Posted: 12/10/2013 3:15:34 PM EDT
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Currently running Windows 8.1
My daily use apps are Chrome browser, J River Media Center for music/movies, utorrent, crashplan, Quicken, EAC for ripping CDs. I haven't used linux in a while and have been kicking the idea around of loading Linux Mint into a VM. Thing is, I don't have a lot of spare time to just randomly mess around with it. I'd like to come up with something specific and useful to use it for. Any ideas you guys could throw at me? |
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I've been using Mint in Virtual Box, although just fumbling around and trying to learn stuff.
I actually downloaded an ISO for Ubuntu Server today at school. Trying to figure out if learning to use Linux thru the GUI is going to be a real benefit for me in my career path (networking). Free OS's are swell though 
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I've been using Mint in Virtual Box, although just fumbling around and trying to learn stuff. I actually downloaded an ISO for Ubuntu Server today at school. Trying to figure out if learning to use Linux thru the GUI is going to be a real benefit for me in my career path (networking). Free OS's are swell though In actual practice, any Linux that is not going to be deployed on the desktop, will probably be something you configure and maintain through the command-line. All of ours are. It's not a bad thing to know, but I'd spend more time learning to get around in the command-line. |
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I have Mint on an older laptop at work.. it's okay for what it is
I have Ubuntu on everything else (except some legacy servers in my basement and a new ultrabook running win8) Might I suggest running a bootable live version to test the waters before going somewhere you'll regret later(?) you can run off a usb ext hdd, thumbdrive / sdcard or even CD (no save options here, obviously, although you could add a thumb drive to save settings (I only know of Puppy LInux doing this, but that is dated info) |
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I always try to keep up with Mint, I've fallen behind lately. I was watching one of the latest Jupiter Broadcasting podcast last week, they were saying the latest Mint is built upon one of the iterations of Ubuntu. I didn't know that. Mint was always based on Ubuntu. |
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I found Mint to be annoyingly sluggish (and surprisingly so) on my 8 core Xeon workstation. I dropped it in on a spare drive in a swappable bay and set it up right, but it just had an "unoptimized" feel to it on the desktop. YMMV Yep, the UI is a dog. After a few weeks with it, Win7 felt lightning fast. That was with Cinnamon though. Maybe the Xfce version sucks less. |
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Yep, the UI is a dog. After a few weeks with it, Win7 felt lightning fast. That was with Cinnamon though. Maybe the Xfce version sucks less. Quoted:
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I found Mint to be annoyingly sluggish (and surprisingly so) on my 8 core Xeon workstation. I dropped it in on a spare drive in a swappable bay and set it up right, but it just had an "unoptimized" feel to it on the desktop. YMMV Yep, the UI is a dog. After a few weeks with it, Win7 felt lightning fast. That was with Cinnamon though. Maybe the Xfce version sucks less. The plain "MATE" version is faster than Cinnamon. |
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I found Mint to be annoyingly sluggish (and surprisingly so) on my 8 core Xeon workstation. I dropped it in on a spare drive in a swappable bay and set it up right, but it just had an "unoptimized" feel to it on the desktop. YMMV Linux Mint probably isn't the problem. It could possibly be a kernel issue, or a hardware compatibility issue. With several Mint versions being based off of Ubuntu, there may be an upstream issue somewhere that is out of Clem's hands to fix. All too often in the past, I've found that when a new version comes out, it usually breaks something that always worked well in the past. Before a new version of Linux Mint is released, Clem and the other folks at Linux Mint work hard at trying to fix what they can that Canonical didn't before releasing their new version of Ubuntu. As was already mentioned in a post above, it also might be a desktop environment issue. Cinnamon has had some growing pains, but has come a long ways and works far better nowadays. Give MATE a try. You can also try the xfce or KDE versions in Mint. There's also Linux Mint Debian Edition to try out. I've been using LMDE on both my laptop and desktop for the last few years, and while I've had a few hiccups after updates/upgrades, I've never come across anything that was a definite showstopper that would make me look to wipe Linux Mint off my hard drive, and find a new distro of choice. You don't say what version of Linux Mint you tried, but Linux Mint Petra just came out. Take one of the versions for a spin, if that's not the version you had tried. Be sure to read the release notes before installing. That will give you a heads up to any potential problems that may appear, or upstream problems that are out of Clem's hands to fix. |
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I use it on my primary workstation at work.
Got tired of Ubuntu and Unity (yes, I know how to get rid of it). Runs like a champ 
(2) X5667 Intel Xeon Processors 48GB RAM 4x300GB 15k SAS drives in Raid 10 Sometimes I do run out of memory and CPU Threads (16) though. 
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I love the post-Mint 13 Cinnamon interface. My dedicated Linux laptop's graphics drivers are only available on LTS versions of Ubuntu (i.e. Mint 13, Ubuntu 12.04) so I can't get the Cinnamon desktop I actually like. MATE isn't a bad desktop and is actually fairly efficient and good for those who require something similar to Windows 3-Windows 7 like interfaces mixed with some OSX X11.
