Discussion on:

Linux Mint 12: A much-needed, much-improved Linux desktop

Looks like I am going to have to give it a try now.

What the heck, I haven't played with Gnome for a while.

I don't gno if I can resist the temptation!
By the way, did ya know that Galadriel used to be a gnome?

Tried the beta a couple of days ago on my amd setup (nvidia video card) and it looked all very nice and was very fast (libreoffice cold starts in a blink of an eye) but.... couldn't get compiz working at all. Linux to me had always been about choice. The choices in Gnome are being eroded day by day... eventually we will have a desktop that's either on or off. I want my desktop to be unlike anyone else's. Changing the wallpaper is just not enough...

As described in the article Linux has some problems with the high end NVIDIA cards. Better to say NVIDIA has some problems with Linux. The NVIDIA drivers simply are not well maintained and are not open source. After I bought a high end Lenovo 520 with NVIDIA quadro 2000 I had to revert to Windows 7, waiting for NVIDIA to finally provide the right drivers or make things open source.
I maintain quite some computers, all under Linux Mint. All users, from schoolgirls to their parents and teachers are happy to finally have computers that simply work, do everything they need and everything they want. I am sure that Mint 12 will be again be a leap forward to make it even better than the previous versions.

Hello, I have a Latitude 131L AMD Turion mk36 1GB RAM 60GB disk and old XP SP3 was already getting heavy with all updates. I saw the Ubuntu release in TechRepublic's how I had the flu at the weekend I decided to download and "test" and surprisingly I liked the screen of Ubuntu 11.10 and ease many difficulties for certain things, I'm not familiar with. Finally some good to spend hours in the configuration I have a fast machine with the system. Now following more closely the linux world will make a "test" with LISA Mint to see if I can change the bar to launch applications from place ... qu course and for this I have to change the operating system again. laughs. Overall I see a certain need for command line for certain things but I think the boys could work to make this as a last case. I'm anxious to test the Lisa.

I have been using Linux Mint 9 on my work laptop and have been very pleased with it. It is easy, usable and stable.

Will anyone other than LInux techies care? LInux is too fractured with too many distros. Everyone knows that. It's still can't muster 1.5% of the OS market either.

I did install Mint 12 over the weekend on my weak HP laptop. The WiFi is flakey and Win7 won't connect properly. But the Mint install went perfectly (even with the Nvidia drivers). Discovered my WiFi and properly connected. Was easy to establish security settings (unlike many other linix distros). Did install Chrome and that went perfectly as well. Did some customization just to play with the user interface. Went back to default look as it is quite nice.

Fed up with trying to get just one screen with Ubuntu 11.4 and 11.10 always fine during install but reverts to four screens when booted.
Mint 12 looked like a lifeboat from the write ups.
Guess what ?....Just the same after reboot ! Works fine during install..one screen.
Laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1100 and the VGA chip is an Intel 845G which is recognized by the Mint 12. A 2.4Ghz Celeron with 1mb Ram should easily run this without problem. I was recently running XP Pro on the machine with no problems. Any thoughts please ?

I don't follow what you mean by "one screen" and "four screens". Do you have 3 external monitors attached? Or you have 4 workspaces but want 1 workspace? Or your display is somehow malformed or illegible? Just a terminology issue - can you rephrase using generic, descriptive words and lots of examples? Thanks!

This seems like a step backwards. We now have this space wasting bar at the top, and all the right click configuration menus for configuring things no longer work (Such as that menu, or the task bar items, etc.). The top bar just appears to do what the start menu does, but just with bigger icons and you have to wait for a tooltip for a description on what the program is.
Here is a news flash devs, tooltips do not work on touch displays, tooltips are bad! Stupid unknown icons are bad, text is good.

I am not able to install to HDD (Testing on a laptop with a dead HDD), but I am running the live DVD, I notice almost all configuration changes are missing, you can't even test compiz because although it is installed, the configuration manager is not (WTF) and Mint has no way to edit it. You can't make the "Menu" more meaningful, it now uses ugly icons and is way to small, you can't make it larger like previous versions, where is the favorites? The search doesn't seem to find anything anymore, doesn't seem to even offer the ability to install the package that you searched for.

What is with these missing features, if it its a live DVD failure, this is a terrible demo of their new product. If it looked like this on my first impression, I probably would be fine, but as an upgrade, this feels like a downgrade.

And My god is firefox ugly, but that's not Mint's fault.


WHY IS THE LOGOFF WHERE THE CLOSE WINDOW BUTTON IS!??
I have accidentally clicked this thing 100's of times already when aiming for the close or minimize buttons.


I remember installing my older version of Mint, it was easy, I had the system set up how I wanted, packages queued to be installed, configurations set, drivers installed, all ready to go from the Live DVD, now I can't do any of that?

I converted from Ubuntu 11.10 to Mint 12 yesterday morning. From the start, I was disappointed...Mint didn't recognize my monitor setup and limited me to three resolutions, and 1280x1024 was the best/closest I could get to optimum for my widescreen monitor. It also wouldn't/couldn't refresh package information and seemed to take forever downloading and installing updates. It installs with a plain black desktop background, which made me think at first that something hadn't installed correctly until I figured out that no, that's just what the dev team thought would be the best first impression. Guess what, folks...if you want to bring new users (especially non-developer types like me) into the Linux fold, first impressions do matter. When I installed Ubuntu 11.10 a month ago, I didn't have to tweak anything other than installing Chromium and removing most of the icons from the Unity bar.

Suffice it to say I've reinstalled Ubuntu 11.10.