Compiz experience that is noticeably interactive, but they don’t go overboard (like dare-i-say “Ultimate Edition”, but I suppose that’s their niche!) The amount of Compiz effects used in this release was pleasantly balanced.

We can’t. The amount of work that must have gone into making all these Compiz plugins is simply mind-boggling! Of course we’d like to have a rotating cube and wobbly windows, of course they’re useless, of course people love them, but we just don’t have the resources to do that. Before we do this, there’s a thousands of other things which require our attention. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen though. The community already came with coverflow alt-tab, the entire Expo plugin was developed by Dreckr, maybe tomorrow somebody will make other Compiz-like extensions or have them integrated into Cinnamon. We won’t go overboard with them, wobbly windows for instance would definitely be disabled by default, but it’s something we’d be happy to add.

The best part of Expo is that there actually are workspaces! You can choose how many workspaces you have (like you used to in GNOME 2), and drag and drop to choose what applications go in what workspace, This makes managing workspaces and application-switching a lot more fluid, feature-filled, and poweruser-friendly.

I can’t remember browsing the Web without multi-tabs. It became a natural standard, a feature every browser has or needs to have. Workspace management is important to power-users and the ability to control workspaces, how many there are, what their name is (we’re not there yet), is something that every DE should have. We’re in control of Cinnamon so we’re getting it done. I’m sure other DEs will follow. KDE also has an interesting “activity” concept, which is similar to Opera’s tabs-sessions management… that’s another thing we can look into. Expo, right now, gives you basic workspace management, you like it because it’s new, but there’s still a long way to go here.

Linux User and Developer magazine (Rob Zwetsloot)

“Ubuntu for Human Beings”

5/5

Linux Mint has continued the tradition of taking all the good parts of Ubuntu, and replacing all the bad bits with fantastic, usable, alternatives. Cinnamon and MATE are both great desktops that offer plenty of choice for all users, and perfectly compliment the rest of Mints design aesthetic and philosophy

Review of the Cinnamon edition: http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/reviews/linux-mint-13-review-ubuntu-for-human-beings/

Comments:

“Ubuntu for Human Beings”

I don’t want to sound ungrateful, and I do appreciate the compliment, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that. It certainly is a smart and funny quote, to take Ubuntu’s motto and turn it against them, but it’s neither fair nor right. Ubuntu is the best at making Ubuntu desktops, we’re the best at making Mint desktops. We have different objectives, different priorities, different goals and different visions. Ubuntu is extremely innovative, their development pace is really impressive and they’re implementing their vision of the Ubuntu desktop in a fantastic way. Unity is not for everyone, and by redefining their goals Ubuntu lost some of its audience. They’re not doing a bad job though, people might think what they want to achieve is not the desktop they want to use on their computer, and that’s fair enough, but they’re making huge progress and they’re getting closer and closer to their goals, so I don’t think they deserve to be depicted in such a way.

In a way it’s also insulting to Linux Mint. Although it’s meant to be a compliment, it depicts Linux Mint as being a “better” Ubuntu, or an “Ubuntu done right” (as I’m sometimes sad to read). Our vision has nothing to do with Ubuntu. You can appreciate what we’re doing with Debian and how much LMDE and Ubuntu-based editions share when it comes to the experience we want to give to our users. If tomorrow we switch to Fedora, LFS or if we build our own base, you won’t see much difference… you’ll see huge delays and very little innovation as we’ll face huge technical challenge, but our vision itself won’t change. We know what we want, they do to, and these are completely different visions. I don’t think it’s fair to neither Ubuntu nor Mint, to say that one is better at implementing the goals of the other better.

While Linux Mint is on its thirteenth version, it only really got popular in the last couple of years.

It was always highly popular. It kept growing every year, and it really started to become “mainstream” in the last two years. The #1 rank on Distrowatch doesn’t indicate that it’s the most used distribution, but it changes a lot of things when it comes to the press, media coverage and adoption. Mint has been growing much faster than it did before since getting to that #1 spot.

MATE is the logical evolution of GNOME 2, bringing it with it the stability and usability that made GNOME originally so popular. It integrates seamlessly with Mint, with all the Mint Menu and Compiz style additions working flawlessly. It’s great for those who have not been able to get used to other Desktops Environments, with all the familiar menus and work flow.

There’s a brilliant relationship between Mint and MATE (it’s no coincidence for instance that MDM is the MDM Display Manager and not the MATE Display Manager or the Mint Display Manager, we talk a lot, very often, we face issues and overcome them together). Compiz doesn’t work out of the box and we’re hoping to get closer to the Compiz devs. to make it integrate better with MATE.

Cinnamon is the real star of the show though. It’s built upon GNOME 3, but very little of the new GNOME shell is recognisable in Cinnamon. The main difference is the KDE or Windows style Start Menu, split up into the classic GNOME categories, and with application and shutdown shortcuts on the side. That’s far from all though, as the interface has been tweaked to make the work flow much more like classic GNOME, with an improved Alt-Tab function, and the ability to better manage virtual desktops. It has a nice layer of polish that makes it a joy to use, with a lot better support for mousing around the screen than the new GNOME.

The menu is a rewrite of mintMenu (although it’s still missing many of its features). The Alt-tab comes from MGSE… for multitasking to work well, the desktop had to be task-centric. Cinnamon is a complete fork, so all visible parts of Gnome Shell and major parts of the back-end were removed.

Along with this change up in desktop environments, Mint has received a new display manager, MDM. Built upon GDM, the Mint developers claim is that most features and customisation of any display manager. It definitely has a lot, with a great graphical tool that allows setting up event scripting, themes, welcome messages, and different behaviours for logging in. For some reason it forgoes the more modern method of having a list of user names to click on, instead requiring you to type in your username. Not a big deal for some people, and you can set timed auto log in, but otherwise there is really no reason to remove this.

Credits go to the Gnome developers. I’m not sure whether they don’t work on Gnome anymore and the people who replaced them threw the best things they did in the bin, or whether they suddenly decided they hated their most popular creations, but you just need to look at some of the things they did a couple of years ago and it compares really well with the best of what’s available today. MDM is based on GDM 2.20. The Mint theme we made for it uses text fields. We’ll make another theme with a userlist, the functionality is there in MDM, it’s just not there in the theme itself.

Linux Mint has once again shown that listening to the community is far better than making compromises for vision.

I appreciate the review and the compliment and listening to our users is something that is really important to us, but I don’t like the direct comparison with Ubuntu. You can’t fault them for achieving their goal, especially when they’re doing so at such a high pace and with high quality. What Gnome and Ubuntu are doing certainly doesn’t appeal to most computer users out there, I wouldn’t use Shell or Unity myself on a desktop computer, it explains why they’re getting less popular and why people are migrating, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong in doing so. If Shell and Unity had been developed by projects independent from Gnome and Ubuntu, they’d be hugely popular within a small, yet, very loyal user base. It’s the fact that they’re called Gnome and Ubuntu, that Gnome 2 and the “traditional” Ubuntu desktop are no longer available which annoys people who previously enjoyed them.

