Adiós Ubuntu, Hola Linux Mint 12

Today I got rid of my penultimate Ubuntu installation--Ubuntu completely abandoned usability and customization in favor of perceived glitz. I do, however, still have an old Dell laptop (bought at the end of 2005) running Ubuntu 10.4. Support for that drops in April, so some time around then I will likely do a fresh Mint install (and maybe insert a larger hard drive). For now I'm leaving well enough alone. I've thought about replacing this machine, but don't really need to, and so now I'm going to nurse as many years out of it as my primary portable as I can.

I have a Samsung netbook with 1MB RAM; it was running XP, but now it's Mint 12/Mate dual boot with XP. I plan to use it to play around with OpenBox. Also, it's getting a little old, was never expensive to begin with, and has  no files to speak of, so I feel comfortable travelling internationally with it and occasionally leaving it momentarily unattended in a classroom.

My main desktop at home is running Mint 11. This was because the machine would not automatically hibernate with Ubuntu 11.04, so I "upgraded" to Ubuntu 11.10, had a terrible experience--Ubuntu offers a number of user interfaces with 11.10, all of them bad. So, in time I performed what turned out to be an actual an upgrade, to Mint 11. This was amazingly trouble-free and very easy to configure--Mint made a great first impression on me. I'll probably upgrade this to Mint 12 sometime after finals.

My desktop at work would not wake up from hibernate with Ubuntu 11.04 (sense a familiar theme?), so I "upgraded" that to Ubuntu 11.10, hated Unity, hated Gnome 3, and lived with XFCE for a few weeks. XFCE is really clunky and, with Ubuntu 11.10, even with XFCE and as much junk as possible disabled and uninstalled, was very, very slow. This may have been an Ubuntu issue, or an XFCE issue. No matter; as of this afternoon the machine is running Mint 12 with Mate, and seems to be performing fine. The university gave me this machine in '06, and it has just 2GB RAM and is dual core, which seemed sweet then, but pedestrian now. Still, it should be plenty for software development and document typesetting. Anyhow, with Mate and Mint 12, things seem okay.

I'm in the process of removing a bunch of garbage as both Mint and Ubuntu seem to have this philosophy that bloat is good. I'll detail that later. Of course I have to install a lot of stuff as well, which I have started with tcsh, emacs, LaTeX, and GHC being first. Then Google Chrome, which wasn't as easy as I'd hoped. Details soon.

Linux Mint 11

This is a new experience for me: I've been using Linux Mint 11 for a week now, and I can't think of any bugs I've noticed. Every new version of Ubuntu brings new bugs as they attempt to make Ubuntu more like Windows, though now they seem to want to make Ubuntu more like a smart phone. Dumb. I'm sure there have been some bugs with Mint11, but so insubstantial as to be ignorable. Unlike Ubuntu, everything works out of the box.

Okay, here's a bug, but it's something Ubuntu long-ago conditioned me to ignore. Here's an instance:

Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library.
Using the fallback 'C' locale.

This with a fresh install. I guess this is what Mint gets for basing itself upon Ubuntu.

I abandoned Ubuntu due to the Ubuntu Unity garbage and the almost equally unusable Gnome 3. I tried XFCE for awhile, but so many things just didn't quite work that it was not worth my while. Importantly, it appears Linux Mint will put a shell over Gnome 3 in an attempt to keep it usable; see http://lxnews.org/2011/11/07/the-future-of-linux-mint/ . I'm counting on this; otherwise it might soon be time to abandon Linux.

Okay, photo transfer from my digital camera is exceedingly slow with Mint, but it didn't work at all with Ubuntu 11.10, so I can live with this (by using a Windows 7 laptop).

It's amusing that I dump Ubuntu when they, for the first time, pick a distribution name worth remembering, "Onerous Ocelot."