Linux Mint goes to 11 [LWN.net]

May 25, 2011

This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier.

Fedora and Ubuntu are making sweeping changes with their most recent releases, but Linux Mint is taking a more conservative approach. Though it's not quite finished yet, the release candidate of Linux Mint 11 (codenamed "Katya") offers the same GNOME 2 desktop that users have come to know and (in some cases) love.

Linux Mint should require no introduction. The distribution got its start in 2006 as an Ubuntu derivative that offered different default applications, a modified theme, and pre-installed multimedia codecs. The main edition of Linux Mint continues to be derived from Ubuntu's main release, though the project has branched out a bit over the years with more Ubuntu-derived releases with a focus on KDE, LXDE, and Xfce as well. More recently, the project also started offering a rolling release based on Debian Testing with Mint themes and management tools, and has rebased the Xfce Mint flavor with Debian as well.

The main Ubuntu-flavored release continues to be the most popular. According to the most recent statistics released in April 2011 (scroll to the bottom of the page for the statistics), the Mint 10 release has more than 52% of users, the Mint 9 release (which is an LTS release) has about 22%, and the Debian-based LMDE has almost 9% of users. Older Mint releases account for the rest — the desktop used is not indicated in the statistics.

What's changed in 11

The release candidate was announced on on May 9, and includes a few significant changes since the last release to Mint-specific applications, and in the default application selection. Mint has followed Ubuntu in replacing Rhythmbox with Banshee as the default music player, and in switching to LibreOffice as the default office suite. Instead of going with Shotwell to replace F-Spot in 11.04, the Katya release uses gThumb instead. The social media craze seems to have died out at Mint headquarters, as Gwibber is no longer installed by default, but the microblogging client is not replaced with any of the alternatives.

Perhaps a harbinger of things to come, the Desktop Settings tool in Mint is being made "desktop agnostic" in 11, and the release notes indicate that it will be extended to offer settings for KDE, LXDE, Fluxbox, and Xfce users in future editions of Mint. The Settings tool allows users to change a few things about the desktop's behavior that aren't exposed through the usual GNOME tools — for instance, turning on the infamous "wireframe dragging" that GNOME developers insisted on hiding in Gconf. A small, but welcome, change in this release is the ability to turn off the fortune quotes users see at login in the console, or when opening a terminal, that are on by default. It's always been possible to kill these by editing /etc/bash.bashrc, but that's not particularly obvious to many of Mint's user base.

The Software Manager that comes with Mint has also had a minor face lift and a few features have been added that provide more detail about what will be installed when users choose to install a package. The Mint Software Manager is fairly slick, and holds its own next to Ubuntu's — it might be a better choice for multi-distribution projects seeking a unified front-end for software installation, given that it's GPLv2 and Mint doesn't have an onerous contributor's agreement required to work on it.

One application that makes an appearance for the first time in 11 is Giver, a file-sharing application for that uses Avahi (a libre implementation of Zeroconf) to discover other Giver clients on the same network. Using Giver you can simply start the application and anyone on your local network also running Giver can share or receive files from your machine just by clicking the target user and selecting the files and folders to share. It's a lightweight file-sharing client that makes a lot of sense for users who are in a meeting or at an event, rather than using a more cumbersome centralized file-sharing service.

Overall, the Katya release is not that different from Linux Mint 10 — but quite different from its Ubuntu 11.04 upstream, at least where the desktop is concerned. It has all the obligatory package updates (Firefox, GIMP, etc.) but doesn't look or feel much different than Linux Mint 10 at all.

Decision time for Mint

The main Mint release has long been based on Ubuntu with some fairly minimal changes — the addition of codecs that aren't shipped with Ubuntu, Mint-specific management tools and themes, and a slightly different selection of default applications. The Katya release is the first to feature what amounts to a completely different desktop environment than Ubuntu.

The GNOME packages used for the default desktop in Mint 11 are still part of Ubuntu 11.04. However, with 11.10 Ubuntu will be removing the "classic" GNOME desktop fallback. This leaves the Mint team with a handful of options — maintain GNOME 2.32 for another release, embrace Unity or GNOME Shell, or switch to another desktop like Xfce. Mint has an Xfce-based release as well, but it is a rolling release based on Debian, not on Ubuntu.

So what is Mint going to do? I asked Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre by email, and he says that it's up in the air:

I was asked that question about Linux Mint 11 and at the time it seemed we were going to use Gnome 3 without Gnome Shell. It's likely we'll migrate to Gnome 3 and GTK3 in the future but if taking ownership on what is currently Gnome 2 makes more sense to us, we could do this as well.

For 11, Lefebvre says sticking with GNOME 2 was the right choice. He said that the main challenge was "the gnome settings daemon not working as well as before and a multitude of regressions occurring in Compiz." Though GNOME 2 won't be supported in the future, he says it's still a modern desktop and (as many users have pointed out compared to GNOME 3) "extremely mature."

For Mint, maturity counts more than whiz-bang new features. According to Lefebvre, the main goal is to "provide the desktop people have come to enjoy with Linux Mint," and that could mean moving to GNOME 3, sticking with GNOME 2, or having a fork of either of those desktops. "We know precisely what we want, we're keeping a close eye on the new desktop alternatives (Gnome 3, Unity) and as usual we'll choose what works best for us."