Linux and Life

I love how the developers of Linux Mint do care about the opinion of the users and offer the what the users really want. All in all, Linux Mint 13 Maya MATE edition is a great distro. It meets the need of those who want the good things of Ubuntu and still prefer the look and feel of the good old Gnome2 desktop.

Review of the MATE edition: http://www.linuxandlife.com/2012/05/linux-mint-13-maya-mate-editon-review.html

Comments:

Since Linux Mint is the biggest rival of Ubuntu to be the most popular Linux distro, I am very curious and excited to see what Linux Mint offers in this release to compete with the recent success of Ubuntu 12.04.

Mark talked about it, and I fully agree with him. I don’t see this as a competition. When Ubuntu gets better, we get better as a result. When Mint gets better, they get better as a result. Both distributions have the opportunity to learn from each others and everything they do is compatible and directly reusable. We’re less than 2% of a market where the major actors out there are vulnerable to the quality of our systems. Ubuntu is changing and attacking that market with a different angle. Together and along with some 300 distributions to choose from we’re a huge threat to Apple and Microsoft when it comes to seducing IT enthusiasts, and more and more also novice and casual computer users. We love being #1 at Distrowatch, we enjoy our popularity, but if there’s a competition out there we’re definitely on the same side and our main competitors are Windows, Mac OS and the firmware market.

The ISO image of Linux Mint no longer fits a CD, the size is nearly 900MB so you need a USB or a DVD to boot and install it. Besides, if you are a Windows user and want to try Linux Mint inside Windows, you have to download the 64 bit ISO file because Wubi installer is not supported in the 32 bit version.

Yes. I’d like apologize about this. This comes down to resources. We’d love to be able to do more but we have to focus our efforts and let things go when they require too much work and don’t impact enough users. We found a problem with mint4win on the 32-bit ISOs, it was too late to fix and we didn’t want to stop the release just for that. The size of the ISOs and making them fit within 700MB takes a huge amount of time and we found out last year (in a previous poll) that a almost all users could either boot off a DVD or a USB stick.

Since MATE behaves just like Gnome2[…]

MATE basically started by “being” Gnome2. It’s the same code, exactly. Applications and libraries were renamed. Conflicts with Gnome 3 were fixed. A few improvements were made.. there’s still a few rough edges but if you were to call it Gnome 2.36 you wouldn’t be very far off.

In comparison with Katya, Maya comes with many more beautiful wallpapers. However, there are only 2 gtk themes ( Mint X and Mint Z) pre-installed in Linux Mint 13 when there were 9 in Katya.

I’ll apologize in advance for the sarcasm here.. I need to take another cheap shot at the GTKGnome developers here. GTK3 isn’t a reliable API. Maybe it should be called libgnome instead. GTK3.4 came with Gnome3.4, and wasn’t compatible with previous GTK3 themes. This means all GTK3 applications looked really ugly not only with all the GTK2 themes which don’t support GTK3 (almost all of them), but also the few which did. With this in mind we had three options:

  1. Give you a desktop with poor integration and applications which look different based on the API they use (which is completely unacceptable)
  2. Ditch all GTK3 applications from Mint and replace them with earlier GTK2 versions, or GTK2 or QT applications (this includes Gnome apps, but also Gdebi, Transmission and a few others)
  3. Rant like mad, remove all themes, and waste countless hours in giving Mint-X and Mint-Z proper GTK “3.4” support even though it’s likely to break again in 3.6…

We went for option 3 “this time”. I hope this little example was enough to convince 3rd party developers not to use GTK3. I couldn’t find any release notes or documentation explaining the regression or how to solve the issue.. I genuinely get the feeling that GTK 3.4 is developed for Gnome 3.4, that it doesn’t really matter if it breaks things and that we’re not supposed to use it outside of Gnome.

Over all, there seem to be no changes about the default applications in Linux Mint 13. For internet use, you have Firefox, Pidgin, Xchat, Thunderbird and Transmission. For office use, you have the bunch of LibreOffice and the online gnome dictionary. For multimedia, you have Banshee, VLC, Gnome Player and Movie player.

These applications are great. They should remain in Linux Mint for a long time. The only risks I can see are the fact that Transmission’s future depends on GTK3’s ability to properly integrate with other DEs, the fact that Firefox might not be able to get Flash in the future (though I’m sure we’ll find a solution to that) and that Banshee could lose systray support if it goes the same route as Rhythmbox.

Banshee isnt integrated into the sound menu like in Ubuntu so you cannot control Banshee from the sound menu in Linux Mint 13.

MPRIS control in MATE is something we all want. The MATE developers are talented, pragmatic and passionate, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before that happens.

The Software Center of Linux Mint looks cleaner and more simple than that of Ubuntu.

To be fair, I think we’ve got a lot to learn about Ubuntu’s Software Center’s look and feel. Release after release they caught up with us on the features and they have some functionality we should add. But if you look at the look and feel, I think they’ve always been ahead. They did a fantastic job not only on the layout, but also on the navigation, the interaction, the dynamism of the components and the widgets themselves.

The very first thing I did after installing Linux Mint 13 was to install the proprietary driver for my ATI graphic card.  When I opened the Additional Drivers configuration window, Linux Mint offered me two choices for the proprietary driver. I picked the first option (the post release update driver) but it resulted to an error. I then picked the second option to install, it seemed to run well but after the reboot, everything turned to a catastrophe. It seemed the two drivers I just tried to install conflicted with each other and caused X to crash. The desktop turned into a blank blue screen and nothing was working. I then reinstalled Linux Mint 13, and this time, I chose only the second option for the additional driver and everything was fine afterward. In my opinion, this error is not a fault of Linux Mint but of AMD instead since ATI graphic cards are known to be the trouble makers in the Linux world. I personally have experienced a lot of problems with my ATI card in other distros before.

nVidia is known to work better and to make better Linux drivers than ATI. The fault still is ours to manage though.. I tested Mint, Cinnamon even, on ATI chipsets and provided you installed the right drivers, you could get really good results. I think the problem here is upstream with Jockey and the drivers made available. That’s something we can and should fix. I’d love to get more information about this from people who experienced this as well… in particular the versions of fglrx they installed and what their GPU chipset is.

Tux Tweaks

I strongly suggest you give Mint 13 a try in either its MATE or Cinnamon editions. In my experience it offers a clean, polished, traditional, desktop experience.

Review of the Cinnamon Edition: http://tuxtweaks.com/2012/05/distro-review-linux-mint-13-maya-cinnamon-edition/

Comments:

I retained my previous /home partition. Upon my first attempt to log in, I got an error message telling me that my preferred session, (gnome.desktop) was not available. After going back and selecting “Cinnamon” as my desktop, I was able to log in to the desktop. I was greeted with the standart Linux Mint welcome screen.

MDM probably read from your home data that your preferred default session is “Gnome” and since it runs the default session by default you saw that error message as it isn’t available. There’s probably a better way to handle this situation, thanks for the feedback, we’ll try to improve this in MDM.

The notifier in the system tray indicated that there were 91 recommended updates available for download. I was a bit surprised by this since I installed this distro on the same day it was released.

