Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon and MATE Editions Released 89
linuxscreenshot writes The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 17.1 'Rebecca' MATE. Linux Mint 17.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use. Linux Mint 17.1 MATE edition comes with two window managers installed and configured by default: Marco (MATE's very own window manager, simple, fast and very stable); Compiz (an advanced compositing window manager which can do wonders if your hardware supports it). Among the various window managers available for Linux, Compiz is certainly the most impressive when it comes to desktop effects. Screenshots can be found here.
Cinnamon and MATE (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is it that they keep having two so similar versions of Gnome? I can't really tell the difference.
Re:Cinnamon and MATE (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't know why you perceived my post to be antagonistic. It was intended as observational.
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Have you seen a counter-example?
I'm pretty sure the systemd forks are well underway right now, for example.
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Actually you can. The menus for applications are contained in .nib files. Those can be edited by interface builder. If you want to go further you can replace the .bundle files that are used by Quartz or though of course in practice this is really hard to do since applications assume you are using the standard ones.
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That was a tough transition for me as well. Anyway in theory there is no reason you couldn't write a bundle to do things the windows way. So I was answering that.
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That's not true. As a user I may not have the expertise to implement the change I want seen in a piece of software. I may even have a hard time getting a developer to make the change and I'll have an impossible time finding someone to assist in supporting that change. In close source land I may be able to pay an obscene amount and not only get the change, but the support as well. There's a place for both closed and open source software and I don't tend to subscribe to any singular philosophy. Much to the ch
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If you have an "obscene amount" of money, for a sufficiently obscene definition of obscene, you can add any feature you like to any open source project and get all the support you would even need, including a butler to click the buttons on the screen for you.
If you think that the price of a windows/adobe/matlab license qualifies an obscene amount of money, well, you're out of luck.
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Sometimes yes, mostly no. Most programs are so incredibly complex that it's difficult to find the file that contains the code that needs to be changed. Good luck then finding the precise lines to changed (amidst a forest of #ifdef ) and then changing it without side effects. Oh, and in addition to understanding the language the program was written in (often obscured C++), the would-be program enhanc
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Cinnamon is a bit more bleeding edge and fancy for users, plus will be receiving the benefit of improvements to GNOME/GTK going forward. MATE is a solid reliable workhorse for lower end machines that ran GNOME 2.32 without a problem but experience slowness when using GNOME 3/Cinnamon. From my perspective, choice is good. I've got Cinnamon on my newer machines and MATE on the older ones. Add to this that MATE looks the way Linux Mint has looked since the early days of the distro. Having the same consistent i
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...but experience slowness when using GNOME 3/Cinnamon.
At least for Gnome 3 if you used one of the earlier versions and felt that it was slow then you should really try the latest version, preferrably 3.14. It's night and day difference between them. It's still not going to be great if your hardware is too old or too slow, but it's going to be better than before.
Cinnamon and MATE (Score:2)
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Some features are all about usability.
This is how Macs in 2014 trying to mock features of X window managers manage to screw things up relative to a 20 year old copy of twm.
They confuse eye candy (or even crippling) with usability.
Re: Cinnamon and MATE (Score:1)
Wait to upgrade (Score:5, Informative)
If you're running Mint 17 now, the release notes say to wait a few more days until they release an updated upgrade manager.
We don't need no stinkin' wait (Score:2)
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There almost certainly will be. It's normal for Mint to release Cinnamon and MATE builds first and follow up with KDE and Xfce versions a few weeks later.
Pretty damned sweet (Score:1)
Please change the update manager notifier (Score:1)
Please change the update manager to suit granny-installations. I have installed Mint to a couple of computers as a replacement for Windows XP, whose users are complete newbies. On both cases I have instructed the users to periodically check, that the update manager's notifier icon is in green. Unfortunately this was a mistake, as the update manager will show the "Every update is installed, all ok" or similar tooltip, even if the updates have not been checked at all for ages. It seems that the user has to pr
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How about you file a bug report instead of complaining here, where the maintainer's unlikely to see it?
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Dear BMW,
During cold weather the ignition timing on my car is out and makes is idle rough until I "reboot" it. I've replaced the cam and crank sensors, but it hasn't made a difference. It's not the MAF sensor, and when it's running rough my ODB reader says the ignition is retarded by about 10deg. I'm thinking of replacing the VANOS solenoids next, is this the correct course of action.
ps. I also asked this question on http://forum.kerbalspaceprogra... [kerbalspaceprogram.com] but didn't get a reply, why not?
