Peppermint OS + Elementary OS - Ubuntu = Perfect OS for me

[mindmint]

This post is my take on Linux and speed and productivity, I'll show you what I found in my search after a more suitable OS and hope to get some feedback.

I'm one of those users who need a responsive system, that's not bloated, for i usually run too many apps myself.

Peppermint OS seems to go to great lengths when it comes to performance...

# The Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) has been completely removed from this edition in order to help with performance and to increase application modularity.

...or is it ? I haven't tried it yet. But I welcome anything trying to be fast. Can I do this with Mint ? Guess this isn't for noobs.

There's also Elementary which,

is a free software project consisting of a Linux distribution, a desktop environment, a PIM suite,

(Being a productivity freak, PIM hits the right spot. Also the interface is a pleasure to work with because of it's beauty... which is what brought me to mint in the first place "from freedom came elegance"... but you could better. ) and which has:

Many daemons and services not relevant to elementary's target audience are removed, therefore the OS is perceived to be much faster than Ubuntu upon which it's built.

Well, this is great - but if I'm not mistaken, I can do this with Mint too, right ? Also, I could install those PIM apps on almost any distro probably.

So while I am glad to find that such distros exist, I'm still not sure, I'll ever find the way... home.
What dissapoints me as well is that they are both based on Ubuntu. Which as far as I know, gets all the more bloated.

(Mint Xfce dissapointed me a tad in elegance and performance. I perceived it being lazier than my previous OS. All in all, Mint is not doing the trick for me - neither does any other OS as of now. I also experience network and audio problems - as described in my other posts.) - if anyone cares about user feedback

Is there anything out there, that would combine tweaks to get more spead, with beauty, topped with workrave, wikidpad and other PIM and productivity software, or do we need yet another distro ?

Can anyone help me, with a hint, a distro, a word of encouragement ? )

[ThistleWeb]

One of the reason the "newbie friendly" distros are more bloated is that they are a single image, they install the same regardless of the hardware, they also enable daemons so that things like Bluetooth works without the user having to go figure out how to make it work. Anything installed as a netinstall like Debian or Arch looks at your hardware and won't load ATI drivers if it doesn't detect ATI gear etc. It also lets you pick and choose what parts of what DE or WM you want to install, as well as start at login or boot. All of this means extra time and knowledge, which goes against the idea of a newbie friendly distro.

If you want light, Gnome is not a good starting point, neither is KDE. XFCE can be light if it's running without all the various Gnome dependencies, LXDE would be a lighter choice, which Peppermint uses. The lighter you go, the more manual it gets for users to change things, which again goes against the idea of a newbie friendly distro. Peppermint is aimed at a cloud setup too, where next to none of your documents are on the local machine, but on services like GoogleDocs, Picasa & Flickr. This makes it ideal as a netbook distro for people who use their netbooks as they were intended.

Usually integrated environments are heavier anyway. The lightest approach is always gonna be a WM, which takes disparate apps and throws them together, but involves more manual configuration.

I love the Elementary Nautilus modification, their version of Nautilus for GTK3 looks to have a lot of the same features, but Nautilus isn't light to begin with, it also has a long tail of Gnome dependencies to run, not to mention it stays resident in RAM when closed because it's more than just a file manager in Gnome.

Anything that's built on an Ubuntu base like Elementary you can install on Ubuntu or Mint, just make sure you add the correct repo. Like all Gnome 2 distros, Elementary are changing to GTK3, so how long the current GTK2 apps will be supported is anyone's guess. Perhaps a better start point would be a Debian base, maybe the Mint XFCE edition. Debian is a faster base, XFCE is faster on Debian, so it's a double whammy. You'd have to look for the apps if they work on Debian, some Ubuntu debs do work just fine, some don't. At a guess, my suspicion would be that these ones wouldn't. They are not the only PIM apps on Linux however.

