Which version of Mint do people suggest using?

[HiTechRedneck82]

I am fairly new to LinuxMint. I had been using Fedora for many years.

I recently discovered LinuxMint 13 and have swapped all of my systems to it as my main distro. I have been having several issues with it, most annoyingly the fact that it will randomly lock up on me, and it is doing this on 3 different systems.

I have been reading through these forums, as well as other info in the internet, and it seems like a lot of people are having issues with Mint 13. Numerous that seem to have the same issue as me with the random lock ups.

I have also found that many people are using older releases of Mint. I've seen a lot of people say they are still using 12, and even several that say they are still on 8. My question is, is it recommended to use a slightly older release because it may be more stable? For those of you who have been using Mint for awhile, do you have suggestions on what the most stable release it? Are there specific reasons that you are not using Mint 13?

[bimsebasse]

I'm not being a good Minter right now but my impression is that the latest fedora is more stable than the latest Mint in any flavour. Mint is still reeling from the Great Desktop Upheaval where the for many years preferred Gnome 2 desktop was discontinued and Mint had to either try and make do with the new much different Gnome 3 desktop "Gnome Shell" (Mint 12) or try to move forward with a Gnome 2 replica "MATE" or a Gnome Shell trained to behave like Gnome 2 (Cinnamon) as they have done with Mint 13. Neither Cinnamon nor MATE have reached maturity yet, though. If you want rock stable right here right now, and still want to use Mint, I'd brave it out on the latest Mint Gnome 2 release (Mint 11) and wait for the new desktops to mature,

[monkeyboy]

I am using LMDE with XFCE and its boring. Reminds me of the older Mint 9 release stability wise. However I also have a partition loaded with the current Ubuntu derivative using Mate which I enjoy but it is a bit more twitchy. Enjoy

[squeezy]

Most of the Mint 13 twitchiness is coming from the Ubuntu 12.04 underpinnings. Same lockup issues for 12.04 are being reported on the Ubuntu forums.

I'm running a custom installed LMDE Cinnamon setup (LMDE console install with only Cinnamon added) right now and I have to concur with monkeyboy. It's almost annoyingly stable

If you're comfortable setting up a Debian system as opposed to Ubuntu, LMDE is sitting pretty right now.

[HiTechRedneck82]

Thanks for all of the info, I'm thinking I'm going to load a test system with LMDE and give it a wirl.

We'll see how it works out.

[realitykid]

The trade off for stability in the Linux world is living with older versions of most of your software. If you want the latest and greatest, you have to sacrifice some of your much sought after stability.

[munin]

I have used Mint 13 Mate for more than a month, and so far I have managed to fix one lockup by restarting from the taskbar, two program errors by using apt-get install in the terminal, and two others just by installing the latest updates. So it seems to me that keeping updated solves most problems.
I am far from being a Linux expert, and my hardware is six years old, So apart from being the best OS I have used, the few problems I have had so far have just been interesting exercises in how to use Linux properly.

[KBD47]

If you want Mint, and the ubuntu based version is giving you problems, I'd recommend LMDE Xfce.

[Amanda]

Thanks for you suggest, I have using 12, but I like you said using Mint 13, thank you!

[opiumpoetry]

I just switched from Mint 13 MATE to Cinnamon. It's much more stable than it was only a month ago.

[exploder]

The Cinnamon based version is working very well for me. I have applied all of the updates and used a workaround for MiniTube I found on the MiniTube site. MiniTube and Totem will both play mp4 files mow. If you install all of the updates there is one package where you need to select, keep the current configuration or something like that.

Using the edition featuring Cinnamon was just personal preference because I liked the style of the menu and the way desktop effects were set up by default.

[Oscar799]

Moved here by moderator

[3fRI]

The Cinnamon based version is working very well for me. I have applied all of the updates and used a workaround for MiniTube I found on the MiniTube site. MiniTube and Totem will both play mp4 files mow. If you install all of the updates there is one package where you need to select, keep the current configuration or something like that.

Using the edition featuring Cinnamon was just personal preference because I liked the style of the menu and the way desktop effects were set up by default.

I concur. I've been running LM 13 Maya Cinnamon on my desktop since it was released and have had no problems worth mentioning; however, I run LM 12 LIsa LXDE on my laptop because I prefer a leaner, meaner, and cleaner laptop DE.

FWIW, the reason why so many Mint users stick with older Mint distros is because they see no reason to update. In other words, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" Overall, LM 9 was my favorite flavor of Mint because it ran best on both my desktop and laptop. Since then, I've found that subsequent versions run differently, but the newer 64-bit iMac is indeed a different PC from the +5 year old 32-bit MacBook.

Regardless of what flavor of Mint you choose, you can depend on finding solutions to almost all problems on these forums.