[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On 09/01/13 19:52, Roland Tarver wrote: > Before it died (after being sat on! lol) my netbook was mint 12 xfce, > but i just installed lxde. So am I missing something here? What is the > actual point of having, for example, 3 versions of mint? With each one > defaulting to a particular desktop [ kde | xfce | lxde ] ? Very little point, in my opinion - traditionally, it was that the space used on the installer was limited but as most distros have now abandoned trying to keep the ISOs below 700Mb to fit on a CD and switched to DVD or USB images instead, it does seem pretty redundant. Personally I'd prefer to have either a much larger installer that simply asked which of the included DEs you wanted, or have the installer simply fetch the desired DE software directly from the repos (an even better choice as then the installer could be much smaller again). Admittedly, option 2 does presume you live in a first world country with decent broadband access which perhaps many users don't. However, considering that Mint/Ubuntu and several others already presume the broadband prerequisite as they will attempt to sync and upgrade during the install anyway, it seems doubly stupid. This is why the option to download a simple and small netboot image that merely bootstraps the target machine and starts the installer, fetching all further software directly is such a good one (hello Debian network installer image). > > Asked another way what is the difference, apart from the desktop, > between each version of mint? Don't forget Mint also offer Gnome in Mate and Cinnamon versions, to further confuse you. Apart from that, there are no differences between the different flavours apart from which DE they will default to installing (and of course you can just apt-get install any further DEs later anyway). There are however some different editions: 1: Regular - this is standard Mint, with various DE options 2: OEM - designed for distributors, rather than consumers 3: No-codecs - theoretically for countries (USA, Japan, etc) with patents allowed on software and where things like Flash, etc are restricted. In practice, I suspect absolutely nobody *ever* downloads this crippled version 4: LMDE - Debian Edition, based on snapshots of Debian Testing rather than Ubuntu. I don't imagine this gets a lot of downloads either, although sound in theory. Most people would just actually use Debian instead. I agree that all this is a bit confusing. I'm not a huge fan of Ubuntu or Mint personally, although I do think they're both pretty good for less technical users. Regards -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq