Linux Mint Releases LMDE 2 RCs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Mint Releases LMDE 2 RCs

The Linux Mint crew has released the first release candidates of Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 "Betsy" with the Cinnamon and MATE desktop spins...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Mint-Debian-2-RC

[halo9en]

I was an LMDE user but frankly, 1 update / year = devs not interested. Luckily then I found Arch (via Antergos, which ironically runs the latest version of Cinnamon much better than old LMDE), so.. thanks Mint devs for your uninterest

[chrisq]

I was an LMDE user but frankly, 1 update / year = devs not interested. Luckily then I found Arch (via Antergos, which ironically runs the latest version of Cinnamon much better than old LMDE), so.. thanks Mint devs for your uninterest

Same story, dropped lmde for arch.
What I wanted was a rolling distro.

[Luke]

I had to pull binaries from Arch for Ubuntu testing of MATE/gtk3

I was an LMDE user but frankly, 1 update / year = devs not interested. Luckily then I found Arch (via Antergos, which ironically runs the latest version of Cinnamon much better than old LMDE), so.. thanks Mint devs for your uninterest

For my recent desktop work with MATE/gtk3, I had to pull the initial set of binaries from an Arch repo and repack them into debs. This was because neither Debian nor Ubuntu (the two things Mint is available based on) has debian packages for MATE compiled with Gtk3, nor did I find any PPA offering them. Yes, they work in Ubuntu with presumably the same alpha bugs they have in Arch. The base I got from this allows me to build some of the MATE packages locally. The Gtk 3 panel/menu elements are much easier to theme in Gtk3, thus my interest in this, new thread in "desktop linux" with more details on this.

[Windywoo]

I was an LMDE user but frankly, 1 update / year = devs not interested. Luckily then I found Arch (via Antergos, which ironically runs the latest version of Cinnamon much better than old LMDE), so.. thanks Mint devs for your uninterest

Spoken like a true blinkered nerd. Linux Mint is meant to be the distribution easiest to switch people over from Windows. It focuses on stability that's why they use the LTS version of Ubuntu in the main distro. That's also presumably the reason they have a Debian version.

[Ikem]

For my recent desktop work with MATE/gtk3, I had to pull the initial set of binaries from an Arch repo and repack them into debs.

How do you did that?

[Luke]

I do a lot of improvised Debian packages.

How do you did that?

This was simple: unpack each Arch tarball to a directory named (name of the package)-gtk3 but no extension, add a DEBIAN directory and drop a hand-written DEBIAN/control file into it, then chown and chgrp the directory to root so you don't install with user rather than root ownership Then it's sudo dpkg-deb -b each of these directories and you have a pile of debs. They are probably not suitable for uploading to any debian or ubuntu PPA/repo due to not meeting all the standards, but they install and run just fine so long as you remove every trace of normal GTK2 mate packages first. These are marked to conflict with the normal Gtk2 versions but I made no attempt to resolve all the dependencies in the control files, relying instead on keeping all of them in a single directory and installing all of them together. I also dropped a text file with the URL the binaries came from into /usr/share/doc/(name of package) so I could trace them later.

At first I just used a single large .deb package for all of MATE-gtk3, but that makes updating one piece with a hacked version (to name widgets for theming, etc) a bear of a job. I have rebuilt mate-panel, caja, pluma, and also the network-manager-gnome and indicator-cpufreq versions so I could theme them and in the case of Pluma in a so far unsucessful attempt to fix the bug which causes the status bar to render too large.

I got started on all this after last summer's alpha versions of Cinnamon developed video playback stutter bugs (since fixed) and got to thinking about how all those scripts and integrating everything into the window manager were simply not the way to go for a DE that works the way GNOME 2 did. I've always found "page's law" offensive and decided to see what I could do.

Anyway, bugs or not I have been quite happy to be able to do with just MATE compiled for gtk3 most of what used to require cairo-dock. Some serious development of this kind by LinuxMint and the MATE devs could leave Cinnamon's heavier code full of scripts derived from GNOME 3 behind for good. MATE should be able to do everything Cinnamon can do with just a little more effort, and has Wayland compatabity on it's roadmap after finishing the Gtk3 work. Perhaps that $200M that Sun Microsystems spent on GNOME 2 usablity studies won't go to waste after all. Just imagine: one basic DE that spans an era from replacing CDE in Solaris all the way to running on any Wayland device that uses a keyboard and either a mouse or a touchpad. For touch screens I would recommend something else, but both GNOME 3 and Unity are entirely too heavy. A do-over with compiled code like GNOME 2 used, not all that JS would be the solution for those.