[mindmint]

Well, I'm using Mint Xfce right now, as specified in my OP. If it's not getting any better than this... well. I guess I'm in the right place already and all I need is a little more RAM.
But I just run into trouble with VirtualBox on it, so I think I'll give Debian Xfce a try. After coming from aptosid... on which Vbox worked, so maybe I ran into some upstream bugs...

I think all there's left for me is reading reading and reading, so that I can disable those deamons my self, theme things my self, and... pick apps myself.

Usually integrated environments are heavier anyway

You're talking about Peppermint here, right ?

The lighter you go, the more manual it gets for users to change things, which again goes against the idea of a newbie friendly distro.

Perhaps, there's a yet to be found middle way. Maybe, a more customizable setup process - that pleases newcomers, but without getting into their way, can take care of more advanced settings.

[ThistleWeb]

An easy way to reduce Mint XFCE's RAM consumption by about 30mb in one swoop is to remove the Mint Menu, replace it with the traditional XFCE menu. The Mint Menu is a Gnome-Panel applet, which needs the compatibility layer to run too.

Peppermint is marketed as "light" and ideal for a netbook because it's all cloud stuff. I didn't find that. To me it's as responsive as Gnome or KDE on my netbook, so the tradeoff of less convenience for speed isn't worth it, because there is no speed gain, just less features. LXDE is the lighted of the DE's, so the only explanation for why it isn't faster, is that most of the stuff like "facebook app", twitter app" aren't apps, but Ice (a single site browser running from Chromium with Webkit), so each one of those that start up, accounts for maybe 40mb of RAM. Jolicloud is based on the same idea with Prism (the original SSB concept from Mozilla using Gecko, the Firefox rendering engine as the base).

Every developer looks to make it more convenient and lighter at the same time, there's always compromises. I've found Crunchbang to be very nippy on my netbook, but I wouldn't say it's exactly newbie friendly, since Openbox requires editing of config files to change a lot of stuff. Yes Crunchbang does have some GUI options, and links into those config files, easy restart commands in the menu etc but it's still not quite what novice users would consider "easy to use".

Think of the approach to websites running scripts. Microsoft took the approach of "don't bother asking the user if they want to allow the script, they won't know the context, so they won't know whether yes or no is the right answer for them. Just enable it to say yes on their behalf to everything. Don't bother notifying the user of this, it just adds extra stuff to their screen that they don't understand anyway." Malware writers LOVED this, they wrote all sorts of scripts that slammed IE users knowing Microsoft's approach. The same applies with running Windows as an administrator, to avoid interrupting the user with permissions, notifications etc, just install int he background. They finally tried to sort this in Vista, but it's a sticky plaster solution.

In Linux there's a separation between user and admin, which means that some actions require user notification, and authorization. This drives new users nuts because Windows didn't have this layer. This is the approach of allowing some things, but ensuring the user has to acknowledge others. It's an excellent layer protecting Linux from malware, but it does mean that users will face prompts for questions they don't understand, so maybe don't know if they should say yes or no.

Getting good defaults is the key but it will never suit everyone. A distro designed to be easy to use has to make decisions on what info they can assume, as well as what they need users input from. Window Managers are lighter but they don't integrate things like default browser, so users may have to set that in various places, instead of just one. "I set Chrome as my default browser and X app still opens in Firefox!!!" Even things like auto-mounting of removable media are different. "I plugged my iPod in and nothing happens, I can't see it on the desktop, or browse to it". Window managers often pull together different apps to provide the functionality, some don't have panels, most don't have any control over desktop icons, for those you need additional apps.

[mindmint]

Thank you for taking the time to reply. Allow me to ask some questions that popped up for me while reading your reply...

An easy way to reduce Mint XFCE's RAM consumption by about 30mb in one swoop is to remove the Mint Menu, replace it with the traditional XFCE menu. The Mint Menu is a Gnome-Panel applet, which needs the compatibility layer to run too.

Knew that, yet, I kept it, for it helps me launch things faster. It also helps me autostart things. Still.. I'll have to install Kupfer and see if it's less demanding.

