Well, having fallen out of bed with Ubuntu over the mess that is Unity, I've been playing with LinuxMint for the past couple of weeks.
Yes, I know it is still Ubuntu underneath. But I don't mind that - the package selection is good and things generally tend to work. Well, 64 bit Flash players apart. Just SO damn slow. What is going on with that ?
I may end up going over to the Debian version to enjoy the rolling updates, but I'm still not decided. For me, I may be OK as I am, but the girls in my office in another country would struggle with reinstalling as I believe that Mint doesn't really offer 'upgrades' between versions, so Debian may be a better choice for them as I rollout Linux on the desktop to replace XP.
My thoughts are about Cinnamon really. Meant to be the new holy grail of simple desktops. Mint decided that they didn't want to go Gnome 3, Gnome 2 was being left behind and they wanted something in the middle. A modern Gnome 2.
The original version that I installed was 1.1.2 followed shortly by 1.1.3
With only one menu bar I was disappointed as I like one top and bottom. I have a dual screen setup so have plenty of screen real estate. No options either. Version 1.2 is a step in the right direction with numerous mods, top and bottom menus if required (not sure how to get one on the other screen yet) and now Cinnamon settings to adjust a few bits and pieces.
All very good, except for one thing. The menu is just so damn slow. The whole thing just feels a bit like it's in treacle. Click, and wait. Show Desktop. Click, wait , figure it didn't pick up the mouse click, go to click again, oh shit, it did but so damn slow that now I have shown desktop, and then covered it again.... balls.
OK, so I don't have a bleeding edge machine. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ with 3GB RAM and a GeForce 210 Card with Nvidia drivers. Yes, I could do with more RAM, and a better card undoubtedly. But even so, it ran my old Lucid install quite happily. No messing about, nice & quick.
I just don't understand, and don't have the time to suss, why it just doesn't feel as snappy as it should. I may go over to LXDE as I know that is far quicker, but I quite like my desktop looking the way it does.
Hmmmm................ decisions, decisions
No comments:
Post a Comment