Linux Mint has a very small group of contributors. Lefebvre is the only person working on Mint full time, though he says the project was close to getting a second contributor who had to bow out "due to personal circumstances." Lefebvre does say that there is a lot he'd like to do.

There's a lot of R&D and development planned for the future, we want to test our own base, we're looking at snapshot/restoration scenarios and local network communications in particular, and we've got some really ambitious projects in mind, but we won't be able to tackle these with limited resources. There's a strong community behind us, the support we're getting is amazing and we've got the power to push further. I personally look forward to extending the team and getting more developers working full time for Linux Mint in the near future.

Extending the team might be difficult without a few changes. The planning and release process for Linux Mint is a bit opaque. Mint does not have a mailing list for developer discussions, so any and all of the development discussions (such as they are) take place on the Linux Mint forum. And very little is discussed on the forum. Those who would care to contribute to Linux Mint are directed to the Get Involved page, which emphasizes monetary donations, spreading the word about Mint, bug reporting, and providing forum support to other Mint users. Interested contributors can follow along on GitHub, but recruiting significant contributors of code does not seem to be a priority for the project.

Lefebvre acknowledges that "it can be confusing for people when it comes to getting involved." He points to the forums and other community features on the site for contributing ideas, but says "things happen when people come and talk to us. Whether it's on IRC, or directly by email, the best way to get something done is by direct communication." He continues:

If the idea is good we can discuss it and implement it. If it's bad, we can acknowledge it and move on to something else. Either way things progress fast once we start talking about it, and it's also in these circumstances that we get people involved and welcome them in the team. If somebody comes to us not only with an idea but also with the skills to implement it, in most cases we'll talk to that person and try to make him/her implement his/her own idea for inclusion in the upcoming release. This collaboration with the person who took the initiative and the work we do together is often the start of a great relationship and often leads to having this person join the development team.

Compared to projects like Ubuntu and Fedora, this requires a lot more legwork for users to make the leap to contributors. Still, Mint might just find a few contributors ready to jump in with the 11 release. While some users have been happy with Unity and GNOME Shell so far, quite a few would prefer to stick with the tried-and-true GNOME experience. Mint 11 might be a good refuge for those users, and this would be a good opportunity for the Mint project to pick up more hands that can help.

Compared to Ubuntu 11.04 or the Fedora 15 release scheduled for this week, Mint is a fairly modest upgrade. For many Linux users, that's all that's really wanted.

(Log in to post comments)

Linux Mint goes to 11

Posted May 26, 2011 10:36 UTC (Thu) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link]

How goes EXDE then?

*plonk*

PS: Not sure why you'd blame a marketing guy for designing GNOME 3...

Linux Mint goes to 11

Posted May 26, 2011 15:50 UTC (Thu) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link]

Hi Sean,

I'm glad you're excited about fallback mode. I'd be nice if you could work upstream instead of posting to LWN comments though. You obviously have a lot of energy and some coding ability. The future of fallback mode is somewhat up in the air, especially if - as seems likely - in the next 6 month cycle Mesa improvements allow us to run full GNOME 3 perhaps with nontrivial but also not insurmountable experience degredation. That gives multiple interested parties an opportunity to step in and own the fallback code there.

However, we'd clearly like fallback to continue tracking GNOME 3 as a reference point, so that constraint would exist. Thanks!

Linux Mint goes to 11

Posted Jun 3, 2011 12:37 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

Do you _really_ want me involved? Think about it. I'm frequently vitriolic towards just about everything Linux/FOSS-related these days, have long lost any semblance of patience for what I identify as stupid or incompetent developers, I hate trying to communicate and collaborate over the Internet, and there's little chance of me ever respecting several of the key GNOME community members. I'm pretty much the social opposite of the ideal FOSS project contributor.

So far as my posts on GNOME 3 and the "energy" involved, tpo is right that I've been incredibly nasty about it all, and most of that energy has been quite negative. I've been a die-hard Linux/GNOME user since before GNOME 1.0, and went almost 10 years without even owning or using a copy of Windows, but those days are behind me and I need to stop being incensed over GNOME not being Windows 7 and just accept that I'm no longer a "real" Linux desktop user.

Sorry for being a jerk. I'm going to refrain from commenting on GNOME from now on.

Linux Mint goes to 11

Posted May 27, 2011 6:27 UTC (Fri) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link]

It's a pitty you keep on to your commenting style of using foul language and name calling. Being LWN I'd give you a last warning and revoke your right to post at your next such comment.

It is well possible to express ones analysis and - strong - opinion without resorting to such language, as LWN culture has consistently shown.

Linux Mint goes to 11

Posted Jun 6, 2011 16:41 UTC (Mon) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

I agree completely about the move to making GNOME (and Unity) GPU dependent, and switching to KMS, before the Linux graphics drivers really work well. There's a Linux PC that I misguidedly upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS last month, and it's freezing several times a day, most likely due to the Intel on-board graphics driver. The user of this PC is mystified as to why it freezes all the time - actually much worse than Windows XP - and I have to make a special trip just to fix it.