Cheers for Mint (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife's 83 year old grandmother was distraught because her computer was running so slow it would take five minutes to open a program. I told her I would come down and fix it for her, but it might require a wipe and reinstall, and she was fine with anything.
It was a 5 year old HP running Vista, and I have never seen a computer so fucked in my entire life. There were viruses in her viruses. Toolbars, toolbars everywhere! I told her it was a lost cause and we needed to reinstall.
Before I left home I burned a copy of Mint 17 Cinnamon. I had never used it before (I run Debian) but I had heard it was the simple, user-friendly Linux. I gave her two options, that she could reinstall Vista and eventually wind up right back here, or, I could install Linux Mint. I explained the free software ethos, in terms of both beer and speech, she got it, and said that's what she wanted. I installed it with no problem (except for the nouveau Nvidia drivers. They caused it to freeze up and I had to get the proprietary drivers instead), set everything up for her so she could get her gmail, web browse and skype. Her webcam worked right out of the box, too.
I poked a hole in her firewall and set up vino so I could VNC in if she needed help. It's been three weeks and I haven't needed to once. She loves it and has had zero problems.
Thank you, Mint team, for all your hard work. Thanks to you there's a new 83-year-old Linux h4xx0r.
Re:Cheers for Mint (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux has been a great platform for the elderly for years.
My mother, who also is in her 80s, bought a Toshiba Latitude in 2007. It came with Vista and not enough RAM to run anything other than Solitaire. I installed Ubuntu, which took about 15 minutes, and fixed the sound config, which took about two days, and she's been fine ever since.
But her version of Ubuntu is no longer supported, and rather than try to upgrade -- she lives 12 hours away, so it's not exactly convenient -- we bought her a self-updating Chromebook on Black Friday. So far, so good, although she's going to have to switch to an HTML5 solitaire game instead of AisleRiot, which has been her go-to for the last seven years.
I'm still running Ubuntu on my own laptop, but Cinnamon may lure me away. I need to upgrade, and I am not a fan of what Ubuntu has done to the UI.
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Mint with Mate is very adequate to replace Ubuntu 8.04, 10.04 etc. and Mint Xfce likewise can replace seamlessly enough an old Xubuntu. (e.g. for one friend going from Xubuntu 8.04 to Mint 13 Xfce was about perfect)
A nicety is support has been increased from 3 years to 5 years, that's entirely from the Ubuntu upstream.
Re:Cheers for Mint (Score:5, Interesting)
Cinnamon was the antidote to the dumbed-down interface craze for me. Switched to it a year ago and haven't looked back.
Nemo alone is worth the switch, it's a file manager that doesn't treat you like a child and "hide the knives" (and trees in the sidebar are intuitive to me, ymmv). Workspace management via panel, hotkeys or OSD all work well. The system menu is usable and makes sense. Applets are actually easy to install and manage. A couple clicks and sane scrollbars are back. And simple things out of the box like being able to resize a window without the idiocy of trying to hit a single pixel in the lower right corner reflects the productivity mindset it targets.
Maybe all this has been fixed in Unity/Gnome 3/etc. but I haven't paid attention and don't care at this point. Sure there's still bugs and features that need polishing but imho it's worth setting up a vm to test it out.
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That's what pocket computers of the 80s and 90s did, but with one key on the keyboard per application (calendar, phone book, text editor, calculator, file transfer).
Feel free to invent another such computer.
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There's no need to re-invent anything.
We just need to prevent bored children from ripping apart what's already working perfectly well. They can even be free to create something that's a more primitive sort of throwback.
Sabotaging what already works really isn't necessary.
Re:Cheers for Mint (Score:4, Insightful)
Age has nothing to do with being unable to deal with technology. Some people are just idiots or choose to be helpless. This cuts across all age groups. So you can have some ancient person pushing 100 that's better able to adapt to new tech than one of her children or even one of her grandchildren.
A lot of the people that can handle new things could always handle new things and will be able to handle new things when they're past 90.
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These days teens, earlier twenties and pre-teens are exposed to these systems where "everything is a search" or "everything is an app" and so it's already getting to the point where someone older has to explain what a file is (!). The young can't use a file manager, can't use a regular desktop application and opening a command line scares them away or have you asking what you're "programming" or "hacking".
