Linux Mint Forums

Hi all.

(This not so much a question as a brief sketch of a Linux newbie installing Mint 13 Cinnamon for first time)

Well after running Mint 13 on USB for a few weeks, I finally bought a new SSD for my T500 ThinkPad & installed Mint 13 Cinnamon this weekend. Wow!!! Mint installed smoothly in around 10 minutes & booted up in 6 seconds. I allowed backporting & used the Update Manager to upgrade Cinnamon etc & spent the next few hours tweaking the desktop environment.

Positives: Easy install & everything worked out-of-the-box - Skype, wireless, graphics card, browsers - Opera/Chromium/Firefox. Getting updates was a breeze, as was installing new software. Cinnamon is fantastic & it's the best desktop that I've ever used. The OS just feels so solid & after updates & a few app installs, it's still taking up less than 5 Gigs of space. No more slow XP boots & perpetual anti-virus update pop-ups!

Negatives: My only "negative" comment is that when I click "Panel Edit" mode in "Cinnamon Settings", I find that strange things can sometimes happen - the calendar can suddenly decide to move to the other side of the panel for example. These are minor problems though & I found that deselecting "Panel Edit" brought things back to normal usually & if not, rebooting did. I don't know if that's a common experience for people, but it's certainly not enough for me to dissuade people from installing Cinnamon - I think it's certainly a DE with a bright future & I hope that the team continues to develop it for years to come.

I'm only 2 days into my first Linux install & am very happy that I selected Mint - it's a beautiful OS, with a beautiful community of developers & users around it.

Very happy!

With Linux Mint 13 by default you are running a quite old version of Cinnamon. Consider upgrading to a newer Cinnamon version, which you can do by enabling the backports repository: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2225. I'd recommend that, as that Cinnamon version is so much better

xenopeek wrote:With Linux Mint 13 by default you are running a quite old version of Cinnamon. Consider upgrading to a newer Cinnamon version, which you can do by enabling the backports repository: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2225. I'd recommend that, as that Cinnamon version is so much better

Cinnamon under Mint 13 is indeed buggy. Under Mint 14 it feels more rocksolid and stable.

And as extra addition on the tip of Xenopeek: if you want to keep your system solid and stable, enable the backports repo, only install/update Cinnamon and then disable the backports repo.