Linux Mint (with KMS turned off) is looking a lot more attractive than Ubuntu for a stable desktop Linux these days.

Linux Mint goes to 11

Posted Jun 6, 2011 18:10 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

try a more recent version, 10.04 was a particularly bad version in terms of Intel video drivers.

It's possible that an update could fix it, but if you have applied all the 10.04 updates and still have a problem, move to a newer version.

not all fixes can be backported, and you are now complaining about a version that's over a year old.

Linux Mint goes to 11

Posted Jun 7, 2011 6:12 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

I will probably try a later release, or Linux Mint. However, an LTS is supposed to "just work" for its lifetime, so the fact that the 10.04 Intel drivers are broken and apparently unfixable without a new Ubuntu release seems to indicate that 10.04 should never have been released as an LTS.

That's one of the big problems with a time-based release strategy for an LTS - good for marketing and potentially bad for stability. In fact I'm not a fan of time-based releases for software that's hard to debug - "release when ready" with thorough automated regression testing is more likely to give good results.

Is anyone working on a distributed automated test suite for Linux distros, a bit like CPAN Testers - http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/WhatIsCPANTesters - or this IBM effort from 2005: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/05/06/05/1426206/Linux-Ke... ?

My feeling is that the testing model for Linux is really quite ad hoc with little automation and fairly random coverage, so that major regressions are introduced (Intel graphics worked fine in Ubuntu 8.04 and earlier) and they are only found when distros at beta or release stages, and often not fixed.

Linux Mint goes to 11

Posted Jun 7, 2011 18:14 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

you are correct in your understanding that there is no comprehensive coverage testing of hardware for any release (be it of the kernel or of any distro)

but if you think about it for a little bit you will see why this is not the case.

how much would it cost to buy one of every model machine that is produced this year? and then think about having to try and go back to machines produced in the past. Then think about trying to house and power all these machines.

and you really would have to have one of every machine due to the various oddball bugs in BIOS/firmware/etc that show up.

Microsoft doesn't have this problem because it is the hardware manufacturer's responsibility to be windows compatible, not Microsoft's responsibility to work with random hardware.

Unfortunantly Linux is not in such a dominant position, so Linux has to work around the bugs, but bugs are only found when they are tested on specific hardware.

the people who released the Intel drivers that are in the kernel used in 10.04 thought they had everything working (and I'm sure they tested it on a bunch of real hardware), but when it got out into the wild, it was discovered that a lot of hardware didn't quite work the way that Intel expected it to once it was wired into motherboards and various customized BIOS' were running it.

As for the problem of 'fixing' 10.04 without upgrading, this gets to the age-old problem of trying to backport only the 'right' things. the number of changes in each kernel release are massive (approaching 10,000 changes per release), deciding which changes need to be backported is an inexact science, and frequently the changes involved for major work end up being so large that it can cause more stability problems than it solves.

you could try running a newer kernel on your 10.04 box to see if that solves your problem, but for something as fundamental as this, I expect that it will take a new kernel to fix it (not just an updated version of the old kernel with backported fixes). Ubuntu may release an optional kernel upgrade for 10.04, but one of the "advantages" of a LTS/Enterprise release is that people don't want the kernel to change.

you can't have it both ways, you need to decide between 'no changes' and 'bugs get fixed'

Linux Mint goes to 11

Posted Jun 8, 2011 11:18 UTC (Wed) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

I'm thinking about distributed user-based testing (like CPAN Testers), not a big investment centrally which I agree would never work for a FOSS distro. Ubuntu has many millions of users, all with different hardware - what's missing is an easy, automated way to systematically test and gather good quality test result data.

Imagine if you could install a nightly alpha version of Ubuntu as dual-boot, using a separate test filesystem, purely to participate in a wide-scale automated test. Some tests would require human inspection (video / sound problems) but it should be possible to determine whether the system froze or crashed (after a reboot involving the user perhaps).

The ideal is to make it as easy as running SETI@Home - tell the system to reboot into the automated nightly testing setup when you are finished for the day, then it does 99% of the work of testing.

This is more difficult than CPAN Testers, since hardware is involved, but finding installation errors is useful, and even statistical info such as "80% of XYZ Intel GPU model are failing" would be of some use, particularly if logs are automatically uploaded.

On the issue of updating 10.04 without a kernel version change - without KMS, the kernel wouldn't be involved. My problem with KMS is that it ties the flaky support of graphics drivers right into the kernel, and in some cases stops boot (Plymouth etc) or causes freezes. Without KMS, an Xorg+driver update would be enough, which is logistically easier.

I know that KMS is good for the future with GPUs that don't support 2D, but for today's GPUs and particularly Intel, it's a major pain - it should not have been allowed anywhere near an LTS, or perhaps the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS should have been delayed by a year to let the drivers stabilise.

KMS has to happen sometime but it has greatly reduced the actual stability of Linux for some people - in fact Linux is generally much less stable on the desktop than when I first started using it in 1996, perhaps because it has much wider hardware support, or perhaps because it is evolving much faster. On the server, Linux is fine and very stable of course.