[SOLVED] Depressing day... LMDE, Mint 12 KDE, Mint 12 Gnome

[asdfasdf]

I started the day with a perfectly functional Mint 11 installation (successor to a perfectly functional
Fedora 14 installation).

I kept reading about how well LMDE now works, and I finally decided to go ahead and give it a try (my previous VirtualBox installation of LMDE last year wasn't impressive; couldn't update the system and didn't really want to spend time fixing it.)

So, I downloaded the new LMDE 64bit version (201204), and gave installing it a few tries. Slow, slow, slow:
forget that 10 minute bit advice on the installation window --- I never had an attempt under 45 minutes, and one went for 2 hours. No idea why they were so slow. And, at the end of each and every attempt, the "bootloader configuration" step would fail.

I searched the forums and found an old posting about doing this by hand with a chroot / grub-makeconfig, but that advice doesn't work at all, with all kinds of errors whining about shared libraries and ELF headers.

So, okay, I wanted my machine at least to be running, even if I couldn't have LMDE. I figured that I would
just install the KDE version. While the installation attempts were faster, it was still no speed demon; install attempts went on for about 30 minutes each. All of them blew up with a "installer has crashed" message in the languages area.

I finally decided to try installing the default version. No problem at all installing, installed quite quickly, and I was thinking "Yay, at least I still have a Mint box, even if it is Gnome."

Wrong. Once the box booted, neither my USB keyboard or USB mouse was being recognized. Okay, how about PS/2? I dug through the spares boxes and located a PS/2 keyboard and mouse. No joy. Not being picked up either.

I was frustrated with Fedora because no one there seems to care about the user experience (fonts in Fedora 15 and 16 just look terrible, even with infinality installed): Mint looks great and using Mint 11 was certainly acceptable.

But both versions of 12 and LMDE have been a real disappointment. I didn't really have a whole day to waste on lame installation attempts.

Yes, it's possible that a nasty hardware failure has suddenly developed on the box, but I don't think it's likely. All of the hardware is only just over a year old; smartctl isn't reporting any errors.

I have decided to go back to Mint 11 for now, though fuduntu looks kind of interesting and I may try that as October gets closer.

SOLUTION: Mint 11 works just fine. Guess I will use it until the next great release.

UPDATE: Mint 13 also works great. Still don't know why Mint 12 was so refractory; the same hardware is happy enough with Mint 11 and Mint 13.

[zerozero]

[moved here because there's no real request for help or a question being made in the post, if the OP decides to change the formatting we might consider move it back to a more suitable place]

[asdfasdf]

I decided to give the LMDE install another try, but this time using a unetbootin installation rather than a DVD.

The unetbootin LMDE install went fine, with no hangs when configuring the bootloader.

[asdfasdf]

When I went to do another installation of Linux Mint 13, I noticed that the unetbootin version wasn't working so well.

I found the instructions at http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/744 using dd to work very well.

Cinnamon is certainly a real winner. I have removed Fedora from most of my machines and moved to Linux Mint with Cinnamon. It's a nice to work on a system where the developers actually seem to care what the desktop looks like and how it functions.

Fedora's fonts have gone from acceptable to unacceptable on the desktop, and their default Gnome 3 set-up is so annoyingly stupid --- I think it's even worse than Ubuntu's Unity.

[asdfasdf]

So everything is going along swimmingly. I even managed to get an ancient HP printer working, something that's always a trial --- though I have to admit that I am not sure which of the three methods I tried actually was the solution, but I am glad that one of them succeeded.

A newer Samsung printer/scanner was a breeze, literally plug-and-play.

The only problem right now that I see is that Amazon Instant Video in full screen is jerky, though other Flash content in full screen is fine, as is XBMC.

Cinnamon is a triumph. It's so much better for me than Fedora's native Gnome 3 and even their KDE that I only wish that I had left Fedora long ago.

I was certainly tired of being the victim of the Fedora developers' alpha-minus-minus code going straight into the general distribution's release. Worse, relatively stable packages that should have been updated long ago are languishing years back from other distributions (though I have to give them credit about getting GIMP 2.8 into Fedora 17.) The priorities, in general, at Fedora are so far off that it's not funny. The stellar work by Linux Mint in getting Cinnamon out has been a great benefit to the community.

[asdfasdf]

The only problem right now that I see is that Amazon Instant Video in full screen is jerky, though other Flash content in full screen is fine, as is XBMC.

Well, oddly enough, I happened to try an older 8500 GT rather than the newer 450 GTS that I had been using, and Amazon has no problem in full screen with the 8500 GT.