In a decade we'll fully realize it. People aged 40 to 50 will be computer litterate and young teens wil
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No, she got it.
Free as in beer: It doesn't cost anything. Neither does any of the software you'd want to run.
Free as in speech: You have the right to know what's running on your computer. Your computer should do what you tell it, and not phone home to see if somebody else thinks it's okay for you to do it.
How hard is that to understand?
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explained the free software ethos, in terms of both beer and speech, she got it, and said that's what she wanted. I installed it with no problem (except for the nouveau Nvidia drivers. They caused it to freeze up and I had to get the proprietary drivers instead), set everything up for her so she could get her gmail, web browse and skype. Her webcam worked right out of the box, too.
I poked a hole in her firewall and set up vino so I could VNC in if she needed help. It's been three weeks and I haven't needed to once. She loves it and has had zero problems.
Thank you, Mint team, for all your hard work. Thanks to you there's a new 83-year-old Linux h4xx0r.
I did basically the same thing for my wife. After seeing that she hadn't used her touchscreen laptop for over a week, I asked why. She was just so fed up with W8.1 that she stopped using it. W8 was forcing updates, destabilizing the machine, and she had been annoyed with it's operation in general. So she just stopped using it
So I installed Mint 17 on it, explaining that I'd never done a touchscreen computer in Linux before. Worked great, and now she's happily doing everything like a Boss. Only problem is
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Good move. My wife had similar complaints. I went one step better and also installed LMDE on her laptop. after configuring it to look identical to her Mint I set it as her default boot OS. >>> she did not notice the change at all. after a couple weeks I asked how she liked. she thought a bit and replied "I did notice that there were no updates needed, but I thought maybe you were doing that for me." Interesting - Maybe it's an excuse for me to get a touchscreen laptop of my own. To experiment with you know, All mine are old school dumb screens.
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Did she almost notice there are no security updates for LMDE?, that's the very slight issue with it. It will be all changed with LMDE2.
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So does the touchscreen work if you install Linux? Or does it just use the keyboard & mouse?
Touchscreen works great. It seems a little strange at first using touchsceen for normal looking menus instead of the big icons like W8, but yes, everything functions perfectly. Right clicks of course need the touchpad. But she gets around with no problems at all.
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I installed Centos 7 on a Lenovo Ideapad laptop a few months back and to my surprise the touchscreen worked just fine. I discovered that by accident when I was polishing a speck of dirt off of the screen and the cursor was following my cleaning tissue.
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It was a 5 year old HP running Vista, and I have never seen a computer so fucked in my entire life. There were viruses in her viruses. Toolbars, toolbars everywhere! I told her it was a lost cause and we needed to reinstall.
My father's solution for this was buying a new Dell box every other year for $500 USD or less. Those "old" boxes became my FreeNAS file server over the years. I kept telling him to stay away from the naughty bits, but of course he never does.
Cinnamon on RHEL7 (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been a Red Hat/RHEL/CentOS/Fedora user for a *very* long time. I've been trying to use Gnome Shell since Gnome3 came out, so I have given it more than a fair shake. This past month I was testing RHEL7 for desktop upgrades at work and found that Gnome Shell is way too much of a distraction. So, at home I switched my desktop to Cinnamon. Holy Cow! I have a usable desktop again. I found Cinnamon in EPEL7 and installed that at work. It is so much more usable on RHEL7. This is what we will be rolling out as the default desktop firm-wide when we upgrade.
So -- a big *Thank You* to the Linux Mint team for making Cinnamon,
Re:Cinnamon on RHEL7 (Score:5, Informative)
You were more forgiving than I was. Gnome3 was pretty much the Poster Child for the Grinch paradigm of software design that's become so prevalent these days. As in, "Here's our new, wonderful product. Isn't it wonderful? Don't you just love it? What do you mean it doesn't do something essential that you've been able to do for years and you don't like it? You ingrate! You're GOING to like our new product! We're not going to fix it just because you and 100,000 whiny little dweebs claim to need those missing functions!"
So I switched to Cinnamon and have been perfectly happy ever since. I've even kept some of the Gnome3-like options turned on. But I have all those little bits of clutter that keep me attuned to systems operation that Gnome 3 took away from me.
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"Grinch paradigm"...I like that. Soooo fucking prevalent. What the hell happened to cause this??
