Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 3rd Oct 2007 19:23 UTC, submitted by abhaysahai
A review of Linux Mint Celena. "I think Celena is a breath of fresh air. It is the best GNOME distribution I have ever used. The artwork is simply amazing, I think PCLinuxOS must take a hint or two from Celena. Strong emphasis is given to integrating the theme with applications. I can see the hard work Mint developers have put behind custom applications like Mint Menu, MintUpload, MintAssitant and Mint Control Center. They have done a commendable job and made our lives easy. They have not followed the trend and have included KDE applications, wherever they felt the need."
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RE: Some thoughts on Mint 3.0 XFCE edition
by Kokopelli on Wed 3rd Oct 2007 23:31
in reply to "Some thoughts on Mint 3.0 XFCE edition"
Member since:2005-07-06
I will qualify this with I do not feel that XFCE is all that lean anymore. It used to be, but I have found that the current release of XFCE has memory usage comparable to Gnome. It is reasonable to expect XFCE desktop install to run in 256 MB of RAM, but I think it is a bit low for a bootable CD environment with XFCE/GNOME/KDE.
Blackbox or fluxbox as a bootable CD would be better at 256 MB RAM, but the reality is desktop applications do not optimize for low memory usage as much in recent times. So it would not expect it a *box distro to do much better once you started opening more then a couple apps (depending on what they were).
Member since:
2005-07-17
I haven't tried this 3.1 release yet (and have very little experience with the Gnome desktop anyway), but gave the Mint 3.0 XFCE edition a go recently. Only used it as a live CD, on a P4 with 256M of RAM. Yeah I know that's little RAM by today's standards, but 256M is still a lot, and XFCE desktop is meant to provide a 'lean and mean' system. This edition left some mixed feelings:
First, loading was dog slow (and you don't see anything happening for a while), even though I used a DVD because that normally gives higher transfer rates than CD's. Likely no problem once installed on HD. Next, without swap, memory limits quickly showed (okay..), but: first the system would nearly freeze, and then the offending program would automagically be killed. Very annoying. When out-of-mem: just say so, damned. I've seen this too with other distro's. This behaviour may be fine for server purposes, but polished desktop distro's really should let the user know what's happening. Also, I found selecting directories etc. a little difficult. Whether that was because of the XFCE desktop or because of underlying libraries/toolkits used, dunno. Not really a show-stopper though.
On the upside: hardware recognition was excellent, everything worked after booting the live CD. Windows NTFS partitions accessible AND safely write-able with the click of a button. Decently configured defaults for applications, and good integration between components. Browser plug-ins and multimedia codecs configured and ready out of the box. Nice artwork (not my taste, but still nice ;-) Overall stability: 0 issues (apart from that out-of-mem thingie mentioned above).
Leaves me looking forward to a Linux Mint 3.1 with KDE (or XFCE) desktop as default. With this degree of polish, and compatibility with Ubuntu package repositories, this is an excellent distro for those new to Linux. Just make sure you run it from HD, not CD/DVD, have enough RAM, and swap available. But ofcourse that advice applies to most modern desktop distro's.