Mate or Cinnamon?

[nfisher]

Yep. That was the last thing I tried before switching.

It had been running perfectly fine for about 3 weeks. I did an update of only 1 and 2 tier updates. Shut down.

And it was dead the next morning. I had also been getting an error with trying to install the Flare RPG v017 about something that was missing... that was infact not missing and was installed and showing up in the package manager as installed.

It's done now. Only thing that may be of interest now, I suppose, was that I was running the ATI beta 12-9 drivers as one of the trouble shooting attempts mentioned a link with video card drivers. They were the drivers that ran Torchlight from the humble bundle perfectly my Radeon 5750. If they were somehow the cause, I'd switch anyway. I'm not giving up my linux games heheh.

[baloney]

And thank god for MATE.

That would be Perberos you want to thank And the rest of the team that joined him of course.

From me BIG THANKS too! - to both of them

I have a clevo laptop with nvidia 650 optimus. I have installed and reinstalled Cinnamon (Maya) several times - with and without Nvidia proprietary drivers and 2D Desktop etc. I have had mouse and desktop freezes all the time. Then, after the last crash I decided to try out MATE. I now have a running and reliable sysem again. What a relief!

[refugee]

Unless you have the time and patients to deal with cinnamons multitude of bugs or really love bleeding edge, mate is the way to go. I tried cinnamon for a few weeks and while it looks and feels great, its still very beta and has poor support for Amd Radeon series cards as has been confirmed by many members. Cinnamon is the future but it has many months of bug hunting to go before its ready for primetime. At the end of the day I use my computer to work, and do not have the patients to deal with the random hard freezes and cpu spikes. Not knocking the mint team, what they are attempting to do is very complex but its just not ready for those who NEED stability above all else.

[cwwgateway]

@refugee I agree that if you use Cinnamon stability usually isn't the first thing on your mind. However, Cinnamon 2d will get rid of a lot of graphics problems, although it admittedly has a long way to go before it becomes usable - llvmpipe does use a lot of CPU (to be expected) to do it.

[fraze]

Unless you have the time and patients to deal with cinnamons multitude of bugs or really love bleeding edge, mate is the way to go. I tried cinnamon for a few weeks and while it looks and feels great, its still very beta and has poor support for Amd Radeon series cards as has been confirmed by many members. Cinnamon is the future but it has many months of bug hunting to go before its ready for primetime. At the end of the day I use my computer to work, and do not have the patients to deal with the random hard freezes and cpu spikes. Not knocking the mint team, what they are attempting to do is very complex but its just not ready for those who NEED stability above all else.

Not really sure where you're coming from. My average LM13 uptime is at least a month, only rebooting for kernel upgrades. Gfx is low-end AMD on all my boxes. Maybe want to run some hardware tests before bashing Cinnamon.

[cwwgateway]

@fraze it is very true that many AMD/ATI graphics cards work great with Cinnamon, but there is a much larger problem with ATI graphcis support for linux than with other cards (intel and nvidia). It usually isn't specific to Cinnamon, but to 3d acceleration in general. I don't know exactly why, but it seems that the ATI drivers are not nearly as good as NVIDIA and Intel drivers. If the driver works well with your graphics card and it supports 3d acceleration, then cinnamon can be very stable (although occasionally there are glitches if you try to tweak stuff too much - it crashes when applet gschemas aren't installed correctly).

[igor83]

@fraze it is very true that many AMD/ATI graphics cards work great with Cinnamon, but there is a much larger problem with ATI graphcis support for linux than with other cards (intel and nvidia). It usually isn't specific to Cinnamon, but to 3d acceleration in general. I don't know exactly why, but it seems that the ATI drivers are not nearly as good as NVIDIA and Intel drivers. If the driver works well with your graphics card and it supports 3d acceleration, then cinnamon can be very stable (although occasionally there are glitches if you try to tweak stuff too much - it crashes when applet gschemas aren't installed correctly).