Peppermint is marketed as "light" and ideal for a netbook because it's all cloud stuff. I didn't find that. To me it's as responsive as Gnome or KDE on my netbook, so the tradeoff of less convenience for speed isn't worth it, because there is no speed gain, just less features.

Could you please name one ?

LXDE is the lighted of the DE's, so the only explanation for why it isn't faster, is that most of the stuff like "facebook app", twitter app" aren't apps, but Ice (a single site browser running from Chromium with Webkit), so each one of those that start up, accounts for maybe 40mb of RAM. Jolicloud is based on the same idea with Prism (the original SSB concept from Mozilla using Gecko, the Firefox rendering engine as the base).

Now this, is a distro that has a vision and a target niche. An intergrated suite that works for those who need this. I find peppermint's right to exist justified.

Every developer looks to make it more convenient and lighter at the same time, there's always compromises. I've found Crunchbang to be very nippy on my netbook, but I wouldn't say it's exactly newbie friendly, since Openbox requires editing of config files to change a lot of stuff. Yes Crunchbang does have some GUI options, and links into those config files, easy restart commands in the menu etc but it's still not quite what novice users would consider "easy to use".

Would it be more than a page to be read about to get from "novice" to "able" ? Learning 2 new commands is worth the sacrifice. Even 20. Btw, Mint needs a better manual... unfortunately..

Think of the approach to websites running scripts. Microsoft took the approach of "don't bother asking the user if they want to allow the script, they won't know the context, so they won't know whether yes or no is the right answer for them. Just enable it to say yes on their behalf to everything. Don't bother notifying the user of this, it just adds extra stuff to their screen that they don't understand anyway." Malware writers LOVED this, they wrote all sorts of scripts that slammed IE users knowing Microsoft's approach. The same applies with running Windows as an administrator, to avoid interrupting the user with permissions, notifications etc, just install int he background. They finally tried to sort this in Vista, but it's a sticky plaster solution.

In Linux there's a separation between user and admin, which means that some actions require user notification, and authorization. This drives new users nuts because Windows didn't have this layer. This is the approach of allowing some things, but ensuring the user has to acknowledge others. It's an excellent layer protecting Linux from malware, but it does mean that users will face prompts for questions they don't understand, so maybe don't know if they should say yes or no.

Yeap. Knew that. I'd like you to note, that this "approach", is an approach of having it both ways (sometimes allowing, sometimes "acknoledging"). Why am I not "notified" of options during setups...?

Getting good defaults is the key but it will never suit everyone.

Notified of options and defaults...

A distro designed to be easy to use has to make decisions on what info they can assume, as well as what they need users input from.

Objection. Why is it either/or ? Why is it easy vs able/optioned... ? Why can't it be both ? Marking default options as default, but allowing access to alternatives too. Why ? I already asked this question in my last post, but this time I'm serious. While last time I was wondering about it in principle, now that I've accidentaly seen it exists in practice, I fail to understand what's going on. I just tried Debian, which I installed in yesterday in expert mode - it didn't kill me, as you can see. I was surprised to see that there is an expert mode, AND (not or) also a "noob mode" AND flawors of each: graphical or not. Why didn't anyone tell me before ? I've seen about 6 distros in my life, but I don't remember seeing this anywhere else. So yesterday took me by surprise. So, if this feature exists in the distro that mint is based on, it beats me why mint is dehanced of this. Funny thing is I also perceive it as being lighter than mint. Well, I'll see if I can say the same in a month... I am sorry if I seem to overact, but it beats me why there are anti-features in the opensource world. I thought that's a shareware thing. Is it saving disk space on the liveCD ?

Window Managers are lighter but they don't integrate things like default browser, so users may have to set that in various places, instead of just one. "I set Chrome as my default browser and X app still opens in Firefox!!!" Even things like auto-mounting of removable media are different. "I plugged my iPod in and nothing happens, I can't see it on the desktop, or browse to it". Window managers often pull together different apps to provide the functionality, some don't have panels, most don't have any control over desktop icons, for those you need additional apps.

