Submitted by 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.”
Downloading right know to give it a spin. My las contact with Linux Mint was Cassandra Community Edition which, even looking beautiful, broke itself with the first kernel update
When will we have Min*d* Control Center? No but seriously, with all this striving to make use ever easier for the so-called average user and Windows refugees, where will it end with ever improving AI, until they even do the thinking for us. Of course not immediately. People also used to ridicule the idea that one day it might be possible to clone human organs.
Ah the age old question – where will it end.
(Not knocking Mint btw, today just seems a day for cheap philosophy.)
Edited 2007-10-03 21:03
hmmm, here is a thing for you to ponder then….
Does Linux need a control panel like application ?
I ask this, because, although Windows has one, Joe User will hardly ever go in there, except if asked to by a help-desk operator, or guided by his “geek mate” over the phone.
It is the same with Linux, Joe User will only venture as far as he needs, anything else and he calls for outside help.
Good one. In that case we should stick to text file configuration, Joe User will only be sort of happy with his computing experience when his machine detect threats and self heals and he can direct it with brain waves until it eventually takes over.
The control panel is -there- for support people. Guiding Joe User through editing a text config file doesn’t work – damn, its hard to guide Joe User to enter “ipconfig” on Windows without mistypes.
Maybe alot of the issues that we currently face will change their form into something that requires or demands less natural resources, or more of them less often?
Like what the Internet did to newspapers, or video-hosting and P2P is doing to movies and television.
Plus, most of the conflicts or interests which are or will be waged possess an increasingly-stronger media aspect. Maybe the loss of life will decrease?
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.
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).
I do not see what the Mint releases add and I even downloaded the Cassandra release. It is now really easy to integrate codecs and proprietary drivers into Ubuntu proper for those that need to drink that kind of poison.
I am appalled that this guy considers the lack of security updates a feature. If you like Gnome, just use Ubuntu.
If you are a KDE guy, use Suse, Mandriva or Kubuntu or some other distribution that doesn’t have this unhealthy attitude towards security.
I also like and appreciate the effort that Ubuntu makes to work with upstream as well as to fix the bugs that I have reported. My use of open source software is contingent on getting the feeling that I am on the same brainwave as the developers as far as security and bug fixing and my experience in these regards with Ubuntu itself has been outstanding.
That is not to say that Ubuntu doesn’t have other issues, but I can tell that those guys are working really hard and using a tested and consistent methodology, rather than simply changing gdm, the menu and the artwork.
Please accept this as constructive criticism as I have nothing against forks. I just don’t see much value in this one.
well security is one thing, but i think he wants to avoid stuff like that xorg update that foobar-ed ubuntu a while ago…
So, only install security fixes, they should not change anything else. Like they do in Debian stable.
i suspect that ubuntu is closer to unstable (iirc, testing == sid) then stable in that regard.
and often, separating a feature upgrade from a bugfix or security update in linux related software isnt always that simple.
I switched to “Minty” versions of Ubuntu about a year ago and I plan to stick with it. Firstly, the Linux Mint theme and overall desktop experience is nothing short of spectacular. Where Ubuntu continues to stick with fecal colored desktops, Linux Mint freshens things up with striking blues and greens. What I really enjoy about Linux Mint as opposed to normal Ubuntu is that everything is configured out of the box. I don’t have to waste time with automatix (which screws up Ubuntu systems) or manually tracking down and installing all my plugins and codecs. Some people might bellyache that the developers of Linux Mint are simply repackaging Ubuntu. I look it as someone fixing everything that’s wrong with Ubuntu and setting everything up for you. It’s like having your own personal computer technician. I hope Linux Mint enjoys a long and prosperous life span. I look forward to what they have in mind for the upcoming Gutsy release and especially the 8.04 LTS Ubuntu release.
I don’t know why you are that excited about the looks. How long does it take to change the default looks of Ubuntu? 5 minutes.
And another myth is that “everything is configured out of the box”. There is no such things. Different systems need different configurations and you MUST make some changes on your own. Actually, most Linux users prefer Linux over closed source systems, because of the ability to configure it properly in all kinds of scenarios.
Developers of a distribution make certain assumptions of what the targeted audience might need and appreciate. Linux Mint Celena seems to be targeted at the typical Linux crowd, which is great, really. Personally I think that it’s usefulness is limited. And I would call every meta-distribution with unresolvable dependencies in main packages just broken.
