What happened to Mint?!

[chaddjohnson]

So...I've been using Mint for quite a while now. I stopped for about 6 months and then started using it again.

I installed Mint 12, and it looks HIDEOUS! The Mint Menu (which is *why* I used Mint) is gone! And now the ugly Gnome-y Applications and Places menu is at the top of the screen!

What happened? Time to find another distro?

I know I can change the session to Mate, but how long will support for the old look actually last?

[SallyK]

The developers definitely plan to have a MATE edition of Mint 13, and that will be a Long Term release, so you should be safe enough with it for the next couple of years, at least. http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1974

[xenopeek]

If you are seeing the Gnome-y Applications and Places menu, this means your graphics card drivers are not enabled properly for 3D acceleration that Gnome 3 needs (you are seeing the fallback mode). Usually that can be fixed. Suggest you post a support question on that in this forum: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewforum.php?f=59. Please include the output of the following command run from the terminal for other forum members there to be able to help you best:

Code: Select all

inxi -SGxc 0

In about a month (hopefully) Linux Mint 13 should be available, and that no longer requires 3D acceleration to work for it to display properly. So you could retry then as an alternative. It will have both Cinnamon and MATE installed, see here the most recent update of Cinnamon for a teaser. Check out 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). The classic Mint Menu also has been ported to Cinnamon, it is installable as an applet. See here: http://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/applets/view/46. The Cinnamon menu however is also quite nice Cinnamon doesn't work without 3D acceleration on Linux Mint 12, so if the problem can be fixed for you now, you can install it. Or wait for Linux Mint 13.

Read some more about MATE here: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=100773

[chaddjohnson]

Whew! I was worried. Good to know... I'm running in VMWare, so that's surely the problem.

[cwwgateway]

Note: There have been lots of posts since I started typing this, but I'll still post this in case it helps. And VMWare is the problem, I'm pretty sure.

So...I've been using Mint for quite a while now. I stopped for about 6 months and then started using it again.

I installed Mint 12, and it looks HIDEOUS! The Mint Menu (which is *why* I used Mint) is gone! And now the ugly Gnome-y Applications and Places menu is at the top of the screen!

What happened? Time to find another distro?

I know I can change the session to Mate, but how long will support for the old look actually last?

Mint 12 uses Gnome shell. This wasn't optional (gnome 2 is EOL and Ubuntu moved to gnome 3 with unity). Mint 12 comes with MGSE (Mint GNOME Shell Extensions), which make gnome shell look more like the traditional desktop. MGSE development stopped months ago. It was replaced by Cinnamon, which is a fork of gnome shell by the Mint devs. You can install it with apt install cinnamon. It is better looking than MGSE, IMO, and it might be default in Mint 13 (either it or MATE). If you don't like the look of Gnome Shell and don't want to use Cinnamon, you can find good extensions for gnome shell to make it look better at http://extensions.gnome.org and themes at http://gnome-look.org. Cinnamon themes, applets, and extensions can be found at http://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com. Mint Menu is in neither of these because it is written in python, whereas gnome shell and cinnamon applets and extensions are written in javascript. Don't ask me why the interface wasn't ported, though. There's an applet that is a near perfect recreation of it, though - http://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/applets/view/46. MATE will be supported for at least five years, because Mint 13 is an LTS release and will be supported for 5 years on the desktop (versus 3 years with previous LTS releases), and there will be a MATE version of Mint 13.

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

That is gnome-fallback
you end up there when you have a really low end (aka really outdated) GPU or dont have a half decent driver for that GPU

[cwwgateway]

That is gnome-fallback
you end up there when you have a really low end (aka really outdated) GPU or dont have a half decent driver for that GPU

This is kind of covered by your driver statement, but a lot of ATI graphics cards don't work with Gnome-Shell because of the ATI drivers.

[bimsebasse]

I'm amazed more people don't wonder when their Mint 12 desktop looks nothing like the Mint 12 desktop pictured in official release articles and blog posts. At any rate a little research before starting to complain loudly about this and that is probably a good idea.

[cwwgateway]

I'm amazed more people don't wonder when their Mint 12 desktop looks nothing like the Mint 12 desktop pictured in official release articles and blog posts. At any rate a little research before starting to complain loudly about this and that is probably a good idea.

While I think that's a little harsh, I agree (in a less-harsh-ish way ). I have seen some pretty interesting examples of this, although I won't mention the exact examples so as not to offend anyone (so I'm less-harsh-ish ).

[xenopeek]

Linux Mint 13 should hopefully run without requiring 3D acceleration, so this should be a thing of the past soon...