February 4, 2013
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Linux Mint 14: Initial Impressions: Booooo
Wow, what a flop.
It does seem that LM14 runs faster than my old distro, which was LM10. But it could also have to do with the fact that my LM10 had so many broken dependencies that I couldn’t I haven’t updated any of the software for a couple of years now.
However, on reboot, everything about it fell apart. I’m not sure I think it’s such a big deal that Gnome has been replaced with Mate / Cinnamon– doesn’t make that much difference to me. Under the hood though, they’ve removed some of the tools that I thought were quite good, and they haven’t really dealt with issues that have been there since LM8. The bootup splash screen still has screen resolution problems that are a bit tricky to resolve (I can’t remember how I fixed this in my previous OS). But, most annoyingly, the 64 bit version of LM10 doesn’t work with my wifi adapter out of the box. That’s really sad. All previous versions of LM that I’ve used, that is to say, 8, 9 and 10, all were able to figure out my wifi card all on their own– this time around, not only isn’t it figuring it out, but installing the correct packages isn’t resolving the issue.
Strangely enough, from reading the forums, it seems that my particular broadcomm wifi card problem only exists in the 64-bit distro– not in the 32 bit. What a hassle.
On the plus side, I figured out the partitions properly, so all my data is backed up on an untouchable partition. I can now just reinstall a 32-bit version of LM10… otherwise, I was thinking of perhaps using Peppermint OS. We’ll see when I have more time.
Comments (2)
not a fan of ubuntu?
@visual_noise - Ubuntu is okay-ish… just that I feel that the main distro comes with too much extra stuff. Things like the automatic cloud storage, social networking, and Ubuntu One are kind of a pain to get rid of. I usually try a Mint and then an Ubuntu every now and then, and maybe some other distros when I have time, but in the end, I usually end up coming back to Mint. Backend wise it’s essentially the same thing, it’s just that when I do IT for my whole family, Mint is easier to set up because there’s less fat I have to trim.