[lug] Ars Technica : Linux Mint 18 Review

Jed S. Baer blug at jbaer.cotse.net
Thu Aug 4 11:18:04 MDT 2016


On Thu, 4 Aug 2016 09:16:24 -0700
Tyler Cipriani wrote:

> Caveat Emptor: there has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding the
> security/packaging/freedom-restricting practices of Linux Mint this
> year[0].
> 
> I don't follow Mint, really, so I'm unclear what (if anything) has been
> resolved.
> 
> -- Tyler
> 
> [0]. https://lwn.net/Articles/676664/

Points well taken, but I have to ask what the alternative is for those of
us who hold the same opinions of Gnome and Ubuntu which drove the
creation of Mint in the first place. (And who already looked at the
post-3.5 KDE and said, "nope". Yeah, I looked at Xfce too - also a nope.)

I haven't yet looked closely, but the concept of "X Apps", i.e. apps
built on GTK, rather than Gnome, suits me well. Whether I like any of the
specific apps they're building is a different question.

I like the Debian package system. Given the namespace collisions, I doubt
I'd be able to switch to plain Debian, and then add MATE on top of  it.

I'm currently on Mint 17.3. So far, with a couple exceptions, it does
what I need it to do. Synaptic is broken, and I had to build Sylpheed
from source, because the packaged version was crashware.

Sure, Mint has its problems. The desktop environment has 1 serious flaw,
which doesn't affect me at all, as I use Fvwm as my window manager.

I also have no interest in installing one distro after another, trying
each in turn, and having to shift mental gears each time, because none of
them do things in quite the same way. I have other things to throw brain
cycles at, which are far less aggravating. (And some aggravating things
as well, which is why I don't need more.)


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