I’ve been testing various versions of Linux Mint 18 (Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE) with an eye on possibly making it my main distro.
A few thoughts…
– It is wicked fast in a VM.
– I love everything about Cinnamon except the start menu. I don’t like that at all.
– The XFCE version is sluggish?
– The KDE version is good but openSUSE 42.2 comes out in 2 months. That has been my distro of choice for years.
– As of this writing the newest Firefox version Mint offers is 48. That is THREE versions and 1 month behind (48.0.1/48.0.2/49.0). Why?
– I love the fact they aren’t trying to ram BTRFS down my throat.
Any thoughts or tips?
Firefox 49.0 just landed in the repos.
I have 2 Linux distros I recommend or install for clients interested in trying out Linux; Mint and MX-15.
My personal preference is MX-15 since I’m partial to Debian stable.
Since you’re not a new Linux user, I’m not going to review MX-15, only that I recommend you try MX-15 in your virtual machine.
IMHO its faster than Mint under XFCE. The only thing about MX-15 folks don’t seem to care for is a vertical panel, which can be switched to horizontal-bottom. If you choose to make this switch, be sure to do so prior to any other panel customization, as they will revert to default upon changing its alignment.
Had a quick look at Mint at my colleague’s laptop. Looked mostly familiar because of KDE. Some things are organized a bit different, though. My OpenSUSE has most (system/netwerk etc.) management tasks grouped together in YAST2, whereas Mint has them spread over the KDE menu items. Since our hardware is VERY different (laptop versus desktop) I cannot comment very much on speed. Also, my colleague stayed with the offered defaults while I normally pick the expert options (regardless of whether I feel an expert but I just don’t like most other people’s defaults). So also nothing about the setup.
One thing my colleague commented on: the Wifi did not always play nice. (Laptop means WiFi most of the time.) I recommended WICKED over ifup/ifdown or network manager and indeed WICKED was available for MINT and seemed to do a better job, though still not convincingly.
I guess I’m rather hooked on RPM based distros (like my OpenSUSE) and Mint is apt based. To me this matters because of some repos offering rpm stuff and not the equivalent packages in APT format. I don’t want to experiment with converting APT to RPM or compiling from source and then telling my APT package manager that I have manually installed package XYZ. However, I feel that’s a very PERSONAL preference and it’s nothing fundamental against MINT nor APT based distros in general.
All in all from the brief looks that I had and from what I gather from my colleague’s comments it looks like a good alternative for Windows.
Last but not least I recognize the sentiments of those not wanting to play Guinea pig for some stupids wanting to have a broad test base for BTRFS. Back in the old days when ext4 emerged I stayed quite a while with ext3 until I felt VERY sure indeed that ext4 had matured to production status.