Trying Mint

[pfeiffep]

Last night I decided to try Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon (Ubuntu based) on a USB2 hard drive. I was pleasantly surprised!

• The installation seemed as painless as Ubuntu 12.10
• The presentation overall seems a bit more visually polished that Ubuntu 12.10
• The kernel and Libre Office are a bit older versions
• Cinnamon was a bit more responsive on this old laptop than Unity
• I choose classic gnome - no effects because native cinnamon was still a bit sluggish for my liking

[tgalati4]

I have found that Linux Mint Mate works well on older Celeron laptops.

[stalkingwolf]

I have mate on all my machines.

[tgalati4]

I have mate on 4 machines--two desktops and two laptops. I still have a few computers running older Ubuntu (one even running Dapper) and Ubuntu server on a few other machines. The Pope drinks mate tea, so you know it is good.

[monkeybrain2012]

I think Mint is just ubuntu with a different DE and some codecs installed, not sure what is the big difference. I also don't believe that running Mate on old machines would be faster than Lubuntu, gnome2 has never been "light" comparing to xfce and lxde and now it is dead, Mate is basically a zombie DE.

[tgalati4]

Zombies are quite popular right now.

[pfeiffep]

Can you simply catagorize the difference between Mate and Cinnamon running gnome classic no effects?

[tgalati4]

The difference really depends on your graphics card and what drivers you are running (open source or proprietary drivers). I'm running a few effects on Mate, and it's quite fast. I don't have Cinnamon installed so I can't switch to compare, but you can install compiz under Mate and get most of the visual goodies. The standard Mate allows compositing, showing windows while dragging, shadows under compositing, and moving the window buttons from left to right. Mate is gtk2 and Cinnamon is gtk3 so there are differences in the frameworks, but I can't quantify them. I don't notice any difference in speed between compositing and not using onboard Intel graphics.

[monkeybrain2012]

Mate is a zombie version of gnome2 based on outdated libraries, that's why it pulls in more and more dependencies as it is getting more and more out of step with current development. Cinnamon is based on gtk3 so it is up to date in spite of the last century look.

[pfeiffep]

Mate is a zombie version of gnome2 based on outdated libraries, that's why it pulls in more and more dependencies as it is getting more and more out of step with current development. Cinnamon is based on gtk3 so it is up to date in spite of the last century look.

Ok I get that you don't particularly like mate ... I was looking for analysis about experiences especially the speed aspect. Your zombie characterizations really aren't all that helpful.

I have noticed that using OOTB configs there is a pronounced difference in responsivness rated from slow to fast on my machine

1. 12.10 Unity (this was painfully slow to the point of being un-useable)
2. Mint 14 Cinnamon (somewhat more responsive, but not really fast enough for me)
3. 12.10 gnome session fall back (tolerable, but couldn't effectively use Thunderbird)
4. 13.04 Unity (in all fairness I didn't try very long)
5. Mint 14 gnome classic no effects (still testing)
6. 13.04 gnome session fall back (still testing)

I have no real benchmarks - all perception.

I really liked Mint 14 OOTB, but it was too sluggish, I really don't find Unity to my liking, I'll probably stick with 13.04 for now!