bye bye Ubuntu, hello Mint

my life with Ubuntu

Ubuntu away

Since 5 years I practise ‚Linux on the desktop‘ and during that time, Ubuntu was my main OS. Before, I just tried different distributions (Slackware, Debian, …) on dedicated hardware, just to learn about Linux, for fun, but not for production and in my daily life.
So I became a Ubuntu follower with 6.04 and it was great fun, as it united a lot of positive aspects, esp. it was very easy to configure and had a great multimedia support.
But during the past years, there are now more and more reasons to leave:

  • a lot of advertising (search lenses, software center, …)
  • no pure desktop linux anymore but a platform (Ubuntu One, Ubuntu touch, Unity, …), that results in a clutter of dev attention and (IMHO) bad UI design
  • lack of privacy (search lenses, …)
  • lack of settings and possibility to tweak something on a fresh system
  • sometimes strange teamwork with the FOSS community

So all in all, it introduced more and more commerce by Collonical, but from my perspective it didn’t introduce any new features that increased my productivity nor solved issues in my workflow.

switching to Mint

While there is a growing number of distros out there, I just wanted what I had for long time with Ubuntu: a easy to use and open Desktop Linux. I guess, thats what I found with Linux Mint.
The installation worked and was easy as expected, just a few small problems on the way:

  1. Keyboard layout in installer and during boot time (at cryptsetup) and login were different, that resulted that you can’t enter passwords with special characters
  2. eSATA Port wasn’t able to hotplug a attached hdd
  3. During one bootup, there was no 3D support, but a reboot fixed everything

But all in all, it feels like home. Cinamon is a clean but also modern desktop GUI, that also convinced me as a Gnome2/GTK/… fan 🙂 You have nice extensions and a lot of useful options if you like to customize the look&feel. But hey, the defaults are pretty ok and without any ads everything is straight forward again and all tools just work without any tweaks.

Thank you Ubuntu

Really, I like to send out a big thank you to the Ubuntu community and Colonical. At a time, where only ‚pure‘ distros existed, you  made the Linux on the desktop movement to become real. You gave the users what they desired: a Linux OS that justs runs on machines out of the box (graphical installer, driver and multimedia support, useful defaults, …). I don’t want to complain, so I just can say goodbye and that I noticed once more this days, that anything is better than the MS Windows experience 😉

Author: Matthias
Betreibt dies Blog und probiert so einiges aus Technik herauszuholen. Oft mit Bezug zur Wirklichkeit, aber manchmal auch weil es eben geht ;-) Hat sich von Robotron über Basic, ASM, qC, ... soweit hochgearbeitet, dass er eigentlich gar nicht mehr so oft codet.

2 thoughts on “bye bye Ubuntu, hello Mint

  1. It’s „Canonical“, by the way 😉

    I absolutely understand the way you’re feeling. I’m finding myself again and again in a constant dilemma because on the one hand Ubuntu is not only super easy to use, but also gives you very convenient possibilities to navigate to and control just everything with the keyboard. I literally didn’t find a single menu where using the mouse was mandatory, which I really enjoyed.
    The downsides are the little cooperation with other open source projects. Unity is nice for sure, but why not make it in a way that it works together with other distros (I know there are packages for Arch and there is also an overlay in gentoo, but it’s still not the easy way to install it as other DEs)? Also, Unity is really bloated. My computer isn’t old and yet has its problems with Unity’s hunger for resources.
    I hope you’ll be happy with Mint and post some articles about that in the future, too.

    Cheers,
    Luyin

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