My Mint 11 experience

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Sust

Senior member
Sep 1, 2001
600
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My first brush with Linux was back on RH 8 a long time ago and my sense of things then was that linux was not yet ready for prime time. At best, my experience with RH8 was much like when I first used windows 3 on my 286.
RH8 was buggy, slower than WinXP, and device support was okay. Looking for answers on the net were painful and often required a lot of obscure reading on linux discussion forums and enduring some madness with re-compiling this or changing this file. It was all very tedious and I got tired of my nerdier linux friends telling me that "real men compile from source" or some BS like that. If that much work needed to be invested then the linux experience was too convoluted for primitive people like me.

Fast forward to now and linux is very much ready for popular consumption. I used linux mint 11 on my HTPC which has been phenomenal. It's a mobile athlon XP at 2GHz with 512mb RAM, a PCI 8400GS, and 4200RPM 20GB fujitsu HD which was previously running with winXP SP3 but I got tired of dealing with the winrot and the poor XP memory handling so I tried out Mint 11 and it has totally replaced any need for windows XP. HD movie playback with Mplayer is comparable to MPC-HC. Installation of programs is a breeze(once you figure out what that program is) using their software manager. Libreoffice(reminds me of MSOffice2003) does all of the basic office tasks and docs can be saved in MS office formats. Chromium is equally nippy on the web surfing. Hardware recognition has been awesome including historically sore spots like wireless G(cannot comment on N). Networking with other windows machines has been seamless. I cant get over how stable mint 11 is and how much value it provides for free such that I no longer need to even look at WinXP as my go-to-OS anymore.

I've waited a long time for linux to come to this point and Im pleased as punch now so I just wanted to share my newfound linux enthusiasm with anyone else who bumps into this forum looking for inspiration to not buy into more MS madness.
 
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nitrous9200

Senior member
Mar 1, 2007
282
3
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I always used to install Ubuntu whenever I needed a quick and easy test OS on a system, but I much prefer Mint's standard UI over the latest version of Ubuntu. Mint is great.
 
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Patt

Diamond Member
Jan 30, 2000
5,288
2
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I have Mint on my old laptop, and it flies compared to the previously installed XP. Nice interface, and only problems I had were configuring the Wireless G access with the unsupported card ... but got around it easy enough without much Linux knowledge, and now I have a great PC for my kids to pound on.
 
lxskllr

lxskllr

No Lifer
Nov 30, 2004
60,935
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Mint's really come into it's own over the last couple releases. I never saw much point in it in the early days. It was pretty much Ubuntu with a couple things added by default, but now they're carving out a nice little niche for themselves, and making it more unique.
 
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kamikazekyle

Senior member
Feb 23, 2007
538
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I've been practicing for the RHCSA/RHCE exams, so I've been eyeball deep in vi and bash in RHEL/CentOS installs for a month now. I needed a desktop oriented Linux install and wanted one Debian based that wasn't Ubuntu, so I decided to give Mint a spin. It was downright *scary* as to how quick it installed on VirtualBox and how little interaction was required. Going from creating and compiling your own custom kernel one day to three-clicks-and-you're-done the next is surprisingly unnerving.

I haven't had much time to actually use it (the whole install process took less than 10 minutes while I got ready for work), but it seems like it'll be great for my basic desktop VM use. I'd like to do a full dual boot and integrated it natively into my AD domain since the only thing I do in desktop Windows anymore is game, but a 60GB SSD doesn't yield good multi-OS results and my RAID array is GPT'd with Windows software striping. Whoops :p
 
joetekubi

joetekubi

Member
Nov 6, 2009
176
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I've been on Ubuntu for about 5 years now - starting with "regular" Gnome, then Kubuntu, then Xubuntu. Now with Unity <cough> and Gnome 3 changes, I'm going to Mint 12, since it looks like it has a maintainalbe strategy for a good Desktop interface.
 
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Paperlantern

Platinum Member
Apr 26, 2003
2,239
6
81
ScoobMaster said:
If you want a really slick *VERY* lightweight, very fast but fully-functional distro still based on Ubuntu, take a look at peppermint linux:

http://peppermintos.com/
Click to expand...