This isn't a problem either if we were to create sets of options... as in:
WM A
WM B + WALL control app. If you want this window manager, by default you should take this wall manager too.
WM C + PANELS + something else...
WM C + different PANELS

There are solutions to these problems. That's all I'm saying. In a world where everything can be automated, crippeling distros is... going against all my logic. Simpler isn't easier, simpler is less. Why is it that everybody assumes otherwise ? Do I make sense ? Anybody feels the same ?

Anyone care to enhance my perspective on what's going on ?

[ThistleWeb]

Simpler isn't easier, simpler is less.

Sorry, I must have gotten the wrong impression from your post. The whole Elementary approach is to simplify various functions, to keep the basic functions of stuff upfront and uncomplicated,m while hiding the more complex stuff under the hood. I wrongly figured out you like this part of Elementary as part of your ideal OS.

I found Peppermint to be as nimble, snappy etc as the regular Gnome and KDE Mint. Gnome and KDE are full on heavyweight DEs, LXDE is a featherweight, it SHOULD feel snappier, Peppermint doesn't. On limited resource hardware like netbooks, people make trade off decisions to go lighter and more manual to get better performance. When there is no noticeable gain, why take the feature hit?

An LXDE distro should be in the same performance category as a WM based one. Try something like Crunchbang, then Peppermint, see the difference for yourself. You shouldn't be able to tell the difference between them performance wise. It certainly shouldn't be enough to be noticeable.

Any distro has a right to exist if people use it, and maintain it. Each to their own.

[mindmint]

Simpler isn't easier, simpler is less.

Sorry, I must have gotten the wrong impression from your post. The whole Elementary approach is to simplify various functions, to keep the basic functions of stuff upfront and uncomplicated,m while hiding the more complex stuff under the hood. I wrongly figured out you like this part of Elementary as part of your ideal OS.

I'm not against a settled down system, but after choices have been made. Regarding simplicity, I read somewhere that everything should be (expressed) as simple as possible, BUT NO SIMPLER. - I guess I'm "complaining" about directives that go against this second part of the things. I guess this is what I want to say. A crippled setup is SIMPLER. Finally I said it simply. But I needed time to figure out my self what I was saying myself. I'm still trying to get a grip on the topic So, don't worry about miss-understanding me.

How is elementary hiding complex things under the hood... like what ? I'm not asking for an exposed kernel... it's just options that empower the user and are available AT LEAST OPTIONALLY (after checking a checkpoint somewhere in preferences or something...)

I found Peppermint to be as nimble, snappy etc as the regular Gnome and KDE Mint. Gnome and KDE are full on heavyweight DEs, LXDE is a featherweight, it SHOULD feel snappier, Peppermint doesn't. On limited resource hardware like netbooks, people make trade off decisions to go lighter and more manual to get better performance. When there is no noticeable gain, why take the feature hit?

Agreed.

An LXDE distro should be in the same performance category as a WM based one. Try something like Crunchbang, then Peppermint, see the difference for yourself. You shouldn't be able to tell the difference between them performance wise. It certainly shouldn't be enough to be noticeable.

I guess I will

Any distro has a right to exist if people use it, and maintain it. Each to their own.

I should have said something like, "it really earned that right". I'm not going against distros, as this would go against options/diversity.

I guess, what I'm saying is. Enhance and beautify as long as it's reasonable performance wise, but stuff options into it. I'm not talking about 4 image viewers, but about ONE that is competent. For example, I was buffeled to see, thunar without file search, file rename, aso. Elementary is packed up graphically, I expected the same at empowering the user. The PIM part was promising.. I expected they put something complete together. Like peppermint does for the cloud & social oriented. I'll have to dig into the repos though for Elementary failed me at first glance.

My problem is that I'm in the dark, I'm inventing theoretical situations and hope to find something somewhere in a distro. My questions and desires might be very well misguided... that's how blind folded people are. Hope those who see... can open my eyes or at least turn me into the right direction.

But as I said, maybe I'm already home with Debian (Mint) Xfce...

