Linux Mint 14 Is Out

New submitter medge_42 sends words that Linux Mint 14 has been released. Check out their list of features and release notes to see what's new. One version uses MATE 1.4, which includes some long-needed bug fixes as well as functional bluetooth and mate-keyring, its own character map, fast alt-tabbing, and improvements to Caja. The other version uses Cinnamon 1.6, which contains a huge number of fixes and new features including its own file browser, persistent workspaces and a window quicklist to go with them, a notifications applet, an improved sound applet, and alt-tab graphical improvements. MDM now supports legacy GDM 2 themes and userlists, and has improved user switching. Gedit 2.30 has replaced Gedit 3, and MintStick replaces USB-ImageWriter.

upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

can you upgrade a mint 13 system?

Re:Good but...

[ifiwereasculptor]

They tend to require more resources. Also, newer versions of drivers aren't as throughly tested on old hardware and can act very funny. Believe it or not, getting any modern Linux distro to run well on my old Athlon XP is actually a bit of a challenge (video and usb ports can be particularly problematic). And now, with llvmpipe being en vogue (the only thing it renders on slower machines is them unusable), things are worsening rapidly. Also, older ditros fit on CDs and lots of old machines don't even have DVD drives. Having said that, my favorite course of action on slower machines is Debian stable, with select packages from testing or unstable (which is getting harder to do, for some reason - it's very annoying and unexplicable when apt won't update hplip without pulling gnome-shell).

Mate on Mint = Awesome

[BrookHarty]

I switched to Mint when Ubuntu forced Gnome 3/Unity on me. Been extremely happy except one big issue. Mate uses GTK 2 but newer apps use GTK 3, so you get stuck in this world of mixed themes that looks bad. Found a nice gtk 2/3 clearlooks compatible theme, so I end up with Mate DM with GTK 3 apps looking normal again. Best thing, Compiz still works...

While I'm very grateful of what Canonical has done for the Linux community and have paid for services and software to show my support, I cant take the design choices or direction the company has went seriously. Gnome 3 has chosen a new direction, one that I don't need or want. Ubuntu is embracing that direction.

Mint right now is the best balance I can find out there. Keeps the popular Ubuntu base, but with Mint or Cinnamon DE which is hands down superior to Gnome 3 for the desktop.

Re:Full disc encryption

[EmagGeek]

You know the full-disk encryption in Ubuntu stores the passphrase in cleartext on sector 0x7Gh on the hard disk, don't you?

Re:Cinnamon on Ubuntu

[jones_supa]

Good question and it brings up a point which I have been wondering. Why was Mint released as a complete distribution and not just a collection of packages for Ubuntu? They could have released the tasty bits (Cinnamon, MATE) only as PPAs, no need to duplicate the whole Ubuntu base.