The Mint team deserves big kudos for striving to maintain a Gnome-panel-like desktop experience. IMO both Gnome-shell and Unity are arrogant usability nightmares; thankfully the Mint team is still keeping traditional usability alive in the Gnome environment.
The bigger point here appears to be the extensibility of GNOME shell. If I read the announcement right, the Mint desktop is GNOME3, but using extensions to create a more GNOME2-like experience.
The JavaScript environment GNOME3 was written in could lead to lots of UX experimentation like this, at least once it has better documentation.
I run Ubuntu 10.10 as my main OS and it screams. I Installed Mint 12 on a test partition and it is a significant slow down, particularly regarding all things UI. Ubuntu puts out a pretty steady 50fps with translucent desktop cube in 1920x1200, Mint 12 can barley transition between workspaces without a choppy slow down. 5-10 second lock up whenever I use ctr+alt+T. Window color inversion (and apparently most of compiz) is broken. Installing nvidia post release caused Gnome to become totally inoperable, I had to boot with Gnome-No-Effects option. I prefer Mint's Gnome 3 to Ubuntu's Unity, but speaking practically, staying with 10.10 is my only true option. I am disappointed.
I should have mentioned that I've tried Ubuntu 11.10 on the same machine and noticed similar UI performance problems compared to Ubuntu 10.10 (as well as a broken compiz).
Yes, some of this could be attributed to Ubuntu 11.10, but the comparison is still valid since both are competing for me as a user. If the Mint team finds it necessarily to subsume Ubuntu then they must be prepared to accept the problems that are inherited as a result.
Every version of Compiz newer than the one in this PPA gives me endless problems. If you're still on 11.04 like me (I downgraded after upgrading to 11.10), this PPA is a must.
The push to Unity made me try alternate window managers. I've ended up sticking with Awesome, which is a pretty sweet tiling window manager. More minimalistic than it needs to be, but still, the core functionality is great. I have multiple workspaces with different tiling schemes for different tasks - one for general purpose, one for terminal hacking (spiralling terminal windows), one for bug fixing (side by side windows w/bug tracker & Emacs), and one for prolonged development (full screen Emacs with a little terminal for building)
When Ubuntu moved to Gnome3/Unity, I did the same. I tried Kubuntu, but found KDE far too different from what I remember back in the KDE3 days to be comfortable with. Then I settled on Xubuntu, which gave me Gnome2 familiarity with XFCE.
Then, I installed Bluetile (http://bluetile.org/) which is a tiling window manager that functions well in desktop environments. It lets me use several different tiling layouts and different modes including tiling, full screen, and floating. Everything can be done with the keyboard or the mouse (there's a narrow pane on the side of the screen with all the functions available as buttons). I've still got window dragging, resizing with the mouse, minimize, maximize, etc. buttons, and a host of new features to play with. I find Bluetile to be the best of both worlds for me, and not much of a compromise at that.
I had great hopes for this release. The fglrx drivers are fething up the "shiny" gnome 3 desktop environment, not to mention I haven't seen anything great about it either -which I am coming to that shortly. MATE is... same as gnome3, I haven't seen anything special about it either. As for gnome 2, why I cannot add widgets to taskbars blows my mind...
As far as I can see, and ironically, these new releases have less usability than their older and "geekier" versions. I mean back in linux mint 9 I could find compiz settings in 2 clicks. Now I cannot even see a compiz settings button anywhere. I mean, what the hell was wrong with my rotating cube desktop? Sure, it wasn't breaking any "productivity increase" reports but it made me happy to work with my linux box, not to mention all of the mac & win people looking with envy to these effects which my pieceashit netbook can pull off while their overpowered books can't.
Two popular distros (I mean ubuntu and linux mint currently) had created an end goal it seems: "We want to be the mac of the linux world!". In the old days it was "we want to be the windows of the linux world" and this decision killed kde4. But the correct direction is to be an unique experience. Compiz did that, and as far as I can see none of the big mothers of the software world (yes I am looking at you m$ and apple) has a similar software to that!
Just installed Linux Mint Debian Edition. I'm conflicted. It seems nice, but a number of things don't work, the biggest being the nvidia drivers. Turned a bunch of old stuff into a standing dual-screen multimedia center in the garage, so plenty of room for fun and education, not sure I'd switch to it full time.
I'm switching my Linux box and a friend's machine to Linux Mint (from Ubuntu), and was going to use v11. I want a simple desktop and something solid that isn't going to be buggy or difficult to setup. I basically use the terminal, emacs, Ruby, and a browser (Chrome).
