Mint 17.3 MATE on TP T60

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faramir9

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Me likey. Been waiting to try Linux Mint 17 MATE for more than a year. My desktop has Nvidia GeForce integrated graphics, which does not mix well with Mint, and my old laptop did not have a large hdd for a dual boot.

Last week I bought a Thinkpad T60 on eBay, with a Core 2 Duo CPU, 3 GB of RAM and a 160 GB SATA hdd. Finally had a chance to dual-boot Mint with Win 7....and it's great. I give it heap big thumbs-up. I upgraded to 17.3 via the terminal and it's even better.

For the first time with *any* OS I can honestly say that things "just work." Even more so than with the excellent Xubuntu 14.04, which I have on my desktop. (I like lightweight DEs even with hardware that can support more eye candy, which does nothing for me.)

Does anyone who runs Mint 17.x have any complaints or criticisms? I've yet to find a flaw in anything I tried to do.

It seems the Mint fanatics here and elsewhere were right, based on my first week-plus playing and working with it. It helps that the T60 with 3 GB of RAM seems like a perfect match for Mint and MATE. High-powered PCs from the past few years would be wasted on it, but the OS makes great use of the mid-level horsepower the T60 provides.

Will report back once I find something of substance to criticize. Will likely be awhile.
 
I moved to Ubuntu MATE recently on my T430 and the thing is awesome. A bit OT, but both are from the same family; wireless, microphone, webcam all work OOTB. Even the volume adjustment keys work.
 
Originally Posted By: simple_gifts
I moved to Ubuntu MATE recently on my T430 and the thing is awesome. A bit OT, but both are from the same family; wireless, microphone, webcam all work OOTB. Even the volume adjustment keys work.


Yep. I used a tutorial from ThinkWiki to enable the OSD for the volume keys, though the keys themselves worked from the start. Anyone who runs Linux on a TP likely has it bookmarked already, but see: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki
 
I'm dual-booting Mint 17.1 KDE with Win 7, and for the last few months I've been running Mint over 90% of the time I'm on my machine.

I have a home-built rig with an Athlon x4 640, 8GB of RAM, GT730 graphics, separate SSDs for each OS install, and a mechanical HDD for data.

eta: I also have Mint 17.1 KDE as the sole OS on a HP Elitebook 2540 with a first-gen i5.

Love it on both machines.
 
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not a computer geek, but not afraid of them either. When my old, ACER XP laptop OS went, I tried everything to get XP to work. Computer guru friend turn onto a Mint maybe 15? Loved it since I dumped my Ipad II for a used Dell laptop, Mint went in over windows. WIth that Dell, I could physically switch the hard drive I wanted. Now with my eBay HP Elitebook, I'm running Mint but still have a Win 7 disk availale. I just dont know how to load additional programs with it. I tell anyone, if you live on the net, Mint is the best thing out there. I us a Mac for my Photoshop work.
 
Just upgraded from 17.2, I don't see many changes except the Wi-Fi icon in the taskbar is shaded and gives me the signal strength when I scroll over it.
 
Linux Mint 17, 17.1, 17.2 and 17.3 are all based directly on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and therefore any changes in these 'point" versions will have to do mostly with Mint's Cinamon and MATE interfaces - both is which are being developed very actively - rather than anything major "under the hood".

Ubuntu's next LTS will be out in April of 2016 and Mint will see some larger changes in their version 18, which will track Ubuntu.

The IBM/ Lenovo ThinkPad T60 or 61 have long been favourites for Linux users: They're built well and usually sport hardware that works well with Linux.
 
I just did a clean install of Mint 17.3 and it is working well. I'm seriously thinking of ditching Win 10 and running Linux on all our computers.
27.gif
 
To uc: You are correct on all points, but Mint 17.3 does include useful version updates to some programs I use.

Specifically, it bumps Libre Office from 4.4 to 5. By itself that does not mean much to me, but the updated libraries and associations that come with Libre Office 5 allow me to manually update two non-mainstream programs I use, without dealing with dependency heck.

It's the little things like that, which are not so little to some non-typical users, that make the difference. I got the same sense (as in Jedi-type sniff the air type of sense) when I first used Mint 17 that I got the first time I booted up Win 7: finally, things make sense and fit together.

And with Mint you don't have to worry about constant security updates, anit-virus/spyware/etc. and maybe upgrading horsepower to deal with an OS and programs that suck up more juice with each update. (Which added up made Win 7 lose much of its luster for me.)

There must be things to pick on in Mint 17.3 but I honestly have not found one yet. OK, the start menu takes a nano-second too long to render. If that's the biggest nitpick there is....
 
Although I like Mint, it isn't perfect either. It freezes on boot up sometimes, I get updates more often for it than my Windows machines. The interface isn't attractive, and I've never had any issues with viruses on my Windows machines.

I will say the price is right and it runs well on a 10 year old laptop.
 
Originally Posted By: dishdude
Although I like Mint, it isn't perfect either. It freezes on boot up sometimes,


I can almost guarantee that to be a hardware fault or incompatibility issue. Not all hardware is Linux-friendly; and when it doesn't work well, it flat-out does not work well.

Originally Posted By: dishdude
I get updates more often for it than my Windows machines.


