Monday, March 23, 2015

Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon: Traditional and elegant Linux distro aimed at simplicity

Linux Mint is lauded as a great distro for beginners, and is also the most popular Linux distro of all, so I thought I’d review the Cinnamon version and post my thoughts about it. I’d used the KDE and MATE versions before and I quite liked them. The Cinnamon edition is the most popular version, though, so I thought I’d review that one.


Menu.png



















1. First impressions and ease of use


The Cinnamon ISO is 1.4 GB in size and can be downloaded from here. You can choose from Cinnamon, MATE, KDE, and Xfce versions. So we load the Cinnamon desktop. Mint is equipped with Guest Additions out of the box like almost every distro I’ve reviewed so far.


Initial Desktop.png


Notice the “software rendering” notification on the right. The fix in virtualbox is to enable 3D acceleration and give the VM as much VRAM as possible in the display settings. This shouldn’t affect most machines on bare metal.


The whole distro seems to be oriented at and familiar to previous Windows users. The bottom panel looks very much like that of Windows XP and the menu is similar to that of Windows 7.


Menu.png


Ease of use score: 10/10


2. Installer


The installer is Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer. Unfortunately, this means that you can’t dual boot Ubuntu and any other Ubuntu-based distro on the same EFI computer without a complicated workaround. However, this isn’t Linux Mint’s fault and Linux Mint only receives attention for this problem because it’s the most popular Ubuntu-based distro.


Installer1.pngInstaller2.pngInstaller3.pngInstaller4.pngInstaller5.pngInstaller6.pnginstall.png


Installer score: 10/10



Release date
ISO size (GB)
Distribution base
Default filesystem
Install time
Boot time
Size of install
Desktop RAM use
KaOS 2015.02
2/24/2015
1.4
Independent
XFS
18:03
0:36
4.6
415
Ubuntu MATE 15.04
2/25/2015
1.1
Ubuntu Vivid (15.04)
ext4
12:57
0:27
4.2
457
Manjaro 0.8.12 Xfce
2/6/2015
1.4
Arch
ext4
11:33
0:27
4.7
351
Netrunner 15
2/16/2015
1.9
Ubuntu Utopic (14.10)
ext4
16:20
0:41
6.4
714
openSUSE 13.2 KDE
11/4/2014
4.4
Independent
Btrfs (used ext4 because of known bug)
15:29
0:39
4.4
422
Bodhi Linux 3.0.0
2/17/2015
0.6
Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)
ext4
5:50
0:34
2.2
348
Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon
11/29/2014
1.4
Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)
ext4
8:45
0:42
4.5
343
Average of all distros

1.8


12:42
0:35
4.4
436


3. Design


The design of the distro is nice looking and current and modern. I say current because it doesn’t have anything really special to distinguish it from the rest. The distro looks slick, but it also looks quite generic. This is not really a bad thing though, and it shines in terms of design, especially in fonts, which usually make or break an operating system’s design. The default font rendering is probably the best of any distro I’ve used.


The login screen is very nice. The background is a slideshow.


login screen.png


There are also many tweak options for the theme.


many tweak options.png


Design score: 8.5/10


4. Applications


Linux comes with the de facto GNOME-based application set.


Web Browser - Firefox
File Manager - Nemo
Email Client - Thunderbird
Text Editor - Text Editor (GEdit fork)
Image Viewer - Image Viewer (GNOME)
Terminal Emulator - Terminal
Music Player - Banshee
Office Suite - LibreOffice


One thing to note is that Firefox doesn’t come with Google as the default search engine but instead uses Yahoo. However you can add Google.
No Google.pngTo add google 2.pngTo add google 4.png
To add google 4.pnggoogle.png


Applications score: 9/10


5. Installing packages


Linux Mint comes with apt-get and a wide software repository, extendable via PPAs, and an excellent package store.


package installer.png


However, because this is an Ubuntu LTS-based release, the software repositories will get older as we go on, so we might want to enable the backports repositories. This is easily done in Software Sources.


Mint also comes with the best update manager of any distro.


Update manager.png


Installing packages score: 10/10


Final Thoughts


Mint is a great distro for any Linux user looking for a distro that is easy to use, stable, and configurable. Unfortunately, there is one major hiccup - the lack of inclusion of Google. However, this is easily fixable. So I have no problem recommending Mint to any Linux user of any expertise level.


Final score: 47.5/50 = 95%


Distro name
Final Score
Manjaro 0.8.12 Xfce
99
Ubuntu MATE 15.04
97
Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon
95
openSUSE 13.2 KDE
93
Netrunner 15
90
Bodhi Linux 3.0.0
84
KaOS 2015.02
80
Average of all reviews
91

No comments:

Post a Comment