We freeze most packages at the version they are during the Ubuntu release. Then after that, we re-freeze for the Mint RC. Our policy on updates is completely different than in Ubuntu. We consider each update as a potential risk for regression. We’re extremely selective when it comes to that. If we were to apply these 91 updates between the RC and the Stable release, the Stable release wouldn’t be called Stable, but RC2 🙂

I suspect that the release candidate that was put out was deemed to be stable and thus was released as the official version.

There were about 40 bug fixes between the two releases, most of them cosmetic or minor.

One of the well known features of Linux Mint is that codecs for most popular media formats are pre-installed. That means you won’t have to go scouring the internet for instructions on how to listen to your MP3 collection or how to watch a DVD.

The non-codecs ISOs come with no multimedia support but they’re installable with a click of the mouse on the welcome screen or on the “Install Multimedia Codecs” menu item present in “Sound & Video”. Other distributions use automated tools such as codec-buddy and most web browsers know where to get the missing codecs, so the situation is better than it was before, and good multimedia support is easily installable in most distributions.

Banshee is included to manage and enjoy your music collection and also includes integration with the Amazon MP3 Store if you’d like to purchase music. I presume that the Mint team has an agreement with Amazon and that a portion of the profits go to support Mint development.

Yes. At present the profits are shared at 50% between Gnome and Linux Mint. The relationship is not good though. Although they control neither the traffic nor the content, the Banshee developers are against the idea of sharing and want 100% of the income. They don’t see Amazon customers as Banshee/Mint users but as Banshee users. That income source is also extremely small and it might not justify the efforts required to make a partnership work. We might remove the Amazon store from Banshee in the future, or claim 100% of the stream, or leave it untouched from upstream (in which case the profits would go 75% to Canonical, 25% to Gnome… I think), or remove all tags altogether and void the income source (i.e. the Amazon sale would then profit no 3rd party). This income stream is insignificant to projects such as Ubuntu, Gnome or Linux Mint, there’s very little interest, and controversies which sprung from it (first with Ubuntu, then with Mint) were a pure waste of time. Nobody really cares about it and that’s why we had no deal in place by the time Mint 12 came out. One release later we still don’t have an implementation that works well for everybody (especially in terms of localization) and our “partners” don’t communicate with us. We’re extremely close to our search partners, whether it’s DDC with Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Opera, these companies produce an income with the Linux Mint user base, they help us with the funding and we have a great relationship with them. You can imagine that Yahoo produces much more income than DuckDuckGo for instance, but what matters the most here isn’t the income, it’s the strategy we define for the search market, and the relationship we have with our partners. When it comes to Banshee, we enforce our strategy, the relationship is not good and the income is insignificant, so it’s unlikely to last.

I found the Cinnamon menu system to be a bit slow on the modest hardware of my netbook. However, when running Mint 13 Cinnamon on a virtual machine on my more powerfull desktop computer, I did not experience this sluggishness.

The ISOs come with the Virtualbox drivers installed by default, so if you enabled 3D acceleration in Virtualbox and you have enough RAM and CPU, it should be fast enough. When running natively it probably delegates much of the rendering previously done by the CPU/RAM to the graphics card.

If you’ve become alienated or frustrated with the changes to the user interface in Ubuntu, I strongly suggest you give Mint 13 a try in either its MATE or Cinnamon editions.

Thanks, but don’t switch distribution just for that. It’s worth mentioning Ubuntu users can run MATE and Cinnamon in Ubuntu itself. Both desktops are available for Ubuntu 12.04.

In my experience it offers a clean, polished, traditional, desktop experience.

Mission accomplished. These are some of the core principles on our checklist.

Video reviews:


InfinitelyGalactic brings a really good review of the Cinnamon Edition


Linux4UnME gives us great detailed contrustive feedback while playing and exploring Cinnamon


A quick and nice overview of the Cinnamon Edition from MrLinuxLive


A quick review of Mint 13 and an interesting comparison of MATE and Cinnamon by Quidsup

89 comments

  1. Mint 13 is really a great distro. I have been using from day 1, everything just works.

    Yes, I give it 10/10. The mint team had done a great job!!

  2. I’m awaiting the next release of cinnamon. 🙂 On the cinnamon menu, it would be great if you could make power off, log out and lock buttons closer together (even better if unified). It would free up some vertical space. I don’t like how it blends with the application icons. That said, cinnamon is the future for Linux mint and far better than MATE in many ways.

  3. Q1: If I installed LM13 + MATE first, and want to try Cinnamon next, should I re-install from scratch?

    Q2: What is the technical reason for having these two separate Gnome Desktop environments?

    Q3: Will MATE and Cinnamon exist forever or will MATE (which I believe is based on the obsolete and un-maintained GTK2) be abandoned in a near future?

  4. I haven’t had time to review Mint 13 yet; I still plan to in early or mid June. I’m glad you are getting such great reviews, Clem.

    Even though I prefer Cinnamon, I hope MATE will be able to continue. Distrowatch has a few Linux distributions that still use GNOME 2, so the demand for such an environment obviously is there. It certainly worked well for me the week I was using it.

  5. Congratulations on the great reviews, Clem! Mint 13 deserves them, I personally switched from Mint 12 to 13 (as my productive system) yesterday and everything is fine.

    I was glad to read that MDM will get a userlist, which was one of my wishes, too.

    I experienced that problems with ATI/AMD chipsets and the proprietary fglrx drivers on Mint 12, too. For that reason, right now i stay with Gallium 0.4, which works fine with cinnamon on RV620 chipset.
    I will install Mint 13 on a second partition and test it with fglrx. You will get the feedback right here!

  6. I had a windblows vista machine, DIE seemed to not even be worth fixing, and a friend recommended linux mint. I got 12, installed it, and was intrigued, and excited that most everything was a pleasure in the program. My big let down, was that I could not use it for online performances in the way that I needed to. I have a flash based performance system, it uses audio and video to stream live concerts around the world via a virtual reality program known as second life.
    You seem to suggest there is a way to uninstall some plugins and that perhaps I would gain this ability. I have the 13 maya edition now, and like everything I see, other than the ability that isnt there which I so greatly desire. any suggestions, links, or ideas, would be appreciated.

  7. I’ve now worked with Mint 13 MATE and cinnamon edition from both a LiveCD and VirtualBox perspective on a daily basis since they were released. If I compare Mint 13 to Mint 10 in terms of “works out of the box” experience, I’d have to give it a bare pass as opposed to Mint 10 which got top marks.

    The reason for this is that both desktop environments need to mature significantly, especially in the area of Accessibility for visually impaired users. Both window managers, Muffin and Marco are light years BEHIND Compiz, both in performance and versatility, and in serious need of fine tuning. I’ve read the disserations on Compiz being a dead project but the fact remains that one does not remove a solution with a given feature set without replacing it with one that offers at least the same level of functionality being removed.

    While I can appreciate the desire to get a LTS distro out the door in parallel with the distro upon which it is based for support purposes, the source distro is badly broken in the area of accessibility and that failing is inherited by the Mint flavour based on it.

    What happens when an OS is released that is less than it’s predecessor? Vista.

    At the end of the day, I put Mint 10 on a quad core AMD 3.4Ghz box with an ATI 5670 and 8Gb RAM and it performed flawlessly, no tweaking required, especially in the visual aids area. I cannot in any way, shape or form make that claim about Mint 13 – it’s simply neither true nor possible.

