Fresh Version of Linux Mint Offers Tweaks and Updates (Linux Planet) [LWN.net]

Fresh Version of Linux Mint Offers Tweaks and Updates (Linux Planet)

Posted Feb 5, 2010 0:19 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]

Do you honestly think mint is just ubuntu with a custom desktop theme?

I also have trouble believing anyone who would think of ubuntu as good enough. I guess
you don't plan in upgrading to new ubuntu releases given that clearly there aren't massive
chunks of missing functionality, bugs, desktop design flaws, or other improvements that
could be made. Heck, I don't even know why people write code anymore. Computers 10
years ago could do everything I thought I needed to do 10 years ago, which clearly means
that they were perfect 10 years ago and needed no changes. Ubuntu itself is superfluous to
debian, which was an unecessary distribution given that one existed before that, and Linux
was a pointless remake of UNIX which itself was a pointless redesign of the previous OSes.

(too much sarcasm?)

Fresh Version of Linux Mint Offers Tweaks and Updates (Linux Planet)

Posted Feb 5, 2010 17:21 UTC (Fri) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]

A little too much sarcasm ;) I would agree that the concept is a little strange, another distro based off of a Debian-based distro. That said, if Mint is perceived as adding value then it's worthwhile to users.

I've been happy running desktops on Fedora, as I appreciate that Fedora's on the vanguard of some new technology -- Pulseaudio, KMS, Nouveu, etc. I also appreciate how often Fedora works with upstream and is committed to freedom.

So the value I receive is a little different than wanting a super easy or pretty desktop. To each his own.

Fresh Version of Linux Mint Offers Tweaks and Updates (Linux Planet)

Posted Feb 5, 2010 19:25 UTC (Fri) by alecs1 (subscriber, #46699) [Link]

Looking on Wikipedia I see that Mint is more than I believed, but I still have my doubts.

The prejudice is about relevance. For ex. you write a new super duper "control center" which does have good points but don't struggle to get it work on other distributions. The world can only have so many distributions, if you're not one of the first, you won't get relevant. Your work on the "control center" will live only with your distributions, and KDE's SystemSettings and GNOME's counterpart will remain the ones that are indeed common. Your "control center" will get little testing, few feature requests and few contributors.

Fresh Version of Linux Mint Offers Tweaks and Updates (Linux Planet)

Posted Feb 6, 2010 9:45 UTC (Sat) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

In other words, the feature is going to live somewhere in the OSS "long tail" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail).
There's a place for such things. With a bit of luck, it may spawn interesting ideas that will permeate to more broadly used software.
Anyway, not all software is born to be used by everybody. Sure, it probably won't make its developers rich, but I doubt that was their main motivation.