Should I stick with v11 or go ahead and install v12 now? Would it be better to wait a while to let any bugs shake out, or should 12 be pretty solid now?
While I usually don't upgrade to a new version until a few weeks after a distro is updated, it boils down to personal taste more than anything. Honestly, the best answer is make live CDs of both, play with them both and go with the one you like.
Is it better than Ubuntu? Can I have a few workspaces? I think to leave Ubuntu as it became slow for me and Unity is really not cool at all. What do you think?
P.S. Can I transfer all my files from Ubuntu to Mint easily?
Just tried this in a VM , Mint's interpretation of Gnome3 is better than Ubuntu's at least. No way to add additional panels though (afaik) which is a major bummer.
installed Mint 12(lisa) on a virtual machine but some things are missing. I've been thinking of abandoning Ubuntu for Mint. Will wait for some more time.
They made DuckDuckGo a partner. I think that means they will have at least little bit of money.
I also think this could be a pretty big blow to Google because I just tried DuckDuckGo and it is working really well. I think I am going to try to switch over. Giant companies like Google make me uncomfortable.
Be careful with letting others control what you do on the Web.
Our goal is to give users a good search experience while funding ourselves by receiving a share of this income. Search engines who do not share the income generated by our users, are removed from Linux Mint and might get their ads blocked.
...
It won’t only be down to donations and sponsorships anymore, your activity on the web, every search query you make and product you buy will help fund our project.
I am not convinced by their "Fresh Upgrade" that looks like a fresh install! Ideally we should be able to upgrade automatically like Chrome or Windows or Wordpress. The future of Linux is here.
With a clean install, there's less chance of an incident, and if you put /home on a separate partition, you don't have to back up your data (although you should, anyway). If you installed extra packages from the repos, you can get them back with:
As for automatic upgrades, that goes against the Linux / free software attitude that the user should be in control of her computer and know what it's doing. I think that's why there's no GUI option for automatic upgrades although unattended-upgrades does exist.
Some kind of service pack to update the software would be nice. But if Wordpress is automatic when you choose to update, you are not obliged to update, there is nothing against free software here!
Some people get used to a workflow. They have an environment set up just how they like.
All of a sudden Gnome release Gnome 3 - which breaks a lot of that workflow, and also means that people wanting to stay at Gnome 2.x are going to drift slowly into dependancy hell. And Shuttleworth plays his benign dictator card, saying he doesn't care what the community thinks, they're wrong, and Unity is the way forward. Unity also breaks the workflow.
Now those users are kind of stuck. KDE also has an example of dramatic change, so people might be reluctant to move there.
LXDE or XFCE aren't yet mature and there are some frustrating features with both. (But they've picked up some users.)
And then you're left with self-built desktop environments - one of the *boxes or some other WM + file manager + etc etc.
XFCE is great. I switched to xubuntu and loving it. It might be lacking. but I find it far more enjoyable to use than Unity or gnome3. I tried to use both gnome3 and unity. and both had me very frustrated.
After Gnome2 was discontinued, Canonical _could_ have listened to their current users and instead of Unity, developed something similar to Mint's MGSE. But Canonical suddendly decided to discard their current target group, desktop users, which made Ubuntu popular, and suddenly switch everything to tablet users.
People hate on Unity for two reasons:
1. Because they feel betrayed by Canonical for switching to another target group and letting desktop users Gnome2-less alone in the cold. It is like Apple completely giving up on Macs and OSX and fully going iOS.
2. Because Unity is, hands down, simply less usable for day-to-day desktop use than Gnome2. It may make sense on tablets, but it is a step backwards on PCs. If Canonical wouldnt aggressively push it by making it a default, probably nobody would voluntarily install and use it.
My personal reason is that it felt like beta-quality software at best. The UI would hang almost every time I tried to log out, for example, forcing me to go to a tty to kill the lightdm service. As lysol says, it seems like things that used to take a mouse click or two now required a lot more effort (but I'm willing to admit I probably didn't try hard enough to figure out the "new way" to do them).
Beyond the UI, stuff that "just worked" before (like my wireless network adapter) now didn't work at all without manual intervention.
All told, it was just too much hassle on a machine where I just want to get some work done. Yes, I should probably know better than to upgrade a Linux distribution on a machine that I use to actually get some work done, and it will probably be a while before I upgrade again--I'll just choose something usable and leave it alone until I have a week of vacation to spend fussing with updates.