I have found this to be the case as well. ATI is persuading me to abandon AMD once and for all. I have been buying nothing but AMD since the 90's, but that will change now that I am getting into Linux. It is time to say good-bye to the siamese twin AMD & ATI, as one of the heads is diseased. I plan to embrace Intel's low-power offerings such as the 35W g630t. It may cost a little bit more but you get what you pay for. I don't see many posts by Linux users complaining about Intel or NVIDIA but there seems to be widespread difficulty with ATI and all of these gotchas for Linux users.

[craig10x]

I was just curious..with the cinnamon desktop, is there an option to "auto hide" the lower panel, and if so, how do you do that?
Thanks...

[caribriz]

I was just curious..with the cinnamon desktop, is there an option to "auto hide" the lower panel, and if so, how do you do that?
Thanks...

Yes -
Cinnamon settings > Panel > check "Auto-hide panel"

caribriz

[craig10x]

Thank you caribriz
Looking forward to checking out the Linux Mint 14 RC...

[richardsdma]

from my perspective, i have to choose between mate and cinnamon. i installed mint 13 mate edition but after few days i realized that is way behind our times.
so, i have installed gnome-shell and i am very happy with my choice.
in my point of view, gnome-shell is the most beautiful DE in the market today, better and more intuitive than windows metro.

[habfan29]

in my point of view, gnome-shell is the most beautiful DE in the market today, better and more intuitive than windows metro.

Heh.. talk about damning with faint praise

[aelfinn]

One perhaps only tangentially relevant question: How do I find out what version of Cinnamon I am running? Is there a magic command I could type into the terminal?

[zerozero]

Code: Select all

cinnamon --version

[aelfinn]

Code: Select all

cinnamon --version

Okay, that was easy…

Thanks!

[bwat47]

Cinnamon all the way for m. The fact that it is based on the more modern GTK3/Gnome-shell base and that it has stable and well integrated compositing out of the box are huge plus's for me. MATE is alright if you don't want compositing or really want to use compiz, I just wish it was based on gnome 3 fallback instead of gnome 2.

@fraze it is very true that many AMD/ATI graphics cards work great with Cinnamon, but there is a much larger problem with ATI graphcis support for linux than with other cards (intel and nvidia). It usually isn't specific to Cinnamon, but to 3d acceleration in general. I don't know exactly why, but it seems that the ATI drivers are not nearly as good as NVIDIA and Intel drivers. If the driver works well with your graphics card and it supports 3d acceleration, then cinnamon can be very stable (although occasionally there are glitches if you try to tweak stuff too much - it crashes when applet gschemas aren't installed correctly).

I have found this to be the case as well. ATI is persuading me to abandon AMD once and for all. I have been buying nothing but AMD since the 90's, but that will change now that I am getting into Linux. It is time to say good-bye to the siamese twin AMD & ATI, as one of the heads is diseased. I plan to embrace Intel's low-power offerings such as the 35W g630t. It may cost a little bit more but you get what you pay for. I don't see many posts by Linux users complaining about Intel or NVIDIA but there seems to be widespread difficulty with ATI and all of these gotchas for Linux users.

If you don't need a dedicated card, go intel without a doubt. Intel is the only one that officially develops proper open source drivers. Intel cards can be depended on to work great out of the box (although there does appear to be a bug with ubuntu 12.10/mint 14 where the intel driver isn't loaded correctly sometimes, but I haven't ran into it on either of my intel laptops). If you need a dedicated card, go nvidia but try to avoid optimus. I am so glad I no longer have to deal with AMD/ATI cards under linux. My old laptop had a mobility hd2600 and gave me nothing but trouble with both catalyst and the oss ati drivers. Its a shame because AMD/ATI has good video card hardware, its just the linux drivers that are terrible. I use an AMD card on my windows gaming pc and it works great, but I don't go near them if I intend to use linux on a machine.

[igor83]

Cinnamon all the way for m. The fact that it is based on the more modern GTK3/Gnome-shell base and that it has stable and well integrated compositing out of the box are huge plus's for me. MATE is alright if you don't want compositing or really want to use compiz, I just wish it was based on gnome 3 fallback instead of gnome 2.