    Of the two, Cinnamon is definitely further behind, lacking customizations and ease of configurability and use that were present in MInt 10. While much work has been done and is appreciated, when a NEW flavor of distro is tabled that takes away functionality and configurability that was present in the OLD, that’s indicative that more work should have been done before it was released.

    I had hoped for more from a LTS but for me it is now obvious that either a 13.1 release or a 14 release is more viable. I know my opinion is going to e unpopular but the facts speak for themselves and are undeniable.

    In closing, I should note that despite my comments above, in my well-considerd opinion Mint 13 is still head and shoulders above any distro based on either Unity or vanilla Gnome3.

    I await further point release evolutions of Mint 13 (13.1, etc.) with great interest and anticipation in the hope that the issues iterated above will be resolved in the context of a LTS release.

  8. I tried Linux Mint 13 with MATE and really like it. I wasn’t sure if I’d like Cinnamon, so I tried it with VirtualBox. It’s much better than I expected. Now I’m installing it on my main machine.

  9. I’m one of those people who are in the “Cinnamon is slow and buggy” category, but I still can appreciate its brilliance. Clem and friends make, in my opinion, the best Linux distro out there, and you aren’t afraid to actually say the word ‘Linux’ 😉

    Keep up the great work and I eagerly anticipate further refinements of both MATE and Cinnamon. 😀

  10. Linux Mint 13 with MATE was the medicine that cured my distro-hopping. Thank you, Dr. Lefebvre, for this miracle drug.

  11. Hello Clem and team,
    I forgot to mention one point in my last comment. I personally miss Deja Dup in standard installation. MintBackup is allright for backing up data before installing a new version of Mint (but I don’t really need it, for I am using a /home partition). But an automatic, incremental backup can really be helpful. I personally was already glad that I had my weekly backup, when something went wrong and my /home partion crashed.
    Please consider to put it back in standard installation, for it will save a lot of people’s data!

    Feedback on flgrx drivers:
    Installed LM13 Cinnamon 64bit on AMD RV620, then tried to install flgrx drivers (with updates). Ended up with an error message.

    Last rows from my jockey.log:
    Building only for 3.2.0-23-generic
    Building for architecture amd64
    Building initial module for 3.2.0-23-generic
    Done.

    fglrx_updates:
    Running module version sanity check.
    – Original module
    – No original module exists within this kernel
    – Installation
    – Installing to /lib/modules/3.2.0-23-generic/kernel/drivers/char/drm/

    depmod…….

    DKMS: install completed.
    update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
    Processing triggers for bamfdaemon …
    Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf.index…
    Setting up fglrx-amdcccle-updates (2:8.960-0ubuntu1) …
    Processing triggers for libc-bin …
    ldconfig deferred processing now taking place
    Processing triggers for initramfs-tools …
    update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-23-generic
    Warning: No support for locale: de_DE.utf8

    2012-05-31 18:56:32,805 WARNING: /sys/module/fglrx_updates/drivers does not exist, cannot rebind fglrx_updates driver
    2012-05-31 18:57:06,167 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf
    2012-05-31 18:57:06,168 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use
    2012-05-31 18:57:06,209 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf
    2012-05-31 18:57:06,209 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use

  12. I’ve installed 8 top distros in an attempt to replace the excellent Pardus (closing shop). Only Mint came close. I especially liked the ease of installing 2 monitors and being able to install all the different screen versions. But I don’t understand the hoopla over Mate and Cinnamon when the KDE version has many advantages. It has a very clean single taskbar only. You can put different pictures on 2 monitors. Compiz works. Both software and applications can be searched. And applications are divided into sub-categories instead of being lumped together.

  13. Clem, thanks for the fascinating discussion of some of the problems you face in putting together Linux Mint. Your comments help shed light on why so many of the reviews are so highly complimentary, in spite of the many problems.

    Here’s one more very laudatory review that I just happened across:
    http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/ubuntu-cinnamon.html

    Keep up the great work!

  14. whats ahead? it is truly a shame that desktop PC’s are sort of in a decline (although hard to say how long they might linger, if that is even the right word for it), in favor of the mobs. But one thing is clear: the position of MS Windows as the unquestionable “only thing that there is ” has been dealt a significant blow ..again.
    Cinnamon is absolutely on the right track! a great team!

  15. Cinnamon has come a long way – I love it.
    Still some issues, but Cinnamon is my choice of desktop.
    Mate and many others is just – not for me.
    I came to Linux with Mint 12, and then cinnamon came not long after. This was “my” desktop! Now because of bugz I was looking if there where other directions to take – never found one.
    But much have been done since, and cinnamon grows and grows.
    I think Mint 13 with Cinnamon is my choice for the next couple of years to come.

    Thx – I love you

    With love and gratitude –

  16. So, now I tried a different constellation. Installed LM13 Cinnamon 64bit on AMD RV620, then tried to install flgrx drivers (the original version, no updates). That worked good, after restart everything was fine, only sometimes image interferences when switching graphics mode.
    Graphics on Supertux Cart is now better (more details, better fps) than using Gallium 0.4

    Then I rebootet and tried to choose and install flgrx drivers (with updates). Again I got that error message.
    Jockey Log:

    Building only for 3.2.0-23-generic
    Building for architecture amd64
    Building initial module for 3.2.0-23-generic
    Done.

    fglrx_updates:
    Running module version sanity check.
    – Original module
    – No original module exists within this kernel
    – Installation
    – Installing to /lib/modules/3.2.0-23-generic/kernel/drivers/char/drm/

    depmod….

    DKMS: install completed.
    update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
    Processing triggers for bamfdaemon …
    Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf.index…
    Setting up fglrx-amdcccle-updates (2:8.960-0ubuntu1) …
    Processing triggers for initramfs-tools …
    update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-23-generic
    Warning: No support for locale: de_DE.utf8
    Processing triggers for libc-bin …
    ldconfig deferred processing now taking place

    2012-05-31 21:00:06,965 WARNING: /sys/module/fglrx_updates/drivers does not exist, cannot rebind fglrx_updates driver
    2012-05-31 21:00:30,983 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf
    2012-05-31 21:00:30,983 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use
    2012-05-31 21:00:31,017 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf
    2012-05-31 21:00:31,018 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,047 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,047 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,082 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,083 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,125 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx): target_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,126 DEBUG: XorgDriverHandler(%s, %s).enabled(): No X.org driver set, not checking
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,378 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,378 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,415 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,416 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,502 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,502 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,543 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx_updates): target_alt None current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt None other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,544 DEBUG: fglrx_updates is not the alternative in use
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,603 DEBUG: fglrx.enabled(fglrx): target_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf current_alt /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf other target alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf other current alt /usr/lib/fglrx/alt_ld.so.conf
    2012-05-31 21:00:44,603 DEBUG: XorgDriverHandler(%s, %s).enabled(): No X.org driver set, not checking
    2012-05-31 21:00:48,770 DEBUG: Shutting down

  17. Hello Innocent Bystander I would think Mate is here for a while as this system is LTs for 5 years.

    Bill

  18. Oh, forgot to mention:
    After the failed installation of fglrx updates, after reboot the graphics driver now is Vesa: M82
    Probably fallback, I guess.

