Linux Mint 12 Release Candidate

[michael.conner]

I disabled the bottom panel extension. With the window list up in the top panel and the "hot corner" mouse-over deactivated, I more or less have the same Gnome experience I used to have under Gnome 2 -- but if I want to use the Activities launcher with the super key, I have it. This is great!



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[simpleblue]

Well, Fedora may be an important distro, but they are far from ruling the Linux world. Just because they think they don't need fallback mode anymore doesn't mean users will agree with them. I watch Fedora a little bit, and just like Ubuntu, users have been leaving in droves due to Gnome 3.

Well, Fedora doesn't need a fallback mode in my case. Up until now I always needed to install the NVidia driver to be able to run Gnome Shell. Fedora 16 is the first distro that booted me right into Gnome Shell without needing that driver installed. This is excellent because I find the Nouveau driver to be more efficient with cpu and memory. This wins major points with me. Perhaps other distros will accomplish this someday? We'll have to see.

[AlbertP]

Mint 12 RC also uses Nouveau out-of-the-box, just like Ubuntu 11.10.

[z06gal]

Mint 12 RC also uses Nouveau out-of-the-box, just like Ubuntu 11.10.

I have Intel integrated with nvidia optimus. Should I remove Nouveau?

[z06gal]

Others have tried to explain it to you. I might as well take a shot.

Gnome 2 as you knew it is no more, it doesnt exist, its gone, its ceased to exist, its shuffled off the mortal coil, its pushing up daisy's, its gone to meet its maker, its a dead parrot (ooopps this isnt monty python). Mint 11 was the last gnome 2 desktop that I am aware of in a linux distro, look around, you can try but I am sure you wont find one.. Wishing it would stick around and be there forever isnt going to happen. The people who build the distro's dont want to take on a project like a desktop. Gnome 2 was forked and the fork is called Mate, but if that is going to receive work and become a desktop in 6 months or a year is unknown. I wish them luck, but no one is paying them to do it and the work might be to much in the end. Its also been announced that the fallback mode will be discontinued because Gnome developers have figured out how to make a less demanding version of the shell for those with older graphics cards.

So you have a few choices.
1. Move to Gnome 3 - You can wait a little as there is still support for a year on Mint 11.
2. Move to another desktop - A lot of people like xfce and kde.
3. Stay in the past with an old distro that doesnt get new versions of applications.
4. You can even try Unity - but its an even bigger disaster.

Me, I hate Gnome 3. But I know it can only get better since its at the bottom of usability right now. Mint 12 does try to make it better. So I am trying to make it livable.

Apologise for repeating myself but still nobody can give me a good reason to move to LM 12 other than repeating Gnome 2 is dead. Obviously Gnome 2 will fade away but I predict that a lot of regular LM users will stick with LM 11. Gnome 2 is far from "pushing up daises", only for the Gnome Developers.

So let me make my final point. I congratulate Clem & the team for their hard work but it simply is not ready to be even a RC. It should be out there for the community to play with, feedback, tweak, crashtest, etc but NOT to stand as Linux Mint's Flagship release. Linux Mint has always been the distro for the NEW and moderately experienced Linux user, it's polish and easy of use has made it NUMBER 1. I suggest they hold back this realease till flagship standard is reached. A quality like LM 11, so when a Windows 7 user tries it for the first time they say "WOW Linux is awesome", rather than "Linux, confused is this"

Why do you need somebody to convince you to move to Mint 12? I love everything about it so far but it is all subjective. If you want to move then do so. If not, don't. It is that simple

[driekus]

I think people need to remember that this is a release candidate.

Clem and the Mint team undertook the massive task of making Gnome 3 usable, something the Gnome team could not achieve.
I am sure the final release will have a large number of the bugs fixed. The rest will get fixed over time.

I think what is more striking is how Clem managed to do this with a budget that is probably 100,000 times less than Microsoft's development budget.

Gnome 2 is unfortunately dead, Gnome 3 is the future. But with any monumental shift it takes some time for the interface to fully develop. I think in two years time Gnome 3 will be a formidable interface if the developers listen to the feedback from linux users.

