mintCast 327.5 – Doppelganger (mp3)

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In our Innards section, we talk Linux Mint’s new Doppelganger with Joshua Peisach (@ItzSwirlz) from Ubuntu Cinnamon (@UbuntuCinnamon).

Some listener feedback and “check this out.”

LINUX INNARDS:

Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix with Josh Peisach

What was your motivation for creating Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix?

Who is working on it with you?

  • Simon Quigly
  • FossFreedom
  • Lubuntu team
  • Moss
    •  I don’t get to lead too many of these things off, but as the resident mad distrohopper, I thought I’d try this one. It installed easily and cleanly; I love Calamares when it works. I have only had one complaint, and that was the color scheme. I don’t often tweak themes, but that Ubuntu Brown and Orange gets pretty tedious and my active tabs in Firefox have an orange bar above them. I’m still not a huge fan of Cinnamon, but am currently using both Mint and Ubuntu Cinnamon (still using Mint Mate as my main distro), and Mint is easier to look at. The missing Mint tools make a difference, and I’m sure Ubuntu users would comment obversely. I definitely need to add Mintstick if I’m going to keep using this. Really, for me the Mint tools are better than the Ubuntu tools, or at least I use them more, so I don’t see why I can’t have a nice minty-green screen.
  • Joe
    • Took a couple of tries and an assist from Moss to get it installed because of an issue with the installer 
    • Very Modern looking and a very nice color scheme
    • Applications ran smooth and startup times were not that long.  All in all, no complaints although I did notice that some of the tools that I use were missing.  Most specifically disks, which i can handle using fstab and i am not sure what ubuntu uses instead also disk usage analyzer.  
    • Rotation works well after I went into settings general and turned it on
    • I went through my usual, installing x2go client and server and the snap of Standard Notes. All are working well. 
    • Going to try Pluma instead of gedit and see how I like it.
    • For some reason sshfs set up but none of my normal scripting/automation stuff worked for it.  If-up and if-down did not seem to function. I am able to make the scripts work when I run them manually but they are ignored by the system
    • The most interesting aspect that I have found in this release is that it includes a 32 bit efi built in.  So I attempted to install it on one of my old 8 inch tablets that had a 32bit efi but a 64 bit processor. It loaded up and i was able to start up the install process but it would lock up everytime it got to the region selection.  It was also very slow on the device. But that is the fault of the device. I also went through the hoops to try and install Linux Mint and got the same issue. Mate worked though. Forgot how much work it was to get one of these set up. 
    • Beyond that, I can say that the OS feels very nice and is responsive, other than the issue with not being able to do a basic install.  
    • Do want to mention that since this is the 7140 I have no way of testing if suspend and resume work properly. 
    • No pinch to zoom.
  • Tony Hughes 
    • Installed to Virtualbox and even in a VM it boots in 10 seconds with 2 cores of my i7 and 4Gb RAM allocated in VB. By default I was happy to find GIMP installed out of the box, but still no Synaptic or Audacity but, as this is Ubuntu under the hood, all these applications are either an ‘sudo apt install’ away or ‘sudo snap install’ if that is your chosen method of installing software. So all the regular tools I use for podcasting such as Mumble and Audacity.
    • As Moss said, it is a nice OS, it was easy to install and I could see this being one of the systems on a drive in the ‘icy dock’ when I finally get around to upgrading my main i7 tower later this spring.    
  • Leo
    • The first thing that struck me was the theme, Kimmo. A bright orange take on Mint-Y, which was, as far as I can tell, forked from the Arc theme.
    • I really enjoy the icon theme itself, but the orange highlighting with the orange icons cause visibility issues on the taskbar. Hovering over the folders especially. I think this is probably why Ubuntu went with a more burnt orange in a lot of cases. But orange is my favorite color, so it’s hard to admit “too much orange” is a thing.
    • My personal preference would be Kimmo-dark everywhere except the icon theme. Go Kimmo-light there and all those issues go away.
    • Seconds counter in the clock!
    • Desktop font is set to “none” in the Font Selection too, but looks like it defaults to Sans Regular. I wonder if the plan is to use the Ubuntu fonts as Linux Mint does, or go with something different?
    • Has the same boot splash as Ubuntu, so I expect lots of new customization in the future.
    • Games like 2048, Sudoku and Chess come pre-installed. Is this the same for all Ubuntu flavors?
    • Of course, Xapps are dropped in favor of their Gnome counterparts. For instance, instead of Pix, you have Gnome-Photos.
    • Oddly, there is no Gnome Disks. Just GParted. This affects the accessibility of disk configurations for the new user.
  • Tony W
    • The ISO download took about an hour
    • Installed in VM
    • Probably the biggest quirks I ran into were Virtualbox itself and not Ubuntu Cinnamon
      • For some reason the ‘launch’ option wasn’t there after installing via Software Manager.  Virtualbox did not appear in my menu in Linux Mint either (required reboot) but had no problem launching it from Terminal
      • ‘Running in software rendering mode’ message
    • I did not readily see an ‘install’ option on desktop from liveUSB; I searched ‘install’ from menu and see the install option is under Administration in menu tree.  
    • Installed Mumble from Software, chose the first Mumble option (of 2) and it was a Snap (mumble 1.3).  Snaps get priority in search results from Software, presumably same behavior as Ubuntu. Mumble was not added to menu until I rebooted
    • I am not a big fan of the color scheme either but it is probably appropriate for this distro, being an Ubuntu spinoff (I am not a big fan of stock Ubuntu color scheme either and I probably like Ubuntu Cinnamon’s better)
  • Josh
    • Super fast on my Ryzen 2600 build
    • Modern theme and I really like it
    • My favourite colour is orange so obviously like the theme
    • Really like the installer, one of the nicest i’ve used next to Deepin
    • For a volunteer effort, it’s a pretty good distro and look forward to the developments
    • I imagine it’s coming in the future, but it’d be nice to have a website to host the distro

How are you dealing with the newfound fame? You’re all over the Linux News sites now!?

What do you think of Flatpak?

What would you say to people that might say that you don’t need Ubuntu Cinnamon because Mint Exists?

Why a new distro, why not just install Cinnamon on the base Ubuntu?

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

CHECK THIS OUT! 

Announcements:

  • Our Next Episode will be live Feb 9, 2020. 2PM CST, 8PM UTC

Wrap-up:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible … 

  • Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)

One Reply to “mintCast 327.5 – Doppelganger (mp3)”

  1. Henrik Hemrin

    Interesting among else to hear your talk about Ubuntu Cinnamon!

    A suggestion for another episode, unless you haven’t covered it already: Linux Mint LMDE. Most talk about Mint seems to be about the Ubuntu based versions. Development of LMDE 4 is ongoing as I read in the Mint blog, based on the recent Debian release 10. Would be interesting to hear a talk about when to use LMDE instead of the Ubuntu based Linux Mint Cinnamon, why or why not, advantages, disadvantages and so on? If someone working with the LMDE development, or by you hosts or any other persons with insights and experience of LMDE, could elaborate on LMDE? I know it also was tested in Distrohoppers Digest Episode 1. https://distrohoppersdigest.blogspot.com/2019/04/introduction-and-first-episode.html#more

    Finally, now and then although not this episode, you have been talking about Linux phones, in particular PinePhone from Pine 64 and Librem 5 from Purism. The Reality 2.0 podcast hosted by Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman, Episode 31 has Kyle Rankin as guest. He works with the development of Librem 5. All three of them have a background in the Linux Journal, as has the podcast itself. I recommend this episode for anyone interesting in privacy, security, long lasting mobile phones, Linux phones and some Linux in general. https://www.reality2cast.com/31

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