  19. I ran the nvidia drivers to do duel monitor and it toke away the linux mint 13 cin theme and everything on the bottom tool bar doubles. but all in all this os it the fastest and runs way lighting better then and other os the video code work very well and game play is wow’ very nice. thanks linux mint.

  20. I’m not the biggest fan of Cinnamon (it’s slow!), but I’ll wait and see what 1.5 brings. In the meantime, MATE is very nearly a dead ringer for GNOME 2.x from this user’s point of view. I can do without the wobbly windows, I guess. MATE is my go-to desktop, and Mint’s dedication to it is a very welcome thing in these days of new paradigms.

    Congratulations, Clem; your (and yours’) hard work is top-notch and much appreciated!

  21. I just saw this on slashdot and wondered what Mint is going to do about this issue which will rear it’s ugly head next year:
    http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12368.html

    Yes, new hardware will ONLY boot Windows 8 unless you pay Microsoft (actually Verasign) for a key and run though some other hoops. The good news is that one $99 fee will unlock Linux Mint for EVERYONE. But it also means that Linux Mint 13 will need an update next year (since it is an LTS release) to fix the issue for new HW. Guess ’13’ has some bad luck to it after all.

  22. @Ken Scharf

    That only applies to OEM hardware boxes. Those with component boxes (like myself) won’t ever be affected. Now I will grant you that it may pose a problem for laptops but the Pacific Rim is notorious for ignoring issues like this.

  23. Linux Mint 13 with MATE is by far the fastest GNU/Linux distro I have ever used, and by far the most simple! Also, on top of that, THE FIRST distro to have Wi-Fi work by default on a Lenovo machine (Lenovo B560), clearing out the Acer_wmi blocklist bug! Excellent job guys, keep it up!

  24. The Cinnamon menu installs itself only in English (or at least not in French). You can still edit by hand for each account, though, but it’s a bit painstaking.

    I’m a trained C++ Windows developer but a Linux newbie. I certainly understand that there exists somewhere a set of configuration files but then it’s not really out-of-the-box.

    Mint remains the best distribution by far.

  25. Clem: I had always had great respect for you and the Mint team for the ‘zen’ manner in which you guys go about developing this awesome distro, and this blog post has increased my respect for you guys several notches higher. I’m rendered speechless when I see how painstakingly you guys listen to fans, users and critics.

    I feel that I’ve found the distro that I can call ‘home’.
    🙂

  26. For what i have read and seen about Linux Mint seams a good distro, but it misses a very important feature, the installed has NO encryption option, if wasnt for that for sure i would install it.

  27. I’m afraid I have to confess that I am one of the unlucky ones for whom Cinnamon does not work. I have Nvidia GeForce 6150se, and Mint had the same issue with the driver that Ubuntu 12.04 does- the driver in Jocky is not the correct one. Well, alright; I updated the driver, though I wonder why the updated driver wasn’t available on Jocky. Even when I updated the driver, the resolution defaults to 87 hz, no matter how many times I set it for “auto”. The same is true if I use anything that uses Compiz in MATE, like Avant Window Manager.
    All of this makes Mint 13 unusable to me. A heck of a change, since 10 was the best desktop I’d ever used. Also, very disappointing. I honestly don’t understand why Compiz has become completely useless to me, but it has made it impossible for me to use Cinnamon at all, and impossible for me to use MATE the way I wish. I’m afraid this will be a LTS that will pass me by.

  28. So for a while there I could tolerate Unity but with changes made in the latest version my patience reached a breaking point. Being a huge fan of the old Gnome 2.3x I installed MATE and immediately felt at home again. Shortly after I decided to check up on Linux Mint again and came across Cinnamon so I installed Cinnamon. When Mint 13 released I downloaded an ISO and installed it on my netbook, then added the Mint Repos to the laptop that I had experimented with Cinnamon and installed the complete Linux Mint experience on it as well. I believe it is safe to say that Linux Mint is a permanent replacement for Ubuntu on my systems. Great work and Thanks!

  29. I found a few problems with Mint 13 Cinnamon 64 bit.

    The Update Manager checks the repositories, downloads 91 of 94 files and then hangs.

    There is no way to configure the Screen Saver or Power Manager.

    Other than that, I think Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon is pretty good. Not quite as good as MATE, but maybe I’ll like it after I use it a while longer.

  30. @Ken: If tomorrow computer shops don’t sell PCs anymore but winBoxes that can only run Windows, then people who buy them will only be able to run Windows. We’ll tell them they bought in the wrong place and their equipment isn’t a PC. Some of them will bite the bullet and only use Windows, others will return the hardware as faulty to the vendor and get refunded, and eventually when too many people get upset they’ll gather and invent easy ways to “jailbreak” or “root” the winbox. There will be hassle but in the end of the day people will get their way, they always do.

    Now, with that said, although I strongly disagree with some of what I can read on the Fedora link you gave us, I think it’s brilliant that they’re having this discussion and reflection about it. Some of their ideas are interesting, and although we’re likely to adopt a much more radical approach, all solutions need to be considered.

  31. Clem,
    Thanks for sharing your experience and the challenges you faced during this release. As a user I always had questions like those which got answered here.
    I have moved from Julia To Maya-cinnamon edition, till now I like it. It’s a little slow in my experience, I found conky is not working properly here, but I can live without that. But I am sure cinnamon will be mature enough in coming days. Thanks again for this amazing release. 🙂

  32. Mint 13 Update Manager problem continued: I tried running this command instead of using the Update Manager:

    apt-get update -f

    It had a problem too. Please see the output text below. It may be a problem with the Ubuntu repositories, rather than Mint. Just wanted to pass this on, in case it happens to anybody else:

    Err http://archive.ubuntu.com precise/multiverse Translation-en
    Something wicked happened resolving ‘archive.ubuntu.com:http’ (-5 – No address associated with hostname) [IP: 91.189.88.25 80]
    Fetched 8,339 kB in 6min 32s (21.2 kB/s)
    W: Failed to fetch bzip2:/var/lib/apt/lists/partial/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise-updates_multiverse_binary-amd64_Packages Hash Sum mismatch

    W: Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise/multiverse/i18n/Translation-en Something wicked happened resolving ‘archive.ubuntu.com:http’ (-5 – No address associated with hostname) [IP: 91.189.88.25 80]

    E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

  33. MDM bug:

    Maya works great on 3 of my PC’s with the exception of one issue which affects 2 of them: the MDM login screen disappears after 2 seconds and I’m unable to log in. I need to ctrl-alt-f1 and restart the MDM service or ctrl-alt-del to get back to grub. Both of these PC’s use proprietary Nvidia drivers yet the issue is not seen if I change to a different login manager such as GDM or LightDM (which I’m using now). Additionally, this issue does not occur when running the LMDE 201204 which uses MDM 1.0.0. This issue has been experienced by others and has been documented here:
    https://github.com/linuxmint/mdm/issues/3

    Thanks for your help.

