Upgrading to Olivia makes me think of switching back W7

[Mohawk]

Upgrading from Nadia to Olivia resulted in a missing taskbar earlier today.
I have spent half of the day today to find a solution: removing NVIDIA drivers which I don't have, replacing Cinnamon, etc. Up until now the best success I've had was enabling gnome-shell to run my applications (whoa!)
After having spent enough of time and nerves, I decided to simply reinstall it. How surprised was I to learn that exe files cannot be run in my current state. And now I can't even burn an iso to a USB stick.

Total score.
+ Fast
+ Package manager
- No Skype (fails every 5 minutes, as already described here in the forum)
- No support for MS Office under Wine (the same)
- Upgrading system at a risk of losing a day to fix bugs and save your critical data (I wonder if any Linux users are paid to test new releases. Well, I'm not).

[excollier]

Maybe you should re-post in the Main Edition section, this is for LMDEissues only.

[proxima_centauri]

* Moved to Chat about Linux Mint subforum

[TBABill]

Were you ever able to figure out if it's hardware, the OS, driver (video or other) or whatever causing the problems? Just curious if you know the end result and not just the workaround (using Gnome shell....ugggg). I'd ditch in a hurry if I were stuck in Gnome Shell. Did you try KDE or another DE to determine if it's Desktop Environment related or something else in the OS?

As much as it's been said, there's real value in sticking with the LTS versions. 6-9 month releases are nice to play in, but not to rely on if you have little time or patience to do so. Latest and greatest is cool until it bites me for relying on it. Mint 13 is awesome and you can enable backports.

One caution I live by...watch the complaints on ubuntuforums.org after a release and see if the issues evolve into common themes for problems. If they do, avoid that release until a major fix is released. I've always found the LTS releases to be superior to any others, but sometimes the latest versions do offer speed or feature enhancements that make that upgrade a tougher call.

[wheeledgoat]

I'm just curious as to why you're torturing your wallet with MS Office still. After I found Libre Office a couple years ago, I haven't looked back. The files are completely compatable, and what minor differences there are are completely worth the money saved to get accustomed to (IMO, of course).

Truth be told, I prefer Libre office - the contextual menus make more sense to me than microsoft's.

[excollier]

Trouble is many need MS Office to send documents by email to Windows users, particularly in business because MS Office cannot display Open/Libre Office documents properly a lot of the time.
Such is MS domination, that's not going to chang any time soon, so people are trapped unfortunately.

[wheeledgoat]

MS Office cannot display Open/Libre Office documents properly a lot of the time.

i did not know that. in my [limited] experience I've had no issues whatsoever will cross-compatability, going in either direction. The conspiracy theorist in me starts having thoughts like "microsoft did that on purpose".

[excollier]

It's not that they do it on purpose, more that because they dominate the business world, they just don't care to cater for other operating system compatibility, why would they even make the effort? It's of no benefit to them.

[samriggs]

Maybe they can do it to be nice for once

Ya ok like that will ever happen.

[lexon]

I can understand where you are coning from. Mint use to work right out of the box. Not anymore.
I just downloaded and installed 15. I cannot adjust the screen resolution anymore. A window is at the top right of the display about a video driver issue.
I clicked on setting the resolution and all I see is an icon at the bottom of the display that says, System Settings. No large window anymore for adjusting.
This machine is about six years old, 3.2 cpu and 2gb Ram.
Mint 14 has been getting worse with upgrades. 15 is bad.
I started with Mint shortly after six came out and never had issues until 14.
Not looking for help as Mint should work out of the box. In the past, all I did was change resolution and single click. Not anymore.
I will have to look for another OS.
I will put the Vista drive back in my laptop which is having issues with Mint 14. I had someone clean it up really nice and it runs very well as a bacckup.

L