[lug] Ars Technica : Linux Mint 18 Review

[Davide Del Vento]

On Thu, Aug 4, 2016 at 11:18 AM, Jed S. Baer <blug at jbaer.cotse.net> wrote:
> 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.)

I second everything, with the small differences below:

1) I could not care less about codecs and the likes.

2) I did try Debian and I did *really* want to like it, because I
*really* like its philosophy. It was a usability nightmare. Stable was
too old to be usable, and everything else was too unstable to be
usable. And by unstable I mean, I turned down the laptop every day
without knowing if it would boot up the next time. And if it did, I
could end up with totally different software on it.