[h8r]

I read the OP, but these posts are long so here's my contribution:

I switched to GNU/Linux (in the form of Ubuntu 11.04) 3 weeks ago. As an open OS, I figured Linux distros would be flawless by now. The nerd in me wanted what I know every human being wants out of an OS: maximum automation and personalization options, and no bloat whatsoever. The install should therefore let the user choose what he wants and doesn't, during install. This isn't the thread to go into methods, suffice it to say any 3rd grader can think of ways to make this type of install userfriendly and intuitive. Devs... no excuse, you're overlooking one of the potentially biggest market voids in recent computer history. Linux is about to be very mainstream on the desktop, the minimal distro with the most personalization and automation, and compatibility out of the box is going to win in the long run. Not the distro with everything and the kitchen sink installed whether we want it or not. And if we want the kitchen sink, let us say so during install.

The best distro I've come across as far as automation (everything working/updating out of the box), personalization OOTB, intuitiveness, and yet still relatively minimal is the Mint OEM CD install. Plus it looks clean. Then if you're a newb like me, open the Software Manager to see what apps are installed, then find them in synaptic and choose Mark for Complete Removal. If you're lucky, then nothing will be broken and you'll have one-upped the entire world of Linux distro devs.

EDIT: I think an important point is that bloat (if defined as unnecessary files) is annoying at best, and literally malware otherwise, since newbs can't uninstall it simply or safely, or even at all without putting generous amounts of time into research and trial and error.

[ThistleWeb]

As an open OS, I figured Linux distros would be flawless by now. The nerd in me wanted what I know every human being wants out of an OS: maximum automation and personalization options, and no bloat whatsoever. The install should therefore let the user choose what he wants and doesn't, during install.

You want the training module and telepathy module too? My point being, new users don't know what they want because they're new. It takes all of us some time to narrow down our favorite apps, distros and environments. If you ask the user to choose at install you put extra questions in front of them that they don't understand saying "what's all this? I just want to install Linux".

The idea of making it almost automatic for daily use means a LOT of default options, like which daemons to be running for a start. I don't need Bluetooth, but it's running by default in Mint. If you use Bluetooth you'll appreciate that it works seamlessly without you having to go figure out why it doesn't. To me that Bluetooth daemon is unwanted, so it'd be classed as bloat that I can free up.

This is the problem for distros aimed at new users, to have that sort of functionality, you need to install a LOT of extra things that many users won't use. If you want a system with very minimal bloat, you're talking about a netinstall of something like Arch or Debian. That way you install a base system first (no graphical environment), and add the environment you like, along with the applications you like. After that you'll have to configure stuff to run at boot etc. It's a LOT more involved, you need a certain level of Linux experience to do that.

Every distro aims to be as easy to use as possible, with the best sets of defaults as they see fit. Many of them try to limit the excess so that it fits on a CD sized iso image too. A lot of this is about personal choice too, I love SMPlayer for videos, it's a QT app, very rarely installed by default in a GTK distro.

If you want an example of the approach you're talking about, with user choice at install, try Debian, all 26 CDs worth, or 6 DVDs if you prefer. Maybe try CentOS, that at least lets you chose from different scenarios to do meta packages, select a web server and it assumes Apache, PHP, MySQL etc but no GUI, you'll have to ensure you tick the Workstation box too for that. You can do netinstalls, but some people don't have net access on the PCs they're installing on at the time of install, so they need a complete working system from the CD or DVD images they're burned.

[h8r]

It takes all of us some time to narrow down our favorite apps, distros and environments. If you ask the user to choose at install you put extra questions in front of them that they don't understand saying "what's all this? I just want to install Linux".

If a person is uncomfortable selecting/deselecting 5 marks during install, with a sentence or two to explain each, then A) he shouldn't be installing GNU/Linux, and B) let him choose the "automatic" checkbox. Problem solved. I'm very new to GNU/Linux and the community, but I grew up online. This is the only community where people are strictly opposed to change or improvements. If someone can't think of a way to make these options intuitive and simplified for the n00bs, then he probably shouldn't be programming what you called "distros for newbs". Worst case scenario, they could let us choose, like millions of other GUI installs do, a full install, minimal install, or custom install.

