Preview: Elementary OS 2 "Luna" Beta 1

Almost 2 years ago, a bit after its official release, I reviewed Elementary OS 0.1 "Jupiter". There I said that there was a ton of hype surrounding its release, and that I had bought into the hype a little bit. Since then, there has been hype of a few more orders of magnitude surrounding version 2 "Luna", given the higher expectations and greater promises. Even so, there hasn't been an official release yet, so I am reviewing the first official pre-release version possible. I'll probably review the official release when that comes out as well.

Main Screen

Elementary OS was born out of the Elementary project, which started as simply a theming project for GNOME 2 and GTK+ applications. It spawned more sophisticated projects like Nautilus Elementary, and then eventually turned into an OS project. The first version was essentially a lighter, faster, optimized, and prettier-looking but otherwise standard Ubuntu-based GNOME 2 distribution. This second version promises much more. For one, many of the GNOME applications and even the GNOME desktop environment itself have been banished in favor of Elementary-developed applications. For another, many further optimizations and design decisions have been made to make it stand out from the pack.

I tried Elementary OS using a live USB made with MultiSystem. Follow the jump to see what it's like, how it has improved, and whether it is worth the hype. For the record, it didn't work correctly the first time that I tried it, so what follows is the result of the second attempt. Also, be aware that in this review more than in others, the focus will be on the desktop environment and not as much on whether specific applications did or did not work.

Featured Comments: Week of 2012 December 16

There was one post that got a comment this past week, so I am reposting that one.

Done with 5th Semester!

Reader Mechatotoro said, "Good work, my friend! It's great to hear you