Regular readers of my techie posts will recall I had trouble with upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on my primary desktop. Two clean installs failed to work right and I was forced to fall back on upgrading a 9.10 installation in place. This has been bothering me since it happened, and last week I decided to try another way around the problem. I popped in a spare hard drive and installed Linux Mint 9 (Isadora).
Now, this is not exactly abandoning Ubuntu. Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution. New releases of Mint follow Ubuntu releases by a few weeks. The differences are partly cosmetic, and partly philosophical, as Mint includes things that Ubuntu doesn’t include by default, primarily proprietary drivers and media codecs. It also makes some different choices for default applications, as we will see. There are also a few features unique to Mint.
First of all, the burning question. Did Mint 9 install correctly where Ubuntu 10.04 failed? Yes, it did. I got a completely normal installation process, pretty much just like Ubuntu except in shades of green, with a snappy working system at the end of it. So score one for Mint on that.
The first thing you notice about Mint if you’re used to Ubuntu is the theme. Ubuntu abandoned the brown themes in favor of a dark theme with purple background with Lucid, but Mint retains its greens, with dark taskbars and window decorations. This makes it feel kind of like OpenSUSE. The windows use a very simple button style, plainer than Ubuntu, and the buttons are on the right, as apparently no other distro really wants to follow Canonical in moving them to the left. I moved them to the left manually, because all my other systems are Ubuntu right now and I’ve already gotten used to it. The startup sound is different too; a quick ethereal chime rather than the Ubuntu jungle bongos.
Ubuntu gives you panels (taskbars, for you Windows folks) at top and bottom; Mint uses just one at the bottom. They probably figure they can do without the top bar because Mint uses a custom main menu called Mint Menu instead of the standard Gnome main menu, so there is no “Applications Places System” dropdown area taking up panel space. I worked with that for a while and found I didn’t really care for it, so I added the small Gnome menu next to it; one small icon drops down into the traditional Gnome menu divisions. I’m used to using a single panel anyway, at the top, and a dock at the bottom, so I moved Mint’s single panel up to the top and was good to go. The shutdown menu is different too; it is the same as Ubuntu 9.04, with a list of choices (shutdown, restart, suspend, logout, etc) rather than the simple confirmation dialog Ubuntu has been using for the last two releases.
Shortly after installation, Mint presented me with some system update suggestions, and I got a chance to look at Mint’s update manager, which is custom to Mint. Unlike the Ubuntu update-manager, Mint’s manager shows you the available updates rated by priority. It’s nice to know, but I’m not sure what value it has, since most of us just accept the updates when they come.
I did not have to set up the medibuntu repositories and install proprietary codecs; those things were already in place. That’s one step saved from a regular Ubuntu install. I did have to manually choose to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers, though. However, compizconfig-settings-manager was installed already. This should be in Ubuntu, and I don’t know why it’s not; if a distro comes with Compiz enabled, the settings tool should be part of it. Score another point for Mint.
Mint has a few different choices for default apps, as I mentioned. The default IM client is Pidgin, as opposed to Empathy. I know Ubuntu chose Empathy because it integrates better with their notification area, and Empathy looks nicer and more modern (like Adium) but Pidgin is more robust and supports Gaim encryption. I don’t really have a clear preference. Ubuntu’s default mail client is Evolution, and Mint uses Thunderbird. I switched to Evolution a while back because of peculiarities in how Thunderbird formatted outbound mail (it would sometimes remove paragraph breaks on its own, and you couldn’t see the change until you looked at the mail in the Sent folder). Thunderbird 3 may have solved this, but since my mail backups were already in Evolution format, I installed Evolution from Mint’s repos, and ran into the first serious problem.
In Evolution, like every other mail client, unread messages in the list are displayed in bold, and read messages in normal weight. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. In Mint, Evolution displayed all messages in bold, whether read or unread. The statuses were being set correctly, but the font weight wouldn’t change. I struggled with it for a while. It was impossible to get any information about the problem from Google. (Try entering “read messages bold evolution” in Google; most results are about creationism.) So I entered a bug report with the package maintainer and received a swift response telling me they could not reproduce the problem, and asking me to upgrade to a later version. I installed 2.30 from someone’s PPA and that solved the problem; but if 2.28 has this bug, why is it the version in the Mint repos? Minus one for Mint.
Another peeve: Mint annoyingly brands Google results. If you do a Google search, the results page comes back in a modified format, with the Mint logo prominently displayed at the top. This is just bad manners. Removing the Google formatting required downloading someone’s altered google.xml file and copying it into three different locations. Minus one. In fact, minus three. That’s just inexcusable. And for some unknown reason, they changed the config file for cups-pdf (installed by default) so that it dumps the pdf output into the home directory instead of ~/PDF. They also enabled “fortunes” in gnome-terminal, so that every time you open a new terminal window, you get an ASCII penguin with some random saying. Cute but pointless. I edited the configuration to disable it, and changed the color choices for the prompts while I was in there; bright green on off-white is not a very readable color for a system prompt. (But at least they didn’t start you off with white on dark purple background like Lucid does.)
There are some flaws in Ubuntu Lucid that made it into Mint 9 unfixed. For example, the startup and shutdown splash screens get big and ugly once the Nvidia drivers are enabled. This is fixable, sort of, but requires geekery with the grub config files and is mystifying. I’m surprised Ubuntu didn’t catch it, and I’m surprised Mint didn’t fix it after all the complaints when Lucid was first released.
Most other things you would expect to work on Ubuntu work just the same on Mint. I installed my DVD and DVD-A burn scripts from my own online guide, and they work fine. Installing Amarok 1.4 from my own online guide also worked fine, right down to having to manually install a dependency from a Karmic package.
All in all I’d say the Mint experience was pretty much a wash; there were some things that I didn’t need to do on Mint that I’d have had to do in Ubuntu, and other things I needed to fix in Mint that aren’t broken in Ubuntu. But, and this is the key, I got a good working installation to start with, whereas Ubuntu didn’t give me that this time around. So on that basis alone, I’m sticking with Mint for a while.
[...] Have a Mint All in all I’d say the Mint experience was pretty much a wash; there were some things that I didn’t need to do on Mint that I’d have had to do in Ubuntu, and other things I needed to fix in Mint that aren’t broken in Ubuntu. But, and this is the key, I got a good working installation to start with, whereas Ubuntu didn’t give me that this time around. So on that basis alone, I’m sticking with Mint for a while. [...]