What Don't You Like about Linux Mint?

[APSchmidt]

RTFM means, in terms fit for polite company: Read The Fine* Manual.

*Or Fornicating. Again, in polite terms.

Ah, okay! English is not my mother tongue, acronyms can be a tad cryptic to me.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

RTFM means, in terms fit for polite company: Read The Fine* Manual.

*Or Fornicating. Again, in polite terms.

Ah, okay! English is not my mother tongue, acronyms can be a tad cryptic to me.

Don't feel bad. English is my mother tongue and I frequently have to look up acronyms and texting shortcuts.

[antikythera]

My favourite is DILLIGAF but I rarely have cause to use it

[Termy]

Ooo, I love that one. Sassy. I like WYSIWYG.

[ajgreeny]

My favourite is DILLIGAF but I rarely have cause to use it

I had to look that one up never having seen or heard of it, and do you know what, I don't GAF!!!

[MartyMint]

I didn't know about this. What do you mean by "bolted on"?

You are compelled to go through a Timeshift backup if you do the direct upgrade between Mint releases.

Sorry but I don't understand where the problem is with that; it's a very simple and necessary precaution so that you can roll back to the previous version if a problem occurs during the process.

I do my own regularly scheduled drive imaging with Terbyte and Timeshift is not intended for backing up data...and there is no opt-out of using Timeshift during the upgrade process.

[Mik3e]

MartyMint et al:
skip the compulsory backup with “sudo touch /etc/timeshift.json”. This creates a file that tells mintupdate that you've been there, done that.

Mike

[APSchmidt]

... Timeshift is not intended for backing up data...

You can use Timeshift to backup your entire Home. It's true that it doesn't backup data that are on other drives but you don't need those to upgrade do you?

[Portreve]

• 1. a simple image processing application à la Irfanview. More precisely, a program that would combine Irfanview, Faststone and ShiftN from the Windows side, as well as Macs Preview, LibreOffice's Draw and - from Mint's point of view, Pix - in a single, great and simple to use image processing program ...

If I'm in a mode where I'm heavily playing around with image file management, I'll set the Nemo thumbnail size to something large enough to visually keep track of what I'm doing, and I use the default image preview program to do a detailed review of the image so I can tell if, for example, it's the version I want to keep. If I were a pro, I'd probably be more inclined to use something like Dark Table.

• 2. a Layout program à la PageMaker from 1996. Scribus is still lame and cumbersome - and in my opinion still very user-unfriendly. And yes - LibreOffice Writer just isn't a layout application ...

I cut my teeth on PageMaker, and in more ways than I can count, you're absolutely right. If I had the money to invest so that I could have some ability to steer the direction of things, I'd try to get Scribus to be the best possible hybrid of QuarkXPress and InDesign. I'm told that recent series of QXP have gone to crap, and that Quark has really taken a customer service nosedive, but back in the day (QXP 3-6) nothing could touch it, especially in a hardcore production environment. InDesign really incorporated a number of effects and capabilities which made it easier to do more graphic design-type work in the middle of a desktop publishing project.

I think Scribus has a lot of promise, but it's extremely rough around the edges. A lot of this is exacerbated by the proliferation of proprietary technology as industry standards (this is, in essence, how it's always been) and that means a lot of "standard" and "normal" things, like color management, for example, either require prohibitively expensive licenses, or heavy lifting to try and reimplement them as libre code without stepping on patented, trademarked, or otherwise copyrighted elements.

And incidentally, this is but one area which demonstrates why software patents are a very bad legal concept.

• 3. a sensible, customizable font management. Fonts grouped in families. MacOS 7, 8, 9 in combination with Adobe ATM showed more than twenty years ago that something like this is possible. It now seems that this cannot be implemented in Linux, Windows or the more recent Mac systems. Nice progress!
  In addition, under Linux (also under Linux Mint) it would be necessary to clarify what should happen to PostScript Type 1 fonts in the future. Just turning it off and showing weird rectangles is a bit shabby.

A Macintosh Plus was my very first computer. I ran ATM (Adobe Type Manager, for the uninitiated) on basically every version of Classic Mac OS which it supported. I still remember Font/DA Mover (with a little bit less than fond feelings, I might add) and dealing with font conflicts, separate versions of font faces for Mac OS and Windows, etc.

