Linux round-up: A bunch of Mints for Christmas
Summary: All the Linux Mint Editions have arrived just in time for the holidays - Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) with Cinnamon, MATE, KDE and Xfce dekstops, and Linux Mint Debian Edition Update Pack 6 with Cinnamon and MATE desktops.
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Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) and Linux Mint Debian Edition
The elves in the Linux Mint development team have been very busy the past few weeks, and just in time for Christmas they have produced new and updated relases for all of the Mint distributions.
The main branch, Mint 14 (Nadia), derived from Ubuntu 12.10 with the Gnome-based Cinnamon and MATE desktops came out in November, then Linux Mint Debian Edition Update Pack 6 at the beginning of December.
That was followed last week by the release of the Xfce version, and the set was completed this weekend with the release of the KDE version. In the following gallery I will show the default desktop and menus, and give a brief description of the content and some of strengths of each version. But there is no substitute for trying it for yourself.
All of these distributions are "Live" images, so you can download and burn them to a DVD or copy them to a USB stick, and boot it up on your own computer without changing anything on your disk. Running the live image you can see whether all of your hardware is supported - don't believe all of the FUD that people spout about having to find device drivers, compile kernel modules or whatever.
The screenshots in this gallery were taken on six different laptops, with a variety of Intel and AMD cpu and graphics, and Wi-Fi adapters from Intel, Broadcom, Atheros and Ralink - and they all worked from the base installation. If the live distribution works for you, the Mint installer will help you get it installed on your system alongside Windows.
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Talkback
loving Cinnamon
Efficient ?
Intuitive, well that's Cinnamon. Like XP if you cleaned up the menus.
Nope
Cinnamon is a firend, yet better friend is KISS
the 1 billion $ question
Why do many private users spend a couple of hundreds for MS Office despite there are free alternatives ?
Don't customers normally vote with their purse ?
There's no single reason
It's partly integration. MS makes a wide variety of products, and they tend to integrate with each other. Products made by companies that make multiple products which integrate sell very well.
It's partly backwards compatibility. One thing MS got right with Windows 8 is they insured backwards compatibility while still moving forward with new technologies. People and especially businesses need to use their old programs and file formats while they adjust to newer systems, and normally that adjustment can take years.
It's partly inertia. All of the above reasons contribute to MS's inertia.
It's partly ideology. As much as I am a fan of F/OSS, the fact of the matter is that most developers and almost all quality content creators want to place restrictions on their product to insure profitability. The Linux platform makes that difficult because it is against their ideology.
There are dozens of other reasons. I will continue to use Linux (Mint KDE is where I've settled lately) for much of my computing needs, but I will also use Windows and other MS products where it makes sense. I made the switch to Linux 12 years ago because I felt MS's quality of product was inferior, but that is no longer the case. I imagine I would not be using Linux at all now if not for my personal inertia in being a Linux user. As it is I'd very much like to limit my Linux use to within a Hyper-V VM, but driver issues (especially audio) still keep me on Linux as my primary OS.
strange vocabulay
" I felt MS's quality of product was inferior, but that is no longer the case. " Tell us please about WIn8 RT superiority with the initial 12gb of disk use (Office included).
As to the quality of software and how my own experience goes, a non-free software is almost always inferior to free alternatives. Just recently, installed Mint LMDE on the Dell Optiplex 740, a pretty good machine. Unfortunately, it's tainted with an nVidia chip. the free nouveau drivers improved so much for the past years despite nVidia's idiocy. So the latest 3.7.1 stable kernel I built had an almost flawless nouveau performance.. Alas, an old nvidea hardware mouse disappearance bug had resurfaced.. I reluctantly and painfully switched to the proprietary nVidia's own bloaty driver... You think it was better? Now some of the fonts get garbled with the visual effects, mouse pinter does not disappear, overall performance is indeed inferior to that of nouveau
So, "Dear nViidia, f@#ck you!", -- as the saying goes...
Oddly enough...
I don't think your machine was 'tainted' with a nVidia chip. It's more likely your HDD is infected with crapware. nVidia seems to do fairly well for itself.
Have fun writing your own drivers. You must have a LOT of free time.
couldn't have been smarter
Had always had little bad things nvidia doesn't give a damn. Nvidia is crap, you might have failed to decipher my message, don't believe, ask Linus Torvalds.
I don't write drivers, nvidia is doesn't publish the necessary specs to help the community write better driver, just like that famous wicked/stupid dog lying in a manger full of hay.
I was with you until...
Really?
There are thousands of amazing OSS, but lot's of them have paid alternatives that are much better because of the simple fact they have many more thousands of hours of development and testing.
Don't go misconstrue what I'm saying, but there are few rivals to software such as Office 2012, Photoshop, Oracle DB, etc. that are F/OSS and don't involve significant sacrifices.
At the same time, Java is the best language, Apache *everything* is simply awesome, GIMP is great, PostgreSQL and MySQL are wonderful, etc.
Both ecosystems are necessary, but your statement was just simply false and/or unrealistic.
Nope
Free software can be under license and support fee. It can be more expensive but gives freedom and better results than proprietary.
Open Source better under Linux
Windows' higher requirements. LibreOffice runs very slowly in Windows for me, but faster in Linux, for example.
Mostly inertia
Answer: They don't
PS: OSX is a lot more like Linux that Windows, but it's as easy to buy Windows. What does that tell you?
Dissent
Because, first ...
When you buy a phone, you have a choice. You see what happens when Microsoft competes in the free market.
Microsoft and phones
It is halfway their fault, though, due to past practices
Here's a Jewish anecdote about this
[joke]
Isaac had a dream to win a lottery one day. Before every lottery, he would pray to God and beseech: "O God, please give me just one chance! Let me win a lottery!" ... Time after time, year after year... 40 years later the irritated Creator unprecedentedly responds "Isaac, just give me only one chance, go and do buy that ...lottery, please, just only once!"
[/joke]
Likewise, when Schools and Universities stop promoting MS products and start promoting the actual IT education, how consumers would respond? (see http://en.windows7sins.org/ "1. Poisoning Education")
it might spoil my Jewish joke