You’re right, it doesn’t take a long time to reconfigure Ubuntu’s theme. But, I don’t like Ubuntu’s default theme and I resent having to spend a good fifteen minutes or so reconfiguring it to my liking. Secondly, every type of media file I’ve tried to play, bot standalone and on the Internet works flawlessly with Linux Mint, right out of the box. This isn’t the case with a stock Ubuntu installation. Finally, I’ve not had any problems with Linux Mint’s repositories because they’re the same as Ubuntu Feistys! If you found unresolvable dependencies, then blame Ubuntu, not Linux Mint.
Well to be fair if you live in a country that allows software patents then you should be downloading the version of Mint without the Codecs installed by default, Thus it loses that advantage, and Although I also dislike the normal Ubuntu theme it hardly takes 15 mins to change it can be done in just a few. Also I dislike the Linux Mint theme, The default OSX Theme, XP and Vista Themes but I’m not gonna dislike the OS over it as it is a simple change.
version 1.0 was released just over a year ago. Version 3.1 carries on the tradition of getting better and better. Mint gives me the best out of the box experience of any OS I have ever used. It supports all of the hardware on both my desktop and my laptop, I have had almost no problems with playing back all sorts of media. The start menu is the most usable that I have come across. Their development team is responsive and helpful. In short, I like this distro a lot.
I do worry that with the upcoming release 4.0 that they may move the system away from its Ubuntu base. To me, the Ubuntu compatibility is a major selling point. Ubuntu has an impressive user community and solutions are rarely more than a search away.
Mint uses the tagline: From Freedom came elegance
It could just as aptly be: Linux without sacrifice
What a trainwreck. Scrollbars in a menu…good grief:
http://linuxmint.com/pictures/screenshots/celena/mintmenu.png
Yeah, scrollbars in a menu just doesn’t strike me as a good thing.
Unfortunately the KDE devs seem to disagree with that sentiment. Kickoff will be the menu in KDE4, with no planned option to use the old menu. Their decision is based on usability studies, therefore users can’t criticize it.
So there you go. Even though I cringe whenever I hear about “a usability study,” they justify scrollbars in menus so I guess we’d better get used to it.
Eek! Say it isn’t so! Ah well, no doubt someone will come up with a simpler alternative.
But really, what’s the point of pretending that’s a menu? Tabs, scrollbars, search fields??? It’d be better to have the thing appear in the middle of the screen when the button is clicked. Let it be the windowed app it’s trying to be and be done with it! Meanwhile, give me back my menu!
And I agree with you about usability studies. Didn’t they produce pearls like “MS Bob” and more recently, the Palm Foleo?
A turkey is a turkey, even if the marketing tells you it’s a super-sized chicken…
Looking at these screenshots, there are worse problems than scrollbars in menus, although I don’t like them either. But just look at the number of redundant icons there!
There’s “Control Center”, “System Tools”, “Preferences”, and “Administration”. That could be a single entry, or maybe two for system-wide configuration and user-specific configuration.
Then there is “Terminal”, which could as well appear under “System Tools” too since it’s just that – a system tool.
I’m unsure about “Desktop” – this doesn’t really open another file browser on the desktop folder, right? Given that the desktop is always open anyway, that wouldn’t make sense.
Then there is “Beryl Manager” and “Beryl Settings Manager” – another useless redundancy, and BTW this belongs into system settings too.
Then apply some sane grouping: “Dictionary” and “Character Map” can go into “Accessories”.
And so on…
When looking at the screenshots of MintUpload and MintMenu I thought it would be nice, when a distribution putting “emphasis on elegance” would get at least dialog paddings consistent with the interface guide. Also I fail to understand how Synaptics fits into the elegance scheme.
I’m still waiting for the point in which they pull an Ubuntu on Ubuntu and fork the repositories.
I like the looks but sacrificing updates just so users won’t have to is foolhardy, imo. One thing I do like about this take on Ubuntu is something I think the ubuntu art team hasn’t got down yet, consistency. Ubuntu’s art is allover the place and pretty mediocre for the most part. I think that the Ubuntu team should try to learn something about putting together a consistent look to their distro from Linux Mint. One thing I don’t like about LinuxMint is the USP. I still think its over-cluttered.