  34. Roj, Clem:

    Today I often “recycle” old computers that formally ran Windoze by installing Linux (Ubuntu or Mint) on them and give them away on “freecycle” to people needing a computer. Hopefully there will be third party bios’ I can use to reflash future Windoze only boxes that don’t allow setting the bios to a non-M$ boot mode. But I AM worried that Asus, Gigabyte, etc will be forced kicking and screaming to put M$ delegated bios’ on their OEM boards for the simple reason that over 90% of their customers WILL be running Windoze on them. And while they may provide a downloadable bios image that is M$ free to download that image you might NEED to be running windows to reflash it. (Though some bios’ update utilities can be run directly from the bios and use a USB flash or CDrom image to load).

    Still the safe boot system that M$ has adopted does have it’s good points if you read the article completely. While it DOES have the unwanted effect of making other OSes a pain to install, it DOES a good job of keeping malware from fsck’ing your boot block (at least on paper). God knows, I’ve seen enough computers become ‘bot slaves’ and slow down to a crawl. True enough, they were running Windoze, but I’ve also heard of a few Linux boxes becoming so infected (guess which ones were easier to clean without having to wipe the disk and re-install EVERYTHING?) Also I currently have my computer dual boot with both Win-7 (which is actually not bad), and Linux Mint so that I can downshift to run a few programs under the dark side of the force from time to time (mostly cross dev tools that are not supported under Linux). For that I would need a way to co-exist with the new overlords. (Though I think I would stay with win-7 for as long as possible, remember XP-vs-Vista? Here we go again!).

  35. Clem,
    thank you for giving me the credits of Expo, that really cheered up! I’m sorry I don’t have much time to contribute anymore. Best of luck to you and keep up with the great work, Maya is awesome 🙂

  36. Clem,

    I’m also having the same problem as Jordan (39) as far as MDM disappearing after 1 or 2 seconds is concerned. It only happens if the Nvidia driver is installed and does not happen using any other display manger.

    Otherwise, a most excellent release. Personally, I chose the 64 bit Cinnamon release and the 64-bit MATE release will replace Linux Mint 10 on my wife’s computer. Both of our desktops are identical so I’ll have to use GDM in place of MDM until the problem is resolved. A minor niggle in an otherwise great release.

    Lastly, you and your team definitely deserve all the positive reviews out there. You’ve brought back a bit of sanity to the rather badly fractured, fragmented world of Gnome.

  37. Очень понравился классический гном в Linux Mint 12. В Linux Mint 13 плохо работает менеджер сети (не раздает Интернет по WI-FI). В Ubuntu и Edubuntu менеджер сети работает хорошо. Cinnamon понравился, но после дополнительной установки gnome-shell. Будет ли Linux Mint создан на основе Edubuntu?

  38. Linux Mint Maya with Cinnamon is just fantastic, the only thing I miss is more customization specially hot corners that is to be able to customize the four corners for different commands like show desktop, workspaces, etc.

  39. “UNITY AND GNOME SHELL ARE GREAT DESKTOPS”

    OH COME ON CLEM, NOW YOU’RE BEING DIPLOMATIC 🙂

  40. I love Mint and Cinnamon but I don’t use it. As a guy who plays and makes games I need the GPU to work well. I have found that AMD graphics cards do not work well with Gnome like DE’s because of Compiz. When you run something full screen it still sits in the background and steal performance. I KDE this is not a problem, and if it is I can hit shift alt f12 to disable compositing. I don’t know if Cinnamon uses Compiz, but I would regardless like to see something like that in Cinnamon.

    I have high hopes on performance on the next release. But on the other hand I haven’t tried Cinnamon in a while.

  41. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but i took the Cinnamon 32bits for a spin and let me tell you it is far from being stable on my config (CoreI7 / 4gb / Nvidia 460 with Nvidia drivers instead of Nouveau).
    I experienced no less than 2 freezes of the DE in one hour : one while sudo apt get some additional packages and one during the normal use (playing music & browsing)…
    The Gui is nice and responsive but those freezes are scarry … back to my KDE and waiting patiently for the Kde13, i will try again Cinnamon next year !

  42. With the potential for another typical power grab by Mycrow$oft using Win-8/UEFI, everyone please remember to look at
    http://www.fit-pc.com
    and seriously consider supporting their company for providing solid work machines that come installed with Mint.
    Anything to keep the power away from where it doesn’t belong.

  43. In my previous I may have sound harsh but it was not my intention. For the few hours I tried it I’ve found cinnamon very polished and pleasant to use (even if it doesn’t come close to kde for configuration & polish).
    The Linux mint dev team has done a wonderful job with gnome3 Aka “the desktop turd”.
    I’m a intensive gamer in wine, and cinnamon effects didn’t impact my framerates noticibly (something kde has still to workout).

  44. I think I was among the small amount of users who really loved 12 and MSGE, and I was really afraid that the new desktop concepts would disappear in favor of old-fashioned concepts in 13.

    But, I tried Cinnamon edition and I loved it right away, for me it’s the perfect mix between the old and the new desktop thinking.

    Great!

  45. The most modern and polished desktop is definitely XFCE in my opinion. I’ve tried them all, all have flaws, but this one definitely suits my needs and is customizable to meet your needs. It’s light, it’s blazing fast, minimalistic, because less is always more and is just……. awesome. 🙂

  46. Thanks to the Mint team for again a great distro. Mint 12 main didn’t work for me at all, neither MGSE nor MATE. I used KDE instead and even worked with OpenSuse for a while.
    Now that I have tried Mint 13 Cinnamon, I am totally sold again. The first boot after installation was like coming home again. Things just work and look good. Even though KDE is a nice and very functional desktop, Cinnamon tops it in the same way for me, as Gnome 2 always did.

  47. Changing the “13″ to “maya” in the wallpaper has its own consequences as around 3 billion people refer to an illusion as “Maya”. One suggestion is to club the “13” and “maya” together.

    All said, this is a great piece of software, the very best so far.

    The real challenge from here is to work together with document foundation so that Libre office is improvised, particularly interoperability and the UI. It is a prerequisite before Mint can be a considered as a challenge to Windows.

  48. I hated Version 12, version 11 was buggy on my hardware. 13 and 10 are still my absolute favorite versions. Followed by 6. Cinnamon is just so minty and awesome. LMDE will always have a place. I definitely will not be switching to ubuntu any time soon. I hope LM converts to Debian Based. Well those are my 2 cents. I’m 15 so what do I know, I started with Version 5.

  49. I am giving my old Asus 1000 Netbook to a friend of mine who knows nothing about computers. Mint 13, Mate version, looks like a perfect OS to install on that PC since it doesn’t need 3D hardware acceleration like Cinnamon goes. Plus since it’s an LTS distro it will last long past the date where he will find the Netbook useful I expect. I am also giving him a 17″ CRT monitor for when he wants a bigger screen. (plus it’s the only way to get rid of that big boat anchor)

  50. feeling frustrated like the dickens. Since installing Mint 13, both MATE and Cinnamon flavours, Virtualbox hasn’t got any internet. I get the network connected pop up, and the icon in the system tray indicates I’m connected, but I can’t download, or browse or do anything else internet related. It’s as though I’m not even on the internet at all. Everything has worked fine up until Mint 13, and I’ve tried all the Vbox versions in the repository and also the latest from oracle’s site, but none of them seem to be working. Seriously thinking of going back to Mint 12… or VMware and a dodgy serial number. Other than that, Mint 13 rocks, so I hope this can get sorted… somehow.

