Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa - A wilted flower

You will hate me for this article. But it must be done. A short, utterly negative review of Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa 64-bit edition, briefly tested on a laptop with UEFI, Secure Boot and GPT, culminating in total network failure over several live session attempts, inability to copy files from Samba shares or print to Samba, decent multimedia playback - HD video, MP3 and associated bugs, several other observations, and more. I will revisit Rosa, but today is a bad, bad day.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-mint-rosa.html


Cheers,
Mrk

 

uff... chill out Mrk
but you're right, these type of failures are inexcusable

 

Sad, I thought Mint would evolve to become the most usable Newbie Distro.

 

It has already, for a long time now. Keep in mind this is just one person's experience on just one (or a few) machine(s). There are many many others who use Mint without any issues, which is what keeps it at #1 in hits on Distrowatch for years now.

 

And I still love and use Rafaela daily. Which is why loathe regressions.
Mrk

 

Mrkvonic, which is the last stable Mint 64 BIT ?

 

I did an in-vivo upgrade to Rosa and it worked fine - but for me Rafaela was doing quite well.
Rosa is fine when you go the upgrade route, and then avoid the network problems I had on the G50.
That's to come in a separate article.
Mrk

 

Is it the Cinnamon release you tried?
I ask this because the KDE one is still in beta.

 

17.3 appears to have some issues. Things will disappear or clicking on something starts to bring it up then it disappears.

 

I made a 17.3 Cinnamon VM. So far, I see almost no difference from 17.2, at least in the safe environment of a Virtualbox VM. So no real reason to upgrade my two Rafeala installs. I'm downloading Fedora 23 right now which will be the next distro I'm going to try.

 

I upgraded by update manger 17.2 xfce to 17.3 xfce so far no problems

 

I wish Mint had an Advanced installer like Debian. This way users could chose wether to install those proprietary programs or not, and configure the system to their taste.

If anyone's interested, try the Debian "mini.iso" on Debian's ftp server. It's a 27 MB ISO image that is close to the Net installer, you download everything from their servers (so you're up-to-date) and you can also install sid without having to install Testing (and then upgrade).

 

Well, it looks like my initial impression of Rosa in Virtualbox was mistaken. I've found a pretty serious and annoying GUI bug. I had to make a Rafaela VM to confirm it was Rosa and not Virtualbox. Under certain conditions, an application's window will be minimized and then it won't restore. You can only close the application, all the other right click options do nothing. This doesn't happen at all in Rafaela. So this is a buggy release that should have been worked on more before being let out. It took me a while to figure out what was causing what. Mint comes with Virtualbox support built in and I installed VM additions without knowing this and that caused other problems. I tried a clean install of Rosa in the VM and the installation program froze minimized and confirmed the bug was in Rosa.

 

Linux Mint: from Rafaela to Rosa

Back in the game. Here's a short but happy review of Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa with Cinnamon desktop, following an in-vivo upgrade from Rafaela, focusing on the upgrade process, changes and new things, overall functionality and stability, applications compatibility, performance, resource usage, battery life, some small problems, and more. Have fun.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-mint-rafaela-to-rosa.html


Cheers,
Mrk