I needed to have a laptop work in dual boot mode with Windows 10 pretty much identically in respect of networking, that is, LAN if connected, WIFI if not, and then 3G if not, automatically. I just couldn't get WIFI with this chip set to work on Debian despite installing the non-free drivers. Very strange.
Anyway, I thought why not try Mint with the MATE interface. And its a delight. Ubuntu based of course, but we must not hold that against it. After all the idiotic nonsense of the new Gnome and KDE and the various fumblings through tiling window managers that we've seen from Windows, here you have an up to date re-implementation of Gnome 2. It just gets out of the way and gives you access to the apps. It comes in a reasonably small footprint, it installs in EFI mode with no issues. It has a sensible collection of apps. For instance, it comes with external drive encryption already installed. It doesn't have the bloated Evolution or Kontact, and Claws-Mail is in the repositories. Out of the box the default settings are all reasonable and the look and feel is understated and sober, but quite attractive. Mate is quite configurable of course. There appears to be another package manager in addition to Synaptic. Maybe it comes from Ubuntu? Anyway, in an apparent concession to the modern Gnome insanity it seems to have been designed with the aim of preventing anyone finding the app they are looking to install, but never mind, as long as Synaptic is available it doesn't hurt. The only niggle that came up is that you need to manually install pmount to have user write access to usb drives. But apart from that, everything just worked immediately, including an invitation to install the non-free drivers, which then went in and worked. I don't greatly care for the reliance on sudo, which means in effect that you only have one password for both root and user access, and would prefer a proper root account and password, but for the average end user its not a big deal, and one can manually reset it to the traditional way. Or what used to be the traditional way. MATE, if you have not tried it, is brilliant, and this is a nice implementation of it in a distribution. Peter Anyway, well recommended. This is an excellent package from a first class team. Not quite enough to make one say, move to this and renounce Debian, but a really worthy alternative. -- View this message in context: http://runtime-revolution.278305.n4.nabble.com/OT-The-unexpected-merits-of-Linux-Mint-Mate-Edition-tp4707582.html Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