  51. Clean installed MAYA with MATE last night, and Isadora and Maya now running along side.

    Maya fixed completely issues with sound and an irritating “extra pixel” on screen to right and left on desktop, both issues was in Isadora.

    On the other hand I really liked the “old” Isadora theme, best there is.. Green is nice, gray is well… a bit boring. Isadora also feels a bit faster and more responsive and faster on start up.

    As I understood, there was a possibility to automatically import data from earlier install (in my case Isadora) into new install (Maya). This didn’t work for me. I thought it would copy the data from Isadora into MAYA, which would have been a nice touch, but it didn’t work.

    Think I will keep Isadora, unless MAYA can proove more. I will find out in the following weeks.

  52. thanks the great work!

    I am installed the OEM version.
    Install –> Minitube –> staring no stream –> and crash. 🙁
    LM12 was OK. New feature 🙂 or bug 🙁
    I thing go back to Katya and see Minitube by Katya, problem solved. 🙂

    sorry my bad English. 🙁

    hp G62 AMD II P340 DC Processor
    4 MB Ram Gallium 0.4 on AMD RS880

  53. У меня не работает Интернет в Virtualbox Linux mint 13. Я сначала тоже думал, что у меня проблема с Virtualbox. На самом деле, что-то с менеджером сети, так как он не раздает Интернет по WI-FI.

  54. Hi,

    everything is great with Maya except suspend and hibernate do neither work in cinnamon nor in gnome. I can suspend and hibernate using sudo acpitool -s/S
    Can it be I am the only one suffering from this?

    thanks for another great version and any advise 🙂

  55. Has anyone tried MATE with Cinnamon installed as a second environment? I wonder if there would be any conflicts. I’d like to try both for some time to see which one would work better for me. I’m very much attracted to MATE, which brings back the Gnome2 experience (including full customization, emblems for files, etc.), but Cinnamon seems more future-oriented (although I don’t see why the future should mean less customization; still, Cinnamon’s more customizable than the disastrous Gnome Shell).
    By the way, when you change the window theme in Cinammon settings, nothing happens, you have to log out/in to see the effect. Is it a Gnome3 bug? I think I’ve seen it before…

  56. Another question I’ve got is: can you use Compiz with Cinnamon??
    Nothing matches Compiz for me in terms of versatility and configurability.

  57. @Ken Scharf

    That’s a false safety. Someone just need to steal the key to sign an update, and you’re thinking all is running fine.

  58. @Clem (36) (Referring to Win8-only hardware)

    There’s a legal phrase, “restraint of trade”. It will be interesting if someone files a lawsuit about this matter, perhaps using that phrase. However, if I understand things correctly, it’s probably good that Microsoft offers an affordable key.

    Political trends worldwide are not generally encouraging, but one can hope that decency will prevail, as well as the right to hack one’s own property (perhaps with a proviso that no intentional harm results from doing so?).

    On the other hand, (“otoh”), cyber-warfare is underway, and I can understand the need for security, while minimizing “security theater”.

    A modern computer with a broadband connection running malware that affects other machines (and/or the network) can do a lot of harm, it seems to me. Just as we have restrictions on dynamite and other such explosives, we are probably entering an era in which computers will require some restrictions, disagreeable as they may be.

    Just my 2 cents’ worth; please delete if you see fit.

    Regards,
    [nb]
    not feeling too keen of mind just now

  59. Translations of vova’s messages:

    #43: “Raw” (unedited):

    It is like the classic Gnome in Linux Mint 12. In Linux Mint 13 is not working, the network manager (not giving away Internet WI-FI). In Ubuntu and Edubuntu network manager works fine. Cinnamon liked, but after installing extra gnome-shell. Will Linux Mint [be] based on Edubuntu?

    Guessing at his second sentence: The network manager is not working in Linux Mint 13 — [no connection to] Wi-Fi.

    #55 (Almost “raw”):

    I’m not running the Internet in Virtualbox Linux Mint 13. At first I also thought that I had a problem with Virtualbox. In fact, anything with the manager of the network, since it does not distribute Internet WI-FI.

    (“distribute” — connect with(?))

    Regards,
    [nb]

  60. Just thought I’d mention these two bugs I’ve noticed. The first in MATE when you logoff from your current user it just hangs. Also When I do shutdown it sometimes hangs. Number two power manager doesn’t put the computer to sleep if totem is open but not running. We have had this issue since forever. It’s not present anymore in LM12 but it reappeared here in LM13 almost like the user doesn’t have permissions for sleep/suspend/hibernate. When DBus is active for totem. Also sometimes, halfway through a movie while its still playing the screensaver kicks in and then hibernate works, however this is also an issue because I don’t want a screensaver to pop-up while im watch my movies.

    And a little request for Clem can you make a PAE 32 bit of cinnamon and mate? I know how to install the PAE manually myself, but others may not, so I would think it’d be nice if the distro they used did this automatically. also please bring back aircrack-ng repos.

  61. Just loaded Maya on a Dell Mini 1012 with no problems. My only issue was the Bluetooth card, which I solved with an old BT dongle I had laying around. Without all the “Smartest Man in the Room” issues here is a layman’s take on Linux Mint.

    I downloaded the Mate iso and installed it on a 2gig USB stick with UNetbootin. I blew away the worthless Win7 Starter, plugged into my router, ran the updates and loaded the Broadcom driver. I never entered the shell! (I have shell phobia.) Virtually everything just worked without delving into the bowls of the OS.

    For the ultimate test I gave the new Mini-Mint to my wife, and told her it was the new windows so she wouldn’t freak out. In 10 minutes she was loading music and pics from her iPhone, surfing the web and checking her email. She did this with no help from me. This was amazing considering her limited technical skills. (limited is a generous word)

    This has to be the simplest, fastest and most successful Linux install I have ever done. It just frickin worked! This is what an install for the less than tech savvy general public should be. The bottom line is that most users just don’t care about the nuts-and-bolts of the OS. They just want to answer a few questions on the screen, and get the system up and running. Is my Mini-Mint tweaked for all the optimum settings, drivers, sucking every bit of power and performance I can get? No, who cares, it’s a Mini, a toy, doing exactly what it is supposed to do by providing a intuitive interface for a novice user.

    Congratulations Maya and the Mint team for such a well thought out distro, and thanks for breathing new life into a once worthless netbook!

  62. I have been using Mint 12 mate and cinnamon installed for a number of months now it was working fine I have a twin monitor setup with an ATI video card and an old AVOCENT switch because I have two computers on these screens.

    I just switched to Mint 13 Mate edition a few days ago. I read the reviews first and thanks to Clem’s honesty, I was careful not to wipe out Mint 12 from my drive and chose to install 12 and 13 in dual booting mode. Mint 13 looks great but one of my screens that is routed through the KVM switch is no longer being recognised if I Bypass the switch and then reconnect via the switch live then things works fine until after 15 min. and the monitor on the switch goes off-line all by it’s self. It’s a minor detail for anyone else but for me it’s important. Otherwise this version is fine but so was Mint 12

    Lesson learned the Mint team are really great developers, they have attained a level of refinement that in order to break a brand new release you need to have organized your set up completely with outdated and out of spec arrangement and even there and then they still have a perfectly working solution (the older version) for you to fall back on and they are completely honest warning you to be careful.

