Something I like: Out of the box MATE desktop environment. I am a fan of MATE. Woohoo! It's very stable and looks great on Mint.
Something I don't: Mint's Google Custom Search Engine. It appears to return poorer results and have no options. I have just now become distressed enough about it to go and figure out how to get rid of it for good.
Mint sort of reminds me of old school Ubuntu. It runs very smoothly out of the box on my laptop, which has in the past had at least one problem with every Linux distro I've run on it.
I gave OpenSUSE a run for a few months last, and had to fix problems with screen brightness not changing according to keyboard commands and the microphone not working. Also the out-of-the-box software generally wasn't jiving that well. The system kept trying to install stuff using Apper which is deprecated or had some problem I forget, and YaST was basically a general pain. What finally broke the camel's back was an overheating problem with the video card that I couldn't figure out. Anyways, more to the point, Mint just works.
My name's Randy and I'm a 20 year old Computer Science major currently living in Munich, Germany. I've been using various Linux distributions for about five years. I usually give a new one a try every time I manage to corrupt my system enough to require reformatting. On this machine, I've only had good luck with Debian based distros, but on my old machine Fedora did the trick.
Anyhow, hi, glad to be here, thanks to the devs, and to anyone who ends up helping me out farther down the road.
Happily using Mint for about a week now
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Lacaille
Happily using Mint for about a week now
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
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anandrkris
Re: Happily using Mint for about a week now
Hey Randy - Glad that you're liking Mint Mate.
I switched from Windows 7 to Linux Mint 13 KDE few months ago and have been enjoying Mint since. Am a pure desktop user (no programming background unlike you) and am enjoying Mint as it is fast, functional and highly configurable. I had no exposure to terminal earlier and now am slowing getting acquainted with the commands and able to get things done faster. (I have since upgraded my kernel to 3.8 and KDE to 4.10.1)
In my case, i think, duckduckgo is enabled by default as search engine and I dont mind as i append !g to search in google, !gi to search google images, !a for amazon etc.
Also, below are links of custom search engines that help me in searching linux related topics.
http://home.windstream.net/joelwest/
http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=01760 ... _owgx6xyi0
I suppose, since you're a comp. sci. student, perhaps you can even contribute to the Mint community either in development or helping new users like me in forums.
I switched from Windows 7 to Linux Mint 13 KDE few months ago and have been enjoying Mint since. Am a pure desktop user (no programming background unlike you) and am enjoying Mint as it is fast, functional and highly configurable. I had no exposure to terminal earlier and now am slowing getting acquainted with the commands and able to get things done faster. (I have since upgraded my kernel to 3.8 and KDE to 4.10.1)
In my case, i think, duckduckgo is enabled by default as search engine and I dont mind as i append !g to search in google, !gi to search google images, !a for amazon etc.
Also, below are links of custom search engines that help me in searching linux related topics.
http://home.windstream.net/joelwest/
http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=01760 ... _owgx6xyi0
I suppose, since you're a comp. sci. student, perhaps you can even contribute to the Mint community either in development or helping new users like me in forums.
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Lacaille
Re: Happily using Mint for about a week now
Thanks for the welcomes. Unfortunately I was a little bit quick to praise Mint's just-workiness xD Although I suspect it's MATE's fault rather than Mint's. I don't hold it against Mint or MATE, if I can get up and running with just one problem like this, I count that as pretty good for Linux on this hardware. Unfortunately, because of my circumstances, this problem was bigger than it otherwise would be and I had to download an Ubuntu ISO on my iPod in Starbucks and create a partition to boot that instead!
Basically the network manager disappeared from my toolbar and I couldn't get it to return. When I tried to start it back up via terminal I got some problem like "there was an error initializing MATE_NetworkManager (I forget the program name but it was something like that)". I also had no luck using iwconfig to create a connection for some reason. I guess this is a common problem but none of the solutions I found on the web worked. And I am living in a hostel with only a WiFi connection while full-time looking for an apartment so I ran out of patience pretty quickly. But when I have some time I plan to figure it out and hopefully get back to trying Mint out again.
Basically the network manager disappeared from my toolbar and I couldn't get it to return. When I tried to start it back up via terminal I got some problem like "there was an error initializing MATE_NetworkManager (I forget the program name but it was something like that)". I also had no luck using iwconfig to create a connection for some reason. I guess this is a common problem but none of the solutions I found on the web worked. And I am living in a hostel with only a WiFi connection while full-time looking for an apartment so I ran out of patience pretty quickly. But when I have some time I plan to figure it out and hopefully get back to trying Mint out again.