An aside from the folks at Linux Mint --- they tell us what they thought about the Ubuntu base and its performance "in general".

As always, the Mint people are very respectful of the upstream providers, but you will note they expect a lot of bugs and to be very busy fixing them.  

Also note Mint is going to be staying with this particular LTS release for 3-5 years once they get it right before they are even willing to go clean up another Ubuntu LTS release.



"Linux Mint 17 “Qiana” passed QA yesterday. It was approved for an RC release which should come out either tomorrow or the day after. Some of the improvements featured in Linux Mint 17 came extremely late in the release cycle but they all managed to get in and we can’t wait to show you what’s new. Of course, you always find a lot of bugs during the RC process, and we’re ready for your feedback, we know we’re going to be busy.

But in the meantime, I found the quality of this release to be outstanding. Everything is smooth, some bugs which affected multiple past releases (the shutdown sequence, the inability to install broadcom drivers offline..etc) have been fixed, and Qiana comes with the same traditional look-and-feel but implemented in a brand new Mint-X theme, so the experience feels very polished.

The decision was made to stick to LTS bases. In other words the development team will be focused on the very same package base used by Linux Mint 17 for the next 2 years. It will also be trivial to upgrade from version 17 to 17.1, then 17.2 and so on. Important applications will be backported and we expect this change to boost the pace of our development and reduce the amount of regressions in each new Linux Mint release.

This makes Linux Mint 17.x very important to us, not just yet another release, but one that will receive security updates until 2019, one that will receive backports and new features until 2016 and even more importantly, the only package base besides LMDE which we’ll be focused on until 2016.

New equipment was acquired, including hidpi laptops for two members of the development team, a broadcom chipset (finally), a macbook pro and some NUC units sent by Intel.

Our site traffic has doubled lately and all our stats are on the raise, and we don’t know why. Maybe it’s related to the the end-of-life of Windows XP. We’re not really sure. The blog went down a few times, we’re addressing this by tuning its configuration. Post-release we’re likely to buy more servers to split services and scale our infrastructure."


 


OK, I give up -- I downloaded the 64 bit MATE 17 version and installed it, release candidate bugs and all.   Took me about 35 minutes including downloading the ISO image and burning it to a DVD.  

Tuning took all of a half hour to get my desktop set up right and get all my Firefox preferences and saved bookmarks moved over (and Firefox with the old complete menu bars is what came with the Mint 17, so once again the Mint guys know what us desktop type people really want.  

I recommend Adblock 2.6 as a worthwhile Firefox add on.   It wipes out the junk stuff from web pages that you load and it takes out the side bar from Voodoo whatsitface that is messing up my SuzukiSavage page viewing.  

Tip:   Reboot your machine periodically while in this period of rapid updating, some system items benefit from a reboot (they go faster afterwards).   Linux prides itself on not requiring you to reboot all the time, but doing it once a week during the period of rapid updating is just smart to do.  

Reboot if things seem slow.

Linux Mint 17 mate has been officially released.  

Go for it .....

In watching the flow of updates, most all of the integral Mint 17 main files have been upgraded twice since I first loaded it up.

This week the update flow has been minimal, one (1) file in the last 4 days.  

It is stable now.   I can attest it works good.   Installation is a no-brainer.  


Go for it.

I think that a dual boot period is essential to wean any MS addicted person from their addiction.



Seriously, the kids will NOT spend the time needed to find the Linux softwares to do all the things they need to do .... they will want their MS world left untouched and operating.

They will learn to like Linux when their MS world goes tits up on them unexpectedly and they can still reboot (dual boot) and still do what they need in Linux.

I took a year of dual booting before I was "primarily" a Linux person, but I admit to being 3 years into it before I got pissed at MS and decided to go cold turkey and kick MS off my hard drive.

Kids do what other kids do -- if Ubuntu becomes the rave they will want to be with the crowd when that  happens.   Otherwise, not ....


 


Everyone knows that Linux Mint is for old farts like Dad and his buddies.