Ubuntu going back to gnome, whats the direction for LM?

[oldgranola]

Just curious, with canonical Ubuntu dropping unity and going back to gnome for desktops, will the focus of mint change? Sounds like they dropped a bunch of insiders, going to community dev like team linuxmint. Since Lm is doing great at desktop dev, way ahead with Cinnamon gnome like ui, and other flavors, shouldnt Ubuntu just go with LM?

[oldgranola]

Should have mentioned that LM was in part started with discontent that cononical had droppef the popular gnome ui to dev unity

[Pjotr]

Just curious, with canonical Ubuntu dropping unity and going back to gnome for desktops, will the focus of mint change?

No. Business as usual, no desktop change.

[sphyrth]

Ubuntu went from Gnome to Unity and then back to Gnome?
Mint will continue on with MATE, Cinnamon, and XFCE.

[Penn]

To my understanding, the reason Mate and Cinnamon came into existence was because many people didn't like Gnome 3. So I don't see Mint going backwards (in that way).

Mint existed before that even happened, so even less need to change towards Ubuntu.

If anything, I'd rather see Mint drop the Ubuntu connection and do more development on LMDE.

[JosephM]

I'm pretty sure I mentioned this in a thread awhile back (as this Ubuntu back to Gnome thing is kind of old news at this point) but at this point it really doesn't affect Mint any more than Ubuntu using Unity did. In fact it might give small benefits. There were cases with the stock gnome applications where Ubuntu was patching the UI to work with their locally integrated and global menus. This made them a bit messy on our desktop environments. It was a small part of why the XApps project was born. They probably won't do this anymore so where we do use the gnome applications we should get them as they were intended to be.

If anything, I'd rather see Mint drop the Ubuntu connection and do more development on LMDE

I'm curious. I see people making this comment but rarely, if ever, do people give an actual reason. I mean what would be the benefit?

[Lucap]

If anything, I'd rather see Mint drop the Ubuntu connection and do more development on LMDE

I'm curious. I see people making this comment but rarely, if ever, do people give an actual reason. I mean what would be the benefit?

I think people just see Ubuntu as a bastardized version of Debian so why not just use the orginial Debian source as the base for Mint.

It sort of gives the impressions of trying to re-invent the wheel multiple times.

[Pjotr]

If anything, I'd rather see Mint drop the Ubuntu connection and do more development on LMDE

I'm curious. I see people making this comment but rarely, if ever, do people give an actual reason. I mean what would be the benefit?

I think people just see Ubuntu as a bastardized version of Debian so why not just use the orginial Debian source as the base for Mint.

It sort of gives the impressions of trying to re-invent the wheel multiple times.

Bastardized Debian?

Improved Debian, I'd say. In several very meaningful ways. As long as Ubuntu remains available (hopefully forever), the Mint devs would be foolish to dump the excellent Ubuntu code....

[Lucap]

If you put Bastardized Ubuntu into google search you'll see that term dates back to 2008 , though mostly from the Ubuntu hate brigade.

[minitux]

Linux Mint already have a main DE , that is Cinnamon, and two flavours with Mate and XFCE.

What does it matter if Ubuntu goes to Gnome?

[MintBean]

Ubuntu would never 'go with Linux Mint,' or even the Cinnamon desktop I suspect, even if they thought it was the best technical solution. Whilst they are perfectly entitled to go with Cinnamon as a desktop, I think it would be seen as very poor form since Mint is a separate distribution ('competitor' of sorts) with one of the headline features being Cinnamon and the development thereof.

[minitux]

and anyway the Ubuntu engine has always been Gnome (before gnome2 and then gnome3) Unity was just a compiz-based user interface

[Penn]

If anything, I'd rather see Mint drop the Ubuntu connection and do more development on LMDE

I'm curious. I see people making this comment but rarely, if ever, do people give an actual reason. I mean what would be the benefit?

Not a lot of reasons but enough for me. The first two a bit philosophical, I suppose.

Debian is not from a corporation and therefore is closer to true FOSS principles. I know this doesn't mean anything to some people and, honestly, not a huge amount to me but it does have some meaning to me.

I recall when the site crack happened nearly 2 years ago Clem, either in the blog or an interview, mentioned his experience contacting Ubuntu. It sounded to me that the person he was dealing with was more concerned with whether Mint was using proprietary blobs and emphasizing Mint isn't allowed to do that instead of answering his security concerns.

Though there was an opt out for it and if I am correct it isn't the case anymore, but, Ubuntu also tied search in the menu to Amazon. I'm not an anti-corporate type of person at all, but I do agree corporations will frequently use some tactics I can't agree with in the name of being profitable. Profit from me in an "honest" (probably not the right word for my meaning but some see it that way) way and I'll support business practices but it seems most of the time a business will get into the money first mentality.

Debian is not a business, Canonical is.

Second philosophical aspect is the management of package maintenance. I just prefer the way Debian does it.

Then there is the functional aspects.

The way I began with LMDE and later true Debian on one machine came from an issue getting Mint, and subsequently Ubuntu, to function on an old laptop with Radeon graphics. This also extends to the Fedora line. Nothing I tried worked because after a few hours (2-4 depending on distro) X-org was consuming so much memory I would get artifacts and sluggish operation. Debian and LMDE didn't have that issue.

Since then I came across printer that had the same experience. I worked on Debian based but not elsewhere. I've also read others having the same experience with other hardware.

The there is overall resource management. I don't know what is different in Debian since it seems this should be relegated to the kernel but I did benchmark tests (not really professional, just my own way of comparing) using 17, 17.3 and 18 compared to LMDE2 and Debian Jessie on the same machine. Memory usage and CPU cycle consumption was just lower on Debian and LMDE. I haven't gotten into the numbers so much with Stretch but observational and a quick look at memory and CPU on similar (though not the same) machines indicates that even though Stretch uses the same amount of total "used" memory at boot it is still more efficient in management of both CPU and memory overall.

Of course Ubuntu has the precious PPAs. If flatpak (or one of the others) grows enough that might eliminate or at least lessen that advantage.

Out of curiosity, if that same question was put back on the overall Mint project's decision to focus on Ubuntu, what is the answer of "the reason(s)"? I recently asked of users but not the project. You are the first I have thought to ask that has a direct connection to Mint decisions.

[thx-1138]

...Debian is not from a corporation and therefore is closer to true FOSS principles.

...Memory usage and CPU cycle consumption was just lower on Debian and LMDE.

...Of course Ubuntu has the precious PPAs. If flatpak (or one of the others) grows enough that might eliminate or at least lessen that advantage.

Exactly this. I'm not on LMDE myself, on Mint Mate instead. Probably the main reason out of those 3 above is the easiness & vast availability of PPAs. Eg. say you want to install Avidemux under Mint / Ubuntu? 5 minutes digging on the main site & Launchpad...wanna install it on Debian instead? Good luck with either deb-multimedia (which is known to break things every now and then) or else by compiling yourself. I don't have the patience and/or time for such every single time that something isn't on the official repos... If / when flatpak 'catches' up, i'm going Debian-based no questions asked

Although as said i'm not using LMDE myself, still, i was kinda sad that it's next version will only come with Cinnamon...in my view, i think that at least one more lightweight variant (eg. say with XFCE) would still be useful to exist. MX-Linux also comes to mind as one of the most promising and 'user friendly' Debian-based alternatives...