I may have to check this out, though I have been a avid Mint user since Helena (8). Mint is fantastic as a workstation, VERY stable (i would reboot maybe once a month at the most when I was using 8 on a physical machine, and the only reason i did once after 90 days was because of the video card overheating and crapping out), and great interface and driver support. Now I have been using 11 for maybe 6 months or so, in a virtual machine at the office. Before it was a physical box connected with Synergy. The virtualization works better for me, but the primary use of researching viruses and malware, and doing other surfing without fear of infection, is still there.

All in all, i'll second the rave review.
 
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Paperlantern

Platinum Member
Apr 26, 2003
2,239
6
81
Running Peppermint right now and so far i'm diggin it. Only using 175MB of RAM while general surfing. Jumps to maybe 250MB when you get into Youtubing (which works out of the box) and such slightly heavier browsing. All in all very slick. Might try using this as my primary machine at work for a little while.
 
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Sust

Senior member
Sep 1, 2001
600
0
71
Thanks for the peppermint OS idea. I wonder if it does the VDPAU playback in mplayer?

After my good experience with mint 11, I thought I would give mint 12 a try.
The short of it is that IMO mint 11 > 12.

I don't know why, but VDPAU with mplayer in mint 12 is not as smooth as in mint 11. In fact, it is downright choppy and if you let something play long enough then the video ultimately lags the audio. I originally though that the work wasnt being offloaded to the the GPU, but system monitor showed CPU only at 35% when mplayer was running through an x264 mkv. Truly bizarre, and there doesnt seem to be anyone who's run into this problem at all on the internet... or maybe I just havent found it yet.
Also, I dont know what they did in mint 12, but it seems to run slower than mint 11 with more frequent utilization/access of the hard drive. Even chromium seems to run slower on mint 12 than mint 11. Youtube was utilizing more of CPU than before?
 
Jodell88

Jodell88

Diamond Member
Jan 29, 2007
8,762
30
91
Sust said:
Thanks for the peppermint OS idea. I wonder if it does the VDPAU playback in mplayer?

After my good experience with mint 11, I thought I would give mint 12 a try.
The short of it is that IMO mint 11 > 12.

I don't know why, but VDPAU with mplayer in mint 12 is not as smooth as in mint 11. In fact, it is downright choppy and if you let something play long enough then the video ultimately lags the audio. I originally though that the work wasnt being offloaded to the the GPU, but system monitor showed CPU only at 35% when mplayer was running through an x264 mkv. Truly bizarre, and there doesnt seem to be anyone who's run into this problem at all on the internet... or maybe I just havent found it yet.
Also, I dont know what they did in mint 12, but it seems to run slower than mint 11 with more frequent utilization/access of the hard drive. Even chromium seems to run slower on mint 12 than mint 11. Youtube was utilizing more of CPU than before?
Click to expand...
Mint 12 uses Gnome 3 as default, whereas Mint 11 used Gnome 2. Try the MATE desktop environment and things should be back to normal. The MATE desktop = Gnome 2.
 
IGemini

IGemini

Platinum Member
Nov 5, 2010
2,472
2
81
I bounced around a few distros, starting with SuSe, Ubuntu, Arch, and finally decided on and haven't been looking elsewhere since finding Mint 11.

I decided to go with Mint 12 when my v11 HTPC's file system got clobbered. GNOME 3 took some getting used to...I liked Mint 11's interface a little more. The one thing that 12 had over 11 was much better handling of nVidia HDA (HDMI audio). Mint 11 required me to edit a few conf files to get it to work properly in PulseAudio, whereas they fixed the issue with 12--only had to change a couple audio output settings. VDPAU seems to work just as well on my machine. Now I just need to figure out how to get Conky to work on the desktop...
 
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Sust

Senior member
Sep 1, 2001
600
0
71
I'll have to keep that in mind, but I wasnt aware that the Gnome3 interface would be SO much more resource intensive? Maybe it's simply that an Athlon XP at 2Ghz wasnt meant to run Mint12 and its true lack of processing power is simply magnified by what would be today considered a trivial/routine workload. I still have no way of accounting for VDPAU's x264 misbehavior and from your suggestion (of Gnome3 as the culprit) I'm lead to believe that my weak 8400GS couldnt handle the load of rendering Gnome3 plus x264?

That's good to know that mint 12 solved their HDMI issue. I'll have to keep that in mind if I ever move away from the stereo mini-plug system that my promedia 2.1's use. In the meantime though, I've moved back to Mint 11 and the experience is every bit as magical as I remembered.

To each his own and I hope everyone out there finds something in linux that they can enjoy.

Thanks to all who have contributed to this thread.
 
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