My server is currently running Ubuntu 12.04 Sever Edt. headless with a N54L (supposedly i5 like specs) chip and 8 GB of memory (I didn't mention 2 of the 4 drive bays have 2.5TB drives in a RAID 5 mdam setup). My Linux PC is a 12.04 32 bit version of Ubuntu that I got tired of dealing with Unity, purged the Unity desktop and installed the XCFE desktop (essentially turned it into xubuntu)…if Cinnamon was available in the version I like, I'd run it (the 12.04 version is actually installed). The only real difference between Ubuntu and Mint that I've noticed (assuming you know how to change the desktops around) are repo's and the fact you can't dist-upgrade Mint like you can Ubuntu. |
| I'm running Linux Mint 15 Xfce 64 bit on a Toshiba Satellite with 6 Gb of ram. It tends to stutter on video playback. Doesn't load some websites well when using Firefox. I definitely like it better than Ubuntu. My only point to you is get a quality laptop or desktop before you decide to use Mint. That definitely affects the experience. |
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zapzap,
Not sure what version of Cinnamon you're running, but directions for installing the latest Cinnamon 2.0.6 can be found here. GNOME3 is no longer running under the hood like it was in pre-2.0 versions of Cinnamon, so you may be able to use it with your dedicated graphics drivers now. You can read more about Cinnamon 2.0 here. misc, Adobe is no longer supporting Flash for Linux, so that might be what's causing some of your webpage and video issues, depending on what you're trying to look at. Might need to install flashplugin-nonfree either through apt or Synaptic Package Manager, if you don't already have it installed. MadebyMattell, I'm not familiar with all that you're using now, but for JRiver Media Center, you may want to look at xbmc as a Linux substitute. For Quicken, gnucash might be a possible replacement, or see if Quicken will run through wine. For utorrent, qbittorrent might work for you. For crashplan, you don't say if you're backing up locally, offsite, or cloud, but Deja Dup might be a good Linux replacement for that. |
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zapzap, Not sure what version of Cinnamon you're running, but directions for installing the latest Cinnamon 2.0.6 can be found here. GNOME3 is no longer running under the hood like it was in pre-2.0 versions of Cinnamon, so you may be able to use it with your dedicated graphics drivers now. You can read more about Cinnamon 2.0 here. I'll look into it sometime. I've been doing a lot of CL based stuff here lately. My little Asus Eee PC has required a Cedar-View graphics driver for most of the LTS release (last time I updated it seems to be using a driver in the kernel now). That little netbook is nothing special, 1GB of fixed memory, Intel Atom chip, 64GB SSD but it runs pretty well for internet and network related stuff. |
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Linux GUI's are simple and won't be of any practical benefit if you are in the network field. Now getting some solid experience on the Linux command-line and server systems is a very good thing to have in the tool box.
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I've been using Mint in Virtual Box, although just fumbling around and trying to learn stuff. I actually downloaded an ISO for Ubuntu Server today at school. Trying to figure out if learning to use Linux thru the GUI is going to be a real benefit for me in my career path (networking). Free OS's are swell though |
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Linux GUI's are simple and won't be of any practical benefit if you are in the network field. Now getting some solid experience on the Linux command-line and server systems is a very good thing to have in the tool box. Quoted:
Linux GUI's are simple and won't be of any practical benefit if you are in the network field. Now getting some solid experience on the Linux command-line and server systems is a very good thing to have in the tool box. Quoted:
I've been using Mint in Virtual Box, although just fumbling around and trying to learn stuff. I actually downloaded an ISO for Ubuntu Server today at school. Trying to figure out if learning to use Linux thru the GUI is going to be a real benefit for me in my career path (networking). Free OS's are swell though QFT If you are going to do networking I couldn't live without nmap ethtool nethogs wireshark <- That one is a gui And that depends what you are doing in networking. If it's more than just admin stuff (like security) check out kali linux. |
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QFT If you are going to do networking I couldn't live without nmap ethtool nethogs wireshark <- That one is a gui And that depends what you are doing in networking. If it's more than just admin stuff (like security) check out kali linux. Quoted:
Quoted:
Linux GUI's are simple and won't be of any practical benefit if you are in the network field. Now getting some solid experience on the Linux command-line and server systems is a very good thing to have in the tool box. Quoted:
I've been using Mint in Virtual Box, although just fumbling around and trying to learn stuff. I actually downloaded an ISO for Ubuntu Server today at school. Trying to figure out if learning to use Linux thru the GUI is going to be a real benefit for me in my career path (networking). Free OS's are swell though QFT If you are going to do networking I couldn't live without nmap ethtool nethogs wireshark <- That one is a gui And that depends what you are doing in networking. If it's more than just admin stuff (like security) check out kali linux. My job would be infinitely more difficult without tshark or tcpdump. |
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I found Mint to be on Northannoyingly sluggish (and surprisingly so) on my 8 core Xeon workstation. I dropped it in on a spare drive in a swappable bay and set it up right, but it just had an "unoptimized" feel to it on the desktop. YMMV Interesting. Ubuntuq2.04 is noticeably faster than Windows 7 or 8 on both my laptop and desktop. |