I will be testing this out this week and will let Y'all know what I think...! New features in Linux Mint 13 - Linux Mint
Ya beat me to it. I've been using Debian on my desktop, but getting a bit frustrated with some of its oddities and thought, "Think I'll check and see if Mint has done anything new". I see it is also going to be a long term edition, until 2017 or something like that. I have some really old computers around here that wouldn't run Mint 12 right at least not the gnome release. So, Yoldering, did you download the Mate edition or the Cinnamon edition of Mint 13? I'm wondering which one to try first and which one runs the fastest on old machines. My desktop is fairly new, but not top of the line by any means, but the others are all limited to 2 gig of ram. I'm still using Mint 9 on the one laptop as I was not able to find a wireless driver that worked in anything after Mint 10 and support for that one is done. Got some other things going on right now, but will be downloading soon. Then to test and possibly install in place of Debian on the desktop, but for sure the others as well if I can get the wireless to work.
I'm screamingly happy with LMDE (I'm running latest kernel 3.4 at the moment) no more version upgrades for melbo! WT, MATE is what you know from Gnome 2, it looks and functions the same and I believe will be supported going forward. Cinnamon is great and although you have to learn a few ways to do some things you are used too, is worth checking out. BUT, both Gnome 3 and Cinnamon require Graphics Acceleration. If you don't have the right graphics card or internal GPU, you'll enter a fallback mode which is either MATE or Gnome 2. I'd try both although the latest LMDE Linux Mint Debian Edition iso has both MATE and LMDE as startup session options. There is also a PPA of Cinnamon applets that add some of the Gnome 2 functionality back into the panels. I've been playing with them and am 98% happy with getting my stuff back.
After a fashion, I got Mint 13 Mate on two of my computers. The old eMachine I keep out in my barn I did first w/32 bit the much newer rebuild desktop in the house I blitzed Debian and installed Mint 13 Mate 64 bit. A few issues with the install/upgrade but working great now. Glad I always backup certain files before I run a live dvd of any new OS. Had to bring the old eMachine in the house so I could hook it up direct as the wireless kept dropping out in the middle of updates. After about 20 or so restarts, I finally said enough and carried it inside. I did try Linuxmint 201204 on my newer desktop and had it running alright, but did not like some things about the way it installed and a couple of the packages I use all the time were not in the repositories. So, I installed Mint 13 instead.
After something over a week of using Mint 13 Mate 64 bit on my desktop, I got to wondering what cinnamon had to offer that Mate didn't have. I downloaded and ran it on the live dvd. I found that it is too much like Mint 12 in that the panel is way limited compared to Mate in what is available to the panel. Also, I like a completely clean desktop - no icons on the screen - to much like windows. Mate allows that, cinnamon didn't seem to have a way to clean it up. Only one menu seemed to be available to cinnamon users, and it wasn't at all what I wanted to see, I like a clean simple menu without all the graphics. So, in short I like mate and will not be switching over to cinnamon. My computer handled it alright, I just like to have more control over the look and feel of my computer.
I've been running Mint 13 now for a little over a week. 1st thoughts - it's ok, takes longer to boot than the previous version of Mint I had, but still a whole lot faster than my winblows PC. Bluetooth works with my FOB, yeah. I could never get it to work with the previous version of Mint I had, it worked great with Ubuntu (forget which version)
Pretty sure it's AMD as it is not a factory build. It's or was my wife's old computer that got zapped by lightening and fried the mother board. When I rebuilt it, I went with an AMD processor.
I've got an old eMachine out in the barn, it was a freebie I did a little upgrading to and added an old monitor. It is 32 bit intel. I'm running Linux Mint 13 - 32 bit on it just fine. However, I mostly just use it for testing new Linux distros on and yesterday I tried that Linux SolusOS 1.1 on it and it would not boot up - gave some kind of error. I tested it on both my netbook and older laptop. Worked fine on the netbook, but on the older laptop, I was unable to connect to the internet as expected. Anything newer than Mint 10 won't connect wireless, and the drivers available are not the right ones to make it work