I'm not mad at you, it's just GNU/Linux devs need to get their heads out of their butts if they haven't realized A) this is what people (ESPECIALLY newbs) want, because newbs need the automated GUIs, and B) an intuitive way to present us these options during install. In my humble opinion, this is either a massive accidental oversight, probably due to the fact they don't realize how mainstream GNU/Linux is about to be, or else they specifically intend to force feed us bloat and promoted software. I assert the latter.

Let a single dev ask me how I would present these options during install, and I can think of several. I just can't program or develop them at the moment.

[ThistleWeb]

Having been a full time Linux user for a few years, having distro hopped around many different versions, I bow to your three weeks on Linux. As I said, if you want a distro that offers a wide choice with questions on what to install, try one that offers it. Mint is not one of those. Mint chooses a default list, that goes on every install the same, where those who want to can enable, disable, install or remove what they like post-install. Ubuntu works the same way, so does Fedora, SimplyMEPIS, OpenSUSE and a whole lot more.

Perhaps you could first try some of the distros that do use this approach and report back how much fun it is, how simple it is for new users, and most of all how you fit it into a single CD image, with a live environment included. A LOT of VERY knowledgeable people haven't managed to figure that one out, despite having 100's of years of combined Linux experience at levels way beyond either of us but I'm sure your three weeks of Linux experience is all the difference they need to have that epiphany.

If you believe Linux is about to become mainstream anytime soon, you really are new to Linux. It will never be mainstream on desktops or laptops. Yes it will gradually grow, but it will never become mainstream, it's arguably a better approach to look at other form factors as they appear and grow, like smartphones and tablets with Android, WebOS, Symbian, Meego etc There's a running joke that EVERY YEAR is going to be "the year of the Linux desktop", the year where the mainstream finally open their collective eyes to the wonder that's Linux, and switch en masse. It's been a while now since it became so wrong that it's a running joke. Vista was the best promotion we could have had, and we didn't do much more than chip away another dent in market share. Where Linux will dominate is places the end user isn't even aware of, as webservers, embedded into devices etc.

As far as people not being suitable to install Linux if they don't take the time to select or read options is concerned. People coming to Linux want as simple and uncomplicated experience to start with. They don't want swamped with extra customized options. Ubuntu and Mint do well with those users because they are simple to install. Plenty of people will happily use whatever comes pre-installed without thinking about it, they often won't even change the default look and feel. The vast majority of PC users don't care about how their PC works, they use it as a device to get something done: "I want to check my email" "I want to post an update to Facebook" etc. They don't care about FOSS, free culture, alternate apps for tasks etc if they can use what's pre-installed. Some do get interested in how things work, they start exploring Linux / FOSS etc, they may even decide to try other distros and like something other than the one they arrived on. They are then armed with enough info and WANT to be presented with custom options, so they seek our distros that suit their needs.

[h8r]

Mint is not one of those.

Hence, this topic. Change is OK.

It's precisely because I'm not a jaded longtime user like you, that I'm pretty mainstream and completely new to GNU/Linux, and I'm young so I'm in tune with the people and feelings that will shape our future, that my opinion is more relevant. Not to mention I understand economics, which it doesn't appear you do. Maybe the fact that GNU/Linux hasn't become mainstream yet is precisely because it's developers have been so opposed to the demands of the mainstream. Economically, that would guarantee that they wouldn't become mainstream.

That's changing, whether your jaded eyes see it or not, and I mean jaded in the literal sense, I mean no offense.

Also, I doubt they're too stupid, as you suggest, to figure out how to make a graphical option to not install something, or to select one of two options. An argument can be made that GNU/Linux distro devs are among the smarter computer scientists.

I don't know what else to say... Learn some economics? They thought slavery was permanent too...