Linux Mint 12
As a long time Linux aficionado, I switched to Mint a couple of years ago and quite honestly I prefer it over most any other distro. But when I switched to Mint 12 back before Christmas, I was not thrilled.
I think the developers at Mint knew they had to do something to incorporate Gnome 3 and they’ve done about as good a job as you could ask. the problem is the release the version is simply still too buggy for a production machine like my personal laptop. The install and everything went as planned. Since Mint doesn’t do rolling distributions except with Debian , you have to backup your home folder first. But don’t use the backup tool. Use an imaging program instead. I found this out the hard way. The Mint 12 version tool didn’t resolve my relative paths 100% and I had to correct a bunch of things once I got the backup restored. This was problem number one – but more my fault than Mint’s.
So I got everything fired up and ready to use and at first things seemed okay. Gnome 3 is hideous but I already knew that and didn’t really plan on spending too much time in that environment anyway. So off I go into the land MATE and back to my comfort zone of Gnome 2. Only problem is it didn’t work – at least on my Dell Studio 1737.
The first problem was intermittent shell lock-down tied to the Gnome 3 extension for media player. So I disabled it and everything was good for about 4 hours. then it happened again. And again. And again. This was no shell problem where you pop out and restart. this was a full kernel crash requiring a cold boot – not good. So I disabled ALL Gnome 3 extensions and again everything seemed fine until my laptop went to sleep and wouldn’t wake up. Again cold boot to resolve. Plus by this time my unit had developed the nasty habit of simply terminating whatever program I was using at the time. I’d be in the middle of writing a letter in Openoffice, turn my back and go back and nothing. Oh and no auto-saved file either even though OO was setup to do so every 5 minutes. This is when I began to get really concerned.
So I slogged through forum after forum trying to gather information and i found a few helpful articles. but Mint 12 is so new the forums were more heavily populated with questions than answers. This was three weeks ago so by now I am sure there are better solutions but I had to have a working unit. So last week I stripped off 12 and re-installed 11 and set EVERYTHING back up again. And now all is well.
I broke my own rule in this and learned yet again not to jump too quickly on a distro. I believe Mint 12 will in fact improve over time to the point of a solid OS but as of right now it still has a ways to go. MATE will be really cool once it evolves and I believe Mint will stay on top of the Distrowatch list as it is now. Unity in Ubuntu is putrid and since Gnome 3 is here to stay, Mint certainly has the upper hand with the MATE fork to Gnome 2. But for me, it will have to wait.
Now these are the results of my experience with Mint 12. Your results may differ. If so, I’d like to hear from you.
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