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pfeiffep
April 24th, 2013, 02:45 PM
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
April 24th, 2013, 03:33 PM
I have found that Linux Mint Mate works well on older Celeron laptops.

stalkingwolf
April 24th, 2013, 04:40 PM
I have mate on all my machines.

tgalati4
April 24th, 2013, 09:15 PM
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
April 24th, 2013, 09:49 PM
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
April 26th, 2013, 04:08 AM
Zombies are quite popular right now.

pfeiffep
April 26th, 2013, 12:11 PM
Can you simply catagorize the difference between Mate and Cinnamon running gnome classic no effects?

tgalati4
April 26th, 2013, 04:17 PM
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
April 26th, 2013, 04:58 PM
Mate is a zombie version of gnome2 based on outdated libraries, that's why it pulls in more and more dependencies as it is getting more and more out of step with current development.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
April 26th, 2013, 08:12 PM
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

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

Roasted
April 26th, 2013, 08:45 PM
I've considered trying Linux Mint lately. As time passes, Mint is becoming more attractive to me. I have it in a VM right now and it's quite nice. Cinnamon looks and feels great, but I do find myself more attracted to the Unity/Gnome Shell oriented environments. Problem is, since I've tried Gnome 3.8, I really don't find 3.6 that great, and 3.6 is what's packaged with both 13.04 and Mint 14. :o

monkeybrain2012
April 26th, 2013, 08:55 PM
@pfeiffpe

Zombie is exactly what Mate is. gtk2 is dead, how long can they keep up with a deprecated toolkit? I like Unity and gnome-shell and am pretty happy with Ubuntu. However on old machines Lubuntu is really fast. I doubt that mate could beat that, basing on gnome2 as it is. Remember gnome2 was never considered "light" in its days. People who wanted a light DE would go for xubuntu or Lubuntu.

momist
April 26th, 2013, 09:11 PM
I have Lubuntu, Peppermint, and Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix as alternative boots on my laptop. Yes, Lubuntu is perceptably faster than Ubuntu, but I can't seem to really feel comfortable with it. I find myself preferring to use the Cinnamon Remix more than the others. Peppermint is _really_ fast, but then of course it slows down when using cloud based applications. My desktop has been Cinnamon flavour Mint 13 for over a year now, and I don't see any need to change that yet.

goldshirt9
April 27th, 2013, 09:17 AM
tried to install lmde on an old netbook - total nightmare and gave up, need to improve installation package.
ran kde on the same netbook - loved it, albeit a little sluggish .Love kde
installed with a little help from here http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=126140
and am sticking with mint nadia xfce.Runs a dream, installs what i need on a netbook ( which isnt alot )low consumption of ram , cpu.
only hitch is a failure to load partition at boot up ???? (believe that very old hdd is slowly going wrong) starts ok after a few seconds though.
Run Unity on laptop but just too glitchy on netbook

pfeiffep
April 28th, 2013, 06:57 PM
I just installed the Cinnamon theme on my Ubuntu 13.04 and have to say this is awesome! :popcorn:

Much more to my liking than Unity & Dash + all the speed of Raring and a newer Kernel than Mint 14.

deadflowr
April 28th, 2013, 07:06 PM
I just installed the Cinnamon theme on my Ubuntu 13.04 and have to say this is awesome! :popcorn:

Much more to my liking than Unity & Dash + all the speed of Raring and a newer Kernel than Mint 14.

I installed cinnamon on raring the day it hit the repos during development.

Quite easy and enjoyable.
Had to kill hot corner though, as I moved my panel to the top and going to opening the menu kept executing the workspace expo switcher.
No biggie.
And I repeat, I moved my panel. having run unity for so long, that by itself was like a lost revelation.