    Anyway

  63. Sorry, I had a small problem with my earlier communication.

    What I meant to say is that I love Linux and I keep exploring other distros but always comes back to Mint. Ho! also I love Mint KDE as well (I have it set up on my laptop and have moved other friends to it as well and I have had no complains so far even kids take it up pretty quickly).

    Good work Clem and the team. You are the best! At least according to this user.

    Cheers
    Denis Labrecque

  64. I’ve tested Mint 13 cinnamon ed. x32 with pae kernel on an Acer Aspire 5530 with Ati Radeon Mobility 3450, using the gallium3d driver.

    Pros: cinnamon looks absolutely gorgeous and offers almost all the needed functionality.

    Cons:
    – I like to have the opened windows list display the opened programs from all the desktops, not just the current one.
    – On my system the X windows tends to freeze. The whole desktop and opened windows become unresponsive, only the mouse and changing the virtual terminal (Ctrl+Alt+function key) works. It happens seemingly at random: once I was trying to reorder the favorites in the main menu, another time I was browsing the web in firefox. It’s not a hardware problem, since I am using Fedora 17 and it works perfectly. Also, Mint 12 with cinnamon had no problem whatsoever.

  65. I used to have Mint 10 based on Maverick, with Gnome 2.32 and I was very happy with it.

    Since it had no more updates I decided to move to Mint 13 MATE expecting to find the same behavior and performance.

    Althoug overall behavior is almost the same, I found that Mate 1.2 isn’t as polished than Gnome 2.32 in some things:

    1) In Preferences/Appearance Gnome 2.32 had a tab to configure “desktop effects” in order to replace metacity with compiz in a simple way. Though it can be installed and used it’s not as simple and stable than before.

    2) I saw some applets and applications use GTK3, however visual integration (gtk theme) is a bit poor, specially if you use other themes instead Mint-X or Mint-Z.

    3) The Preferences/Preferred Applications doesn’t work as expected. In one way I can’t choose other media and video player, in the other way I’ve found the config files to set manually but it does nothing.

    In spite of those issues, Mint 13 works as well as expected. I think nowadays it’s the best distribution for all people who wants a pretty, easy and stable powerful desktop OS.

    Also I wanted to explain that I love Aurora GTK theme but it has no GTK3 support, for this reason now I’m using Aurora for GTK2 and Mint-Z for GTK3. If there is a version with GTK3 support or instead someone could explain me how to port it easily to GTK3 I would be very grateful.

    Thanks!

  66. Thank you Mint team for providing us a gnome 2 version of the new Mint Maya.

    I am one of the unlucky users that has an ATI gpu on a laptop and needs fglxr driver in order to have better power management.

    As a result gnome 3-based desktops don’t work as expected: Unity worked well but was cpu and ram hungry, gnome shell had many problems with fglx and Cinnamon has some minor glitches with fglxr. On the other hand, KDE is cpu ang ram hungry, xfce is lightweight but it is obsolete and old-fashioned.

    So, MATE is the most lightweight solution for my laptop, works as expected, without problems and it is a very nice desktop.

  67. @pazuzuthewise, I also have the “desktop unresponsive” issue. Since you have Ati, I may have jumped the gun in blaming my Nvidia 8200 chip.

  68. So far, Mint 13 MATE has been perfect in my experience. Fast, functional, and beautiful. Thank you for a properly customizable GNOME display manager and for working suspend/resume (first time ever for me!).

  69. I’ve just installed Mint 12 Cinnamon and here are the issues that I noticed:

    *overall – LM 13 Cinnamon seems usable

    small bugs:
    – when too many apps are opened, they seem not to fit the taskbar which results in overlapping the menu icon. the apps windows should better resize to fit
    – if you remove an entry from any applet, the pop-up with the removed item’s name stays visible for quite a while despite the fact the item is no longer present (for example, try to remove “removable devices”)
    – I would introduce separators to regulate the space between applets / groups of applets on the panel. distance between the menu and the show desktop applet and panel launchers is larger than I’d like it to be. I’d rather control that distance through separators, and if no separators, would make the distance equal.

    – the menu needs a complete redesign imho – it basically doesn’t allow the use of favorites at all. the more apps you add to the favs, the higher stretches the menu which is really inconvenient. the old mint menu was better in this regard.
    also the 3rd column in the menu lists all the apps which looks messy and doesn’t have practical usefulness. I would either allow to select a category to show the apps from or would move the favorites list there.

    – gnome mplayer won’t play videos from time to time for some reason (didn’t look into this much)

    other than these, LM 13 is great. it gives hope for a normal alternative to KDE.

  70. – dragging a window on the taskbar (“cinnamon window list”) to re-arrange it produces some scary and not nice looking shift of icons, basically it makes the “panel launchers” applet hide. if “show desktop” goes after “panel launchers” the former will hide as well.
    when you stop dragging, everything returns to how it should be.
    it seems it’s better to move apps windows within the “cinnamon window list” only without shifting other applets.

  71. – the icons on the desktop – the file icon seems to be centered against the file name. if you keep the elements on the desktop aligned, the files with longer names will stay farther from the alignment line. generally – the order looks broken. (for example create a long name text document and see how it stays in comparison to the computer and home icons)
    it seems it’s more reasonable to have an equal indent for all icons. (there will be an issue with smaller files names then)

  72. – if you add an app to the favorites list, then uninstall the app, the icon remains in the favorites

  73. – nautilus bookmarks (the default ones – pictures, videos, documents, etc.) cannot be removed by editing the bookmarks in nautilus

  74. – the volume manager should show the volume level in %. now one has to estimate the level by eye which is less informative then % figures

  75. Linux Mint 13 is so good you have got to try it to believe it for yourself! Very well done in providing what I believe is your best distro to date Clem and co. Thank you

  76. I don’t know how to communicate with the Mint organization but the language doesn’t work on Mint 13…I tried to load Korean and I tried to load Spanish. Both broken.

  77. Clem, I wish it were as perfect as reviewers say it is:
    I’ve had several problems with Mint 13 (Mate) that I did not have with Mint 11 (64-bit, mate/gnome). Here are 4 problems:

    1. “could not write bytes: Broken pipe” is message at shutdown
    (http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=104084 )

    2. Shutdown is very slow unless i first disable networking
    (http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=104818)

    3. computer freezes/hangs when I plug in external monitor
    (http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=104578)

    4. mint13- no more auto window-halfing upon edge snap
    (http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=103874)

  78. ..A “perfect” score to me would mean it doesn’t hang 2 out of my 3 laptops during boot time because they have b43 based wireless. I was trying to recommend Maya to friends, but its hard to do when at least one of them I know for certain has a b43 card in their laptop. It would be also nice to see a less hungry LXDE-Maya integration, but for now I guess LXDE-Lisa 32 or Lubuntu 64 will do. There a lot of things to manage and despite the large b43 bug I like the progression of Mint and how far its come. ;-D Ty.

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