[AlbertP]

I have Intel integrated with nvidia optimus. Should I remove Nouveau?

No. Unlike the proprietary driver Nouveau is disabled automatically when your computer uses Intel graphics. And a lot of muxless Optimus setups aren't supported by Nouveau at all.

[crispata]

You might need gnome shell to restart in order for it to show up again.

alt+f2 r : might do the trick.

Thanks for this, but was unfortunately the first thing I tried. Hopefully the devs can figure out what's causing this though...

I don't really see any obvious way to troubleshoot an individual extension, so if anyone has any tips

try alt+f2 lg (it's a small L), will open looking glass and on there you can, on the extensions tab see any errors, to exit hit q;

Thanks! This provided an error which I've attached to a bug report someone else had already filed with the same problem. Anecdotally it's worth noting (for anyone else who reads this) that so far both of us who are subscribed to the bug installed a Crossover product just before the menu went away.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/889546

[z06gal]

I have Intel integrated with nvidia optimus. Should I remove Nouveau?

No. Unlike the proprietary driver Nouveau is disabled automatically when your computer uses Intel graphics. And a lot of muxless Optimus setups aren't supported by Nouveau at all.

Thanks Albert. I decided to install ironhide and I think it blacklists the nouveau driver also.

[KBD47]

I disabled the bottom panel extension. With the window list up in the top panel and the "hot corner" mouse-over deactivated, I more or less have the same Gnome experience I used to have under Gnome 2 -- but if I want to use the Activities launcher with the super key, I have it. This is great!



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I also deactivated the bottom panel and am much happier with just the top panel. If they fix the icons so they are not spread out and make them more even in size, I'd say Mint 12 would just about be perfect
KBD47

[spamazoid]

looks and feels great, but can't run the standard Gnome setup, the fonts stuff up and the graphics on the top/bottom/menu bar's are very glitchy and keep unloading.
thats with HD 6990 and the RC supplied drivers.

From the little i can do with the new Gnome i definately prefer that to Ubuntu's spin. but the 1 thing Ubuntu does really well is the App/Software store manager that is far superior to anything any other distro does, would be nice if Mint could add the same sort of thing, the usual software manager is ok but the Ubuntu version is amazing.

oh should say i don't like Ubuntu, just that 1 thing they do that is great. from a 95% windows user who dabbles in Linux, Mint has been my testbed in 9 and 10, 11 not so much but 12 all the way baby!!!!!

[crispata]

^^ Have you actually looked at the Mint software manager? As a longtime Ubuntu user (probably about 3-3.5 out of the past ~4 years with Ubuntu, 6-9 months with Arch -- some brief flings with the others you'd expect sprinkled through), the Mint software manager immediately struck me as being more attractive and easier to use than the Ubuntu one -- I actually don't find myself wanting to use synaptic as much.

I don't mean this in a snarky way -- you just sound like you just might not have noticed that it's there.

[spamazoid]

um yes i have and i know what i'm looking at. Ubuntu has an App store like one which is alot more appealing, Mint's works don't get me wrong and for along time it was better then the others.
Sounds like you haven't actually looked at the newest ones.

[crispata]

um yes i have and i know what i'm looking at. Ubuntu has an App store like one which is alot more appealing, Mint's works don't get me wrong and for along time it was better then the others.
Sounds like you haven't actually looked at the newest ones.

You could be right -- 11.04 was where Ubuntu and I parted ways, and I haven't seen the 11.10 one at all.

