Two flavors of GNOME for Linux Mint 12

Earlier this year, Linux Mint seemed to have two choices: Stay close to Ubuntu and take on the Unity desktop, or move to GNOME 3.0. Rather than choose between two immature desktops, Mint chose to stand pat on GNOME 2.32. This time around, Mint is taking a different approach, taming GNOME 3.2 for Mint users and planning to offer a legacy version of GNOME as well.

Mint project lead Clement Lefebvre has been fairly quiet about desktop plans for releases after Mint 11. On Friday November 4th, Lefebvre finally took the wraps off the plans for Linux Mint 12. Despite the Ubuntu-based heritage of Mint, it looks like the team is sticking with GNOME over Unity.

GNOME 2 vs. GNOME 3

Lefebvre said that Mint would like to keep GNOME 2.32 "a little longer," but "we need to look forward and embrace new technologies." He said that GNOME 3.x is "a fantastic desktop" that's getting better with each release. Eventually, Lefebvre said, "we'll be able to do much more with it than was possible with the traditional desktop." Eventually, but not today.

In the meantime, Lefebvre's plan is to ship GNOME 3.2 and MATE, which is a continuation of GNOME 2.32 that is currently packaged for Arch Linux. One problem, though, is that MATE has naming conflicts with GNOME 3.x, which Lefebvre said the Mint team is "working hard in collaboration with the MATE developers to identify and fix these conflicts so that we can have both Gnome 3 and MATE installed by default on the DVD edition of Linux Mint 12." Unfortunately, there's precious little information online about MATE, but you can find Debian-ized packages for MATE on GitHub. In the comments to the post about Mint 12, Lefebvre also directs interested parties to the #MATE channel on Freenode.

So, if all goes well, users will have a familiar GNOME 2.32-ish desktop to use. More adventurous users, though, can opt for Mint's take on GNOME 3.2. This GNOME is not what you'd see with Fedora 16 or openSUSE 12.1, though. Lefebvre said that they've put together a "desktop layer" that hammers GNOME 3.2 into a traditional desktop if users want that:

Unfortunately, there's not a lot that Mint can do about GNOME 3's other major drawback — 3D acceleration required. Lefebvre said that Mint 12 will allow running GNOME 3.2 in Virtualbox if you have video acceleration enabled, but otherwise, you're stuck with the fallback mode. Users can also choose the MATE desktop.

So, in the end, users should have three options with Mint's main release: GNOME 3.2, GNOME 3.2 with Mint's extensions, or MATE as a GNOME 2.x replacement.

Ubuntu users' pain is Mint's gain

According to Lefebvre, Mint saw a "40% increase in a single month" and he claims that Mint is quickly catching up with Ubuntu for the top spot in the Linux desktop market and fourth overall for desktop operating systems.

There's little doubt that Mint saw a big jump in users following the Fedora 16 and Ubuntu 11.04 releases. Linux users around the world made their unhappiness with GNOME 3.0 and Unity widely known. If you consider DistroWatch's rankings to be accurate, consider that Linux Mint is currently in the top spot (for the six-month ranking). Ubuntu hasn't been displaced from that spot for years. Unfortunately, like Ubuntu, Mint doesn't actually publish hard numbers. Occasionally Canonical cites a hard number (most recently 20 million), but doesn't provide anything the public can verify. (Unlike Fedora and openSUSE, which provide statistics based on the number of unique IPs that connect to their update servers.) So Mint appears to be doing well lately, but how well we don't really know.

With so many users, though, Mint may want to do a bit more to publicize its security fixes and explain its security policy. Trying to find a coherent policy about security updates on the Linux Mint website is an exercise in futility. In addition, Mint doesn't have mailing lists, so no security list exists. Since many of Mint's packages are taken directly from Ubuntu, and use Ubuntu's repositories, users will get security updates when Ubuntu's users do for those packages. But for Mint-specific packages, it's unclear what the policies are.

Search revenue

Another interesting development with this release is Lefebvre's announcement that Mint will be trying to go beyond user donations and extract revenue out of searches.

Mint has always shipped an add-on that "enhances" search results given by Google in Firefox. With any luck that's going away, since the default pages produced by Mint were, shall we say, less than optimal. However, Mint may be limiting user choice when it comes to search engines out of the box. Lefebvre said:

Exactly how Mint will be blocking ads is not explained — and Lefebvre hasn't yet responded to our questions about the plans to block ads in Mint 12 — or whether this might influence the browsers shipped with Mint 12. A preview to Mint's partnerships with browser vendors might be found in the updated Opera 11.52 package for Linux Mint, which seems to be aimed at demonstrating the size of Mint's user base.

It's not entirely surprising that Mint is looking to go beyond what users contribute directly. Lefebvre writes that "we're in a difficult situation financially" because the project is only generating income via donors. Despite having "millions" of users, the September stats show the project raising about $5,600 from 316 donors.

Timeline

If the timeline put forward by Lefebvre holds, then Mint should ship its first RC for Mint 12 by November 11th and a final release around November 20th. Lefebvre said that the GNOME 3.x stuff is "fully ready and fully functional" with just a few minor bugs. The MATE packages may need more work, though, and negotiations with browser vendors may mean some search engines are not included in the RC.

As a project that was caught between the GNOME Shell and Unity conflicts, Mint seems to have not only weathered the desktop turbulence but emerged better for it. By catering to what the existing audience wants, Mint has grown its user base considerably. Whether the project can now turn that into a reliable source of revenue and continue that growth is another question entirely.