A Brit in Buffalo NY says Hi!

[Lateralis]

Greetings all. As it seems to be customary, I thought I would write a brief hello. So, hello!

I've come over from the Ubuntu community. I have been an avid supporter and user of Ubuntu for 4-5 years or so, but have grown tired of trying to make Gnome 3 work for me when I found Gnome 2 to be *perfect* for me and what I wanted to achieve. I know that is now a cliched argument, but it is unfortunately very true. I've tried the last 6 months to like Gnome 3 and I just don't. So I decided to do the thing I should have done 6 months ago which was try out Mint. So here I am. This week I have switched both my work and home computers over to Mint Lisa, having tried the Live DVD, and both are running Cinnamon. (It is because of Cinnamon I decided to try out Mint and ultimately make the switch.) So far, I absolutely love the desktop experience and you cannot possibly understand how grateful I am to this community and its developers for supporting MATE and even developing Cinnamon. For 6 months I was lost and irritated by Gnome but I feel at home again. I even enjoy my desktop again! So a big hearty thank you to everyone who has worked so hard and in so dedicated a fashion to make Mint what it is.

Anyway, that's enough of the sycophancy. What about me? Well, in brief I am a 20-something physicist. I got my PhD from Warwick University, UK last year and am now working in Buffalo, NY. I had been an avid user of Ubuntu from roughly 7.10 all the way through to 11.10, starting off with KDE, then XFCE before settling on Gnome. That love affair is now over, but I am hoping to help the Mint community in whatever way I can.

[The-Wizard]

Welcome to the Mint family forums

wizard

[xenopeek]

Hi Literalis, welcome to the Linux Mint forums Thanks for joining the forums! Good to read you are enjoying your desktop again; that is praise for the MATE and Cinnamon developers right there

Be sure also to check out the Community website (ideas, tutorials, and hardware and software reviews), and the Cinnamon Spices website for adding themes, applets and extensions to Cinnamon (and check out the Cinnamon Extras package, which will install a lot of these for your automatically).

You can also chat in real-time with other Linux Mint users. In the Mint Menu, in the Internet section, start the application XChat IRC. You will automatically get connected to #linuxmint-chat for general chat and #linuxmint-help for support with other Linux Mint users.

[Lateralis]

Hi Literalis, welcome to the Linux Mint forums Thanks for joining the forums! Good to read you are enjoying your desktop again; that is praise for the MATE and Cinnamon developers right there

Be sure also to check out the Community website (ideas, tutorials, and hardware and software reviews), and the Cinnamon Spices website for adding themes, applets and extensions to Cinnamon (and check out the Cinnamon Extras package, which will install a lot of these for your automatically).

You can also chat in real-time with other Linux Mint users. In the Mint Menu, in the Internet section, start the application XChat IRC. You will automatically get connected to #linuxmint-chat for general chat and #linuxmint-help for support with other Linux Mint users.

Yeah, I felt like saying thank you to the developers of MATE and Cinnamon (although not directly, I should change that) for the software they have developed. I don't want to turn this into a bashing thread as I know that there are plenty of people that love the Gnome shell, but the nail in the coffin for me was the other week an Ubuntu developer on Reddit essentially said "Gnome 3 works perfectly fine for me so it should work fine for you too." The implication in what he - and other Gnome and Ubuntu developers - said was "what we've done is great. If you don't like it you're using it wrong." So to cut a long story short, I simply cannot abide that mentality, so I finally cracked and chose to try out a distribution where, seemingly, the main developers are actively engaged within the community and actually listen to people's suggestions. This is something that I appreciate enormously and so, here I am.

With regards to customisation of Cinnamon, I have already trawled a lot of web space already! I've got a lot of themes, poked around somewhere and got things to my liking right now. As I said above, I am actually enjoying this experience and I feel as I am more able to navigate around a desktop that looks, feels and is laid out in the way that I want.

As for IRC, I haven't used IRC properly in years, not since I helped run an online text-based game. Partly because I don't like XChat and never really looked around for a Linux IRC client I liked. But I might change that. =)

[robgraves]

Whoa, you're kinda close to me, I'm in Elmira, NY

[rivenathos]

Welcome to Linux MInt! Enjoy your stay!