Some people have legitimate complaints, there are a couple minor bugs and glitches in Unity still. But mostly what I see is knee-jerk resistance to change; even if Unity is a better UI, they hate it because it's different from what they're familiar with.
It's exactly the same kind of hang-wringing we saw from a lot of the GNOME 1 users when GNOME 2 came out.
Sure, some of it is resistance to change, but that's not all of it. It also has to do with users, particularly power users, having their workflow broken. That was essentially Linus Torvalds' complaint about GNOME 3 being a mess, and why he's now back on GNOME 2.
* Stability: I've had issues on multiple different hardware setups. Trying to configure compiz plugins -- hung. Reboot then failed to re-log in to "3d" Unity. Only "2d" unity, where all the key shortcuts were different. Sigh.
* Stupid UI design: Maximized windows get the top panel as their title-bar, but that panel displays a different name if a different window is active.
* UI glithces: Double-click of title usually [un]maximizes. That is, unless you're trying to unmaximize a non-active window.
* Winkey behavior: Type the full name of an application, hit <return>, and a different application is executed! That is because the search happened to find that different application, and not my application yet.
* Slowing me down: The time it takes to un-hide the bar is extremely long and slows me down.
* No fast way to minimize a window with the mouse (I used to be able to click a task bar item)
* No easy glance to see which windows I was working with
* Crappy workspace switcher: requires multiple clicks to switch workspaces, cannot drag&drop windows between desktops, etc.
I really cannot hope to remember the hundreds of annoyances I've had when trying to use Unity. I find it to be really incompetent design.
Apple may be competent enough to decide to throw everything away and design something nice. The Ubuntu guys are not. They should have stuck to incrementally improving the Linux desktop as it was. I think that now, they're going to become irrelevant.
For me its the menu bar on the top of the screen except for libreoffice. On a 1920 by 1080 its a bit of a trek to the top of the screen from a small Gedit window.
The rest I can deal with, I tend toward 'end user' tasks plus a couple of ssh sessions, and about 10 applications over four virtual desktops.
Hibernate works so I can keep the setup between sessions.
Have you used it? The principal thing is that it's different and offers less customization than gnome2 and even gnome3 with gnome-shell. Any action requires a hilarious number of clicks to get done. These sorts of things are self-evident when you've attempted to use Unity for any length of time.
The author is referring to the fact that the taskbar/dock in Unity doesn't offer the same affordances as the old Gnome2 taskbar. For example, in Ubuntu 11.04, there was no way to open a new terminal from the dock. You had to click on the terminal icon, then click File->New Terminal. As someone who routinely opens a number of terminals for various tasks, that one regression was a source of significant slowdowns.
In addition, Unity is slow on any system that doesn't have a separate graphics card or the latest generation of integrated graphics. There doesn't appear to be a way to turn off the graphical effects to speed it up. Combine that with the usability regressions, and Unity was a definite no-go for me.
That's not to say that I "hate" Unity or will never use it as my desktop environment. I think Unity has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, like all too much software out there, it was released before it had been fully finished. I look forward to trying Unity again when the next Ubuntu LTS (12.04, I believe) is released. Hopefully it'll be far more usable and "finished" by then.
Can't you just middle click the icon in the dock? Middle click launches a new instance of the app instead of bringing the current instance to the foreground.
for now i only use linux server-side, but i'm thinking of maybe swiching from osx to linux for my next laptop. i played a little with both mint and ubuntu in vmware, but i don't think i can make a fair assessment.
personally, i don't care for customization at all, so i was wondering if there were other issues besides that.
There are a bunch of slightly off-center use cases that Unity doesn't handle well at all (or at least not yet). For me it's multi-screen setups, which it didn't cope with well for me as of 11.04 ...
because nobody likes to be treated like a four year old, I personally hate ubuntu's approach on this: "THIS IS GOOD FOR YOU! USE IT! WE KNOW WHAT'S BEST FOR YOU".
Unity might be the next big thing in the desktop environment phenomena but forcing it down through our throats is very obnoxious.
Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You're free to use a different desktop or distribution. The source is even provided to you free of charge to modify as you see fit.
Complaining that someone else is not doing free work just to suit you personally sounds like acting like a four year old, honestly.
-Lack of bottom taskbar... I greatly dislike the combination launcher/taskbar style of Unity/Mac (Win 7 pulled it off better.) I could fix this except for item #1.
