It’s been about a month now and my computer hasn’t melted down, so this is a good sign. Additionally, I haven’t been forced to drop out of any of my courses due to technical incompetence.
The Good
- Linux Mint is fast as hell. Coming from a Windows background, I’m amazed at how quickly my computer boots up and shuts down. Installing programs is (usually) a breeze, and I rarely have to restart my computer against my will.
- It looks very nice for an open-source OS, and there are a bunch of skins offered.
- I’ve found open source alternatives to pretty much every program I used in Windows. OpenOffice.Org has effectively replaced MS Office, Pidgin matches MSN messenger, and Deluge works just as well as uTorrent.
- Thanks to the easy-to-use installation manager, I can easily download and run new programs. I’ve been introduced to Opera (which is an excellent broswer, as it turns out) and Picasa. Although these run on Windows, the installation process involves more than “click four times”, and there’s no guarantee they’ll load as quickly as they do on Mint.
- I finally understand this joke:
The Bad
- My media experience has been sub-par at best. My sound only works at about half-capacity, which is fine when I’m hooked up to the speaker system in my room, but it’s frustrating when I have to use the laptop’s native speakers. This is especially annoying since a lot of websites (*cough*youtube) have a wildly inconsistent volume level in their videos, meaning going between two linked videos can be jarring. Video has also been an issue – the media players I’ve tried tend to get choppy whenever I have a menu in fullscreen. Moving the mouse while in fullscreen also briefly flashes my desktop wallpaper and returns to the video. Obviously there is room for improvement here.
- The lockups I experienced were infuriating. I haven’t had any lately (knock on wood), but there are few worse feelings on a computer when you’re halfway through an assignment and a simple google search crashes your computer.
- Mint doesn’t like coming out of hibernate or standy – apparently the kernel just shits the bed. I’ve been told this is an ATI bug that will be fixed in the next kernel upgrade, but I really needed this yesterday.
- I still haven’t gotten my monitor working properly. The display manager crashes whenever I open it, and the ATI Catalyst Control Center isn’t co-operating. Ideally my monitor should be running at 1920×1080, but it’s stuck at 1600×900 for now.
The ohjesusgodWHYYYyyyyy
- A few days ago I experienced a corrupted inode and my computer refused to update or install anything. This was obviously a pretty bad experience and it would’ve taken me hours to figure out what was going on if Tyler and Jake didn’t step in to save the day.
Overall I’m impressed with Mint so far. If it weren’t for the issues I’ve listed in “the bad”, I could see myself using it regularly.
Update: Okay what the hell Mint, I tried to say something nice about you and you go and crash as I’m publishing this post. I guess I’ll amend this infuriating bug.
Another infuriating bug:
- For some reason, Mint will occasionally decide that my desktop is functioning too well. Out of spite, it will shift everything diagonally by N pixels, where N is some number randomly selected from {1,…,1836} (I have very little data to base this on, but I conjecture that this functions on a uniform distribution or the Cauchy distribution, just to be a bitch). Basically, it selects a new spot on my monitor to anchor the bottom left corner of the graphics. At the same time, it forces me to click where I would have clicked before. It looks something like this:
So yeah, there go you Mint. Way to ruin this post.
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