Re:Cinnamon on RHEL7 (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in the time of Fairies and Unicorns, every software release was a visit from Santa Claus. Each new release was more wonderful and feature-laden than the one before.
Then came Windows 2000. This was when it all changed, I think. ET began to "phone home" via the Internet, the software license keys weren't just something that you could type in - now they had to be "real" keys. And Microsoft decided that they would be selective about what multi-media formats they supported. As in, if they didn't "own" it, they wouldn't support it. The Grinch was beginning to appear.
But the happy little penguins played on, and each new Linux release was Christmas.
Until certain developers decided that they "knew" what was best for the unwashed masses. One of the first examples was when Nautilus lost one of its most popular window display options. That caused a mighty uproar, to the point where after many futile attempts to persuade the masses, a solution was presented that more or less restored what the Grinch had taken.
Gnome3 brought the Grinch out into the open. Yes, it was a cleaner, more dynamic display. It was certainly prettier. But some of us aren't using our computers to look good, we're using them to (allegedly) be productive. And the Gnome3 Grinch stole our applets.
As usual, the apologists had all sorts of excuses why I was wrong not to be properly awed. But all those grody little applets served very important purposes. Since they were in the margins of the display, they couldn't be covered up by sliding windows. They were always visible from every desktop. And this was important because when the machine went South, it was often the case that the reason could be seen from those applets even though the display was too paralyzed to permit switching to another desktop or launching a diagnostic app.
Which is why I'm now a happy little Cinnamon user. It gave me my applets back. And, from what I can see, it's actually a lot easier to write Cinnamon applets than it ever was to write Gnome applets, should I be so inclined.
But the Grinch is still creeping around. Gnome3 fixed a lot of the things that offended people, but as far as I know, the applets weren't among them. And now we have systemd playing Grinch as well. What's next? I shudder to think, but I may drop my longstanding relationship with Red Hat for Debian if systemd is going to stay the way it is.
I whine. I complain loudly. But given a choice, I also vote with my feet. Which is why I'm running Cinnamon.
And yet... (Score:2, Interesting)
Despite a lot of hand-waving initially from the Mint folks about not containing the same "spyware" that Ubuntu does (i.e.the Dash Lens that submitted searches to Amazon, which incidentally had a rather obvious "switch" to turn it off), they still won't explain exactly what their "Mint Search Enhancer" extension for Firefox actually -does-...nor is the source provided for it anywhere by the people behind Mint. They offer a vague suggestion that you can e-mail a request for the source for any package on the w
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So just disable the extension and add a normal Google search or whatever to the browser. I don't like it when people try to get all smart and move away from a standard, the-same-for-everybody, not-trying-to-personalize-my-results search either, but come on.
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Absolutely. You can disable it. You can't remove it without removing the core meta package for the desktop, on the other hand. Contrast that with Ubuntu...apt-get remove xul-ext-ubufox. Removes the extension and nothing else. Oh yeah, and the source for the extension is still readily available.
Yes you can disable it. No, it doesn't really explain why the people behind Linux Mint are purposefully being obscure about what the extension does, nor does it explain why the source code for the extension isn't read
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Okay, fair enough. I was just hoping you weren't arguing it was unavoidable, which apparently you aren't.
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You can disable it. Not as obviously easy as it could be (but then again, that's how Mint pays to keep the lights on). But if you don't agree with the way their 'enhancing' search for you, you can switch to standard Google search - or anything else firefox supports. Or install Chromium or Chrome from the Mint repository.
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I assume you're joking, but I'll bite. Chrome doesn't 'spy on you' and Mint doesn't either. They just pass your searches on to a search engine which does what search engines do (and only the paranoid would call that 'spying on you' - though information is retained). Ubuntu, in passing your stuff on to Amazon, is scarier.
The only 'nefarious' thing Mint is doing is attempting to find a way to fund their development by getting a commission on the ad revenues generated by the search engine they contract with
share those add/mod/deletes/config script ideas? (Score:2)
Do tell. I just updated my custom-stuff-after-installing-Mint script (which has become a go-to for friends and associates), and it's almost clean enough to share and/or xpost to the Mint forums. I'd love to add good ideas from others, and just as importantly, pull out or modify stuff that needs it.
What packages do you find objectionable?
(e.g. this thread. Care to share that list of 50? Does removal break anything major? )
What are must-haves to add?
Works well with systemd? (Score:3)
Then I don't want it.
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