There's a bit more going on behind the scenes vis a vis font listings in menus are concerned, I suspect. Now, font designers who actually know what they're doing, will take the time to ensure all the appropriate parameters are correct. For example, when you have multiple weights of a font (this refers to both thicknesses as well as other things, like italics) you have to make sure you're setting up each face as a member of a common family (for example, if there was a font called "Absque Fenestris", then you might have:

• Absque Fenestris Light
• Absque Fenestris Light Italic
• Absque Fenestris Book (or Regular, or no additional descriptor)
• Absque Fenestris Book Italic (it would follow the convention used by Book above)
• Absque Fenestris Medium
• Absque Fenestris Medium Italic
• Absque Fenestris Demi
• Absque Fenestris Demi Italic
• Absque Fenestris Bold
• Absque Fenestris Bold Italic

and so forth and so on.

However, the "family name" would be Absque Fenestris, and this would have several naming conventions to suit how different OSs require name data to be entered (generally without spaces). Also, does the OS itself give the capabilities of a single slug listing for the family, with a hierarchical menu for each weight? Beyond that, did whomever wrote any particular program you might use implement that? Even in Classic Mac OS, this could be a problem with programs written by folks who didn't have the interest in including that sort of high polish finishing touch to their code.

One of the things Apple (or at least Apple of old) had going for it was they had a lot of visual arts folks on the payroll who could ensure such things were done properly.

I have an archive of fonts, much of which comes from a multi-decadal collection. Many originated as fonts for the Classic Mac OS environment, and others from the Windows 3.x->W98 environment. They're now all converted to OpenType, with a dogged, one might even describe as obsessive, attention to detail, and yet the greatest limiting factor — really, the only one — is how a given program handles font handling.

[absque fenestris]

Hi Portreve

Scribus is not directly related to Linux Mint, but as the only open source layout application available free of charge, Mint users are also affected by its weaknesses.
The color management as long as it concerns profiles is not the problem - but the color selection! or the filing and saving of user-defined colors or the creation of your own color palettes, separated by CMYK or RGB etc. pp.
Then, as a layout program with the claim to deliver professional print data, a possible mix of CMYK and RGB colors in the same print file ... you can just hope that the PDF export complains or silently cleans it up.
InDesign or Illustrator would kick your ass and complain until you have decided to one or the other color model.
GIMP and Krita show that it can be done better.
Then the different tool windows in completely arbitrary sizes; floating freely and without the possibility of docking them or at least rolling them up. You need a large monitor area or 2 monitors to work smoothly with the tool windows.
Here, too, GIMP and Krita show that docking under Linux is quite possible.

As it stands, Scribus would need a hefty financial contribution to bring it to a professional state. Voluntary sponsorship is obviously not enough here ... but how much should a paid version cost - realistically?

As for the fonts, I'll wait and see. Here, too, it affects the Linux system as a whole. As far as I know, no Linux distribution has solved the font chaos in any way.


And Yes! My last QuarkXPress experience from 2015 on a Mac was simply a nightmare...


About Linux Mint as operating system: I've now switched from MATE entirely to the Cinnamon desktop.
LMDE 4 Debbie gives me pleasure in the VirtualBox and Mint 20 on an external SSD.
There's nothing to complain about. Mint runs quickly and reliably, looks nice and the peripheral devices are recognized - everything that characterizes a good operating system.

In the past, the decision between MATE and Cinnamon was the big thing, now it's the decision between Debian-based LMDE or the usual Ubuntu-based Mint.
The Mint team is already making sure that you don't get bored ...

[ugurcansayan]

What Don't I Like About Linux Mint:

The fact that Cinnamon is a derivation of GNOME. I'm a KDE person. But I cannot complain about it because Cinnamon and Linux Mint is one of the best duos I've ever tried.

[APSchmidt]

... But I cannot complain about it because Cinnamon and Linux Mint is one of the best duos I've ever tried.

Did you try Xfce? I never used Cinnamon nor felt the need to use it.

[ugurcansayan]

... But I cannot complain about it because Cinnamon and Linux Mint is one of the best duos I've ever tried.

Did you try Xfce? I never used Cinnamon nor felt the need to use it.

I tried Fedora XFCE and use Xubuntu on another old-PC. I can't say it's bad at all, it's definitely better than GNOME 3 in my opinion. But I love KDE, (I hope things go well for KDE team). I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon because as far as I understand it is the main desktop-environment for Linux Mint and I thought it would be the most stable for Linux Mint. I loved multitasking on this, the sound effect while changing workspaces is so motivating lol.