Issues that get patched get pushed to users immediately instead of "patch Tuesday" or whenever it is that Microsoft deems appropriate. In most Linux systems you can set your Update Manager to check for, alert and install at varying intervals.

Originally Posted By: dishdude
The interface isn't attractive, and I've never had any issues with viruses on my Windows machines.


One of the distinct advantages of an open system is that you can use one or more of a variety of interfaces. If you do not care for any one of them they can be swapped out very, very easily.
 
Originally Posted By: faramir9
Specifically, it bumps Libre Office from 4.4 to 5.


Point taken. I just realized that Ubuntu 14.04.x still uses the 4.4 branch and has not included 5 until 15.04. I guess this is one rare instance where the Ubuntu devs actually tried to keep their LTS as stable as can be (most Linux distros espousing their stability never do major version upgrades; only point releases and security patches), and the Mint devs took the plunge on a major version upgrade.

Kudos to the Mint devs! Although it is precisely a major version upgrade that I try to avoid while supporting desktops for others: They get thrown for a loop sometimes when they are confronted with a different-looking application (that they were used to) upon running it one day. Ubuntu continuing to upgrade Firefox on LTS versions has caused me a few headaches, for instance; eg. having to field calls from a co-worker of my wife's parents asking where this option went or why there is a new button here or why a add-on is no longer working. It's made me seriously flirt with just using Debian more than once.
 
Quote:

I get updates more often for it than my Windows machines.


With Mint, the entire software stack is subjected to updates. If you install a 3rd party app on Windows and some of the libraries provided by the 3rd party are found to be vulnerable, guess what, it sits on your machine unpatched unless you go out to EACH vendor and download the patched version (if they have even bothered to recompile, which generally they don't)

Updates are frequent with Mint because so many people have visibility into the code that issues can and are rectified and placed in the source tree to be available to developers. For the most part, ALL software is pulled from a few, but frequently updated repositories.
 
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I ran Mint 17 Xfce first on my single core Athlon/Asus machine, and then on my FX4300/ECS machine, both using Geforce dedicated graphics cards. Mint 17 Xfce was great and eventually I'll install it again to dual boot with W10. Nvidia has better Linux drivers than ATI/AMD, not sure why you would think "Nvidia GeForce integrated graphics... does not mix well with Mint."

If you're interested in gaming, steam runs on Linux and they have some good AAA titles ported for linux including War Thunder.
 
Originally Posted By: asand1
Nvidia has better Linux drivers than ATI/AMD, not sure why you would think "Nvidia GeForce integrated graphics... does not mix well with Mint."


It is hard to classify any proprietary driver as mixing "well" with Linux. (Some distros, though, make detecting a required proprietary driver, and installing and configuring it automatic.) Linus Torvalds (the creator and current maintainer of the Linux kernel) very famously gave NVIDIA devs the finger during a speech a few years ago.

I have had both NVIDIA and ATI/ AMD chips work really well with decent distros and I have seen just the opposite (Several months ago Papa Bear's system was unbootable because the NVIDIA driver was unable to re-compile on an updated kernel for some reason. Booting from an older kernel fixed everything immediately; and there was an update to the driver a week later).

I always suggest to users that unless and until you need a gaming-capable graphics chip, try to stick with an Intel (which is open-source and fully Linux-friendly) graphics system.
 
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
I always suggest to users that unless and until you need a gaming-capable graphics chip, try to stick with an Intel (which is open-source and fully Linux-friendly) graphics system.


I've had zero issues running drivers directly from the Nvidia site in combination with elementaryOS.

As far as I'm concerned, the benefits of putting a good GPU to work (OS, browser) are well worth it, even if you never play any games.
 
I have no problems playing Team Fortress 2 on Steam using Intel 4000 graphics. I have an i7

Actually I do have problems playing, but no technical ones.... lol
 
Yes they are proprietary, but they are made by nvidia specifically for linux. That would be like calling borderlands2 for Linux "proprietary", who cares if it works.

My onboard ATI graphics had no available drivers because it was between legacy and the current batch of drivers. I was able to install a geforce gt740 and install the latest driver through linux.

I guess my point is just that in my limited experience nvidia has better support and a proprietary driver is better because it is made by the manufacturer.

I played warthunder and starconflict though steam with the gt740 and got good scores on their own benchmarks.
 
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Originally Posted By: asand1
Yes they are proprietary, but they are made by nvidia specifically for linux. That would be like calling borderlands2 for Linux "proprietary", who cares if it works.


"Proprietary" refers to the licensing of the source code. If it is not open, then only those who possess the intellectual property can see and modify the source code. It does not matter in the slightest that the drivers are made specifically for this or that.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#content

Most Linux distros strive to use only F/LOSS (Free/ Libre Open Source Software; meaning "free" not just as in "no cost" but **mainly** "free" as in "freedom") as best they can; but most provide the possibility of using closed-source software as well. Eg. Ubuntu has the ubuntu-restricted-extras package that will install non-free things like Flash, some codecs and fonts that might be necessary for a functional desktop. Distros like Ubuntu also make it a trivial thing to install GPU drivers; but in each of these cases they cannot include them "out of the box" like they can open-source (ie. freely-redistributable") software.
 
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