@fraze it is very true that many AMD/ATI graphics cards work great with Cinnamon, but there is a much larger problem with ATI graphcis support for linux than with other cards (intel and nvidia). It usually isn't specific to Cinnamon, but to 3d acceleration in general. I don't know exactly why, but it seems that the ATI drivers are not nearly as good as NVIDIA and Intel drivers. If the driver works well with your graphics card and it supports 3d acceleration, then cinnamon can be very stable (although occasionally there are glitches if you try to tweak stuff too much - it crashes when applet gschemas aren't installed correctly).

I have found this to be the case as well. ATI is persuading me to abandon AMD once and for all. I have been buying nothing but AMD since the 90's, but that will change now that I am getting into Linux. It is time to say good-bye to the siamese twin AMD & ATI, as one of the heads is diseased. I plan to embrace Intel's low-power offerings such as the 35W g630t. It may cost a little bit more but you get what you pay for. I don't see many posts by Linux users complaining about Intel or NVIDIA but there seems to be widespread difficulty with ATI and all of these gotchas for Linux users.

If you don't need a dedicated card, go intel without a doubt. Intel is the only one that officially develops proper open source drivers. Intel cards can be depended on to work great out of the box (although there does appear to be a bug with ubuntu 12.10/mint 14 where the intel driver isn't loaded correctly sometimes, but I haven't ran into it on either of my intel laptops). If you need a dedicated card, go nvidia but try to avoid optimus. I am so glad I no longer have to deal with AMD/ATI cards under linux. My old laptop had a mobility hd2600 and gave me nothing but trouble with both catalyst and the oss ati drivers. Its a shame because AMD/ATI has good video card hardware, its just the linux drivers that are terrible. I use an AMD card on my windows gaming pc and it works great, but I don't go near them if I intend to use linux on a machine.

Yes, I'm afraid this is so. That said, all of my computers are AMD-powered at the moment, because I've been a loyal customer--for as long as I stayed with Windows, that is. AMD was a lot cheaper, after all, even now with their Trinity line,and they made some good low-powered chips. With Windows, AMD stuff works pretty good. Now that I'm getting into Linux Mint, I am having second thoughts, because I'm not sure how much advantage the Linux version of the AMD/ATI driver makes of the GPU. Based on the description of "fglrx" in the Ubuntu repository, it does not take full advantage. I'm also concerned because ATI does not seem to publish a changelog for the Linux community. I have the impression Linux may be an afterthought to ATI.

Getting back on topic, after using Linux Mint Mate 13 64-bit for about a month, I'm pleased. I particularly appreciated the ease of customization. I had a dark desktop in no time with light green text. One launcher opens the music directory, one launcher opens the video directory, one launcher opens VLC (for customization), and one launcher shuts down the computer. For simple htpc, I would say Linux Mint Mate is highly recommended. ATI's driver presented a few challenges, but that would be true on any distro. In fact, I learned how to configure the ATI driver by reading documentation on the Arch Linux site. The same steps applied in Linux Mint. I appreciate how transferable knowledge is from one distro to another. Linux Mint never makes anything more difficult. And as far as the idea that a lighter distro like say, Xubuntu, is faster, I think that when the total amount of memory the OS takes is quoted at between 190 and 300 megabytes, that's pretty small in a computer with 4G of RAM, and if the desktop consumes under 8% of the cpu, that's fast enough. Greater speed increases can be found through inexpensive hardware rather than sacrificing the user interface or making things more difficult for the human.

If I were to download today, I'd select the latest version, even though it's not an LTS, because version 14 has the latest version of several software packages, which will save time when updating. I haven't heard of anything major being broken in 12.10 of Ubuntu, although your mileage may vary.

[Pikachu6708]

As a guy who has both installed on his system, I prefer Cinnamon for looks and modernity, and 'cause it seems nicer and more mature than MATE, and MATE for performance and usability, so either's good for me.

[RC Da Kookee]

MATE + Compiz would be my choice over Cinnamon