[bimsebasse]

I also deactivated the bottom panel and am much happier with just the top panel. If they fix the icons so they are not spread out and make them more even in size, I'd say Mint 12 would just about be perfect
KBD47

That's quite easy to fix yourself by a simple edit in the shell theme .css file, the spacing between the top right panel icons:

Before:


After


Open usr/share/themes/Mint-Z/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css as root. Find this bit:

Code: Select all

.panel-button {
   -natural-hpadding: 12px;
   -minimum-hpadding: 6px;
   font-weight: normal;
   color: #fff;
}

... and change the h(orizontal)padding to suit your needs. In the "after" example above, hpadding is 6px. Change the shell theme to default and back to Mint-z to see the effect. The Update Manager icon being big, clumsy and out of place is another story and another fix

[bimsebasse]

um yes i have and i know what i'm looking at. Ubuntu has an App store like one which is alot more appealing, Mint's works don't get me wrong and for along time it was better then the others.
Sounds like you haven't actually looked at the newest ones.

Gotta go with spamazoid on this one, Ubuntu Software Center is the one thing I miss from Ubuntu. It takes a while to load, is not without glitches, but it's a much better software manager than mint's equivalent. It used to be the other way round, but that was before Canonical revamped USC. USC 5.0 is about as much ahead of Software Manager as Mint's Update Manager is ahead of Ubuntu's Update Manager. I've quickly gone back to just using synaptic in Mint, which USC made me almost never use in Ubuntu.

[KBD47]

I also deactivated the bottom panel and am much happier with just the top panel. If they fix the icons so they are not spread out and make them more even in size, I'd say Mint 12 would just about be perfect
KBD47

That's quite easy to fix yourself by a simple edit in the shell theme .css file, the spacing between the top right panel icons:

Before:


After


Open usr/share/themes/Mint-Z/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css as root. Find this bit:

Code: Select all

.panel-button {
   -natural-hpadding: 12px;
   -minimum-hpadding: 6px;
   font-weight: normal;
   color: #fff;
}

... and change the h(orizontal)padding to suit your needs. In the "after" example above, hpadding is 6px. Change the shell theme to default and back to Mint-z to see the effect. The Update Manager icon being big, clumsy and out of place is another story and another fix

This may be above my pay grade I got to the code above and my default is what you show 12px and 6px so are you saying you changed the 12px above to 6px? I saw no option to save changes until I started to close the window.
Thanks! KBD47

[KBD47]

um yes i have and i know what i'm looking at. Ubuntu has an App store like one which is alot more appealing, Mint's works don't get me wrong and for along time it was better then the others.
Sounds like you haven't actually looked at the newest ones.

Gotta go with spamazoid on this one, Ubuntu Software Center is the one thing I miss from Ubuntu. It takes a while to load, is not without glitches, but it's a much better software manager than mint's equivalent. It used to be the other way round, but that was before Canonical revamped USC. USC 5.0 is about as much ahead of Software Manager as Mint's Update Manager is ahead of Ubuntu's Update Manager. I've quickly gone back to just using synaptic in Mint, which USC made me almost never use in Ubuntu.

I'm probably in the minority, but other than it looking cool I did not like USC. It is slow as molasses. It is less buggy in 11.10 vs 11.04, but after downloading a few programs with the software center I quickly downloaded gdebi and synaptic package manager and used those solely from that point forward. I find Mint's Software Manager seems a bit faster than USC but I prefer Synaptic Package Manager.
KBD47

[bimsebasse]

Yup, just change the "12" to "6" in that one line (you have to be root, "sudo gedit usr/share/themes/Mint-Z/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css" in a terminal opens the file as root).
Save. Press Alt+F2, type just "r" in the box, enter, gnome-shell reloads and the change should have taken effect.

[KBD47]

Yup, just change the "12" to "6" in that one line (you have to be root, "sudo gedit usr/share/themes/Mint-Z/gnome-shell/gnome-shell.css" in a terminal opens the file as root).
Save. Press Alt+F2, type just "r" in the box, enter, gnome-shell reloads and the change should have taken effect.

I must be doing something wrong, here is the terminal output:

(gedit:4189): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to store changes into `/root/.local/share/recently-used.xbel', but failed: Failed to create file '/root/.local/share/recently-used.xbel.964U4V': No such file or directory

(gedit:4189): Gtk-WARNING **: Attempting to set the permissions of `/root/.local/share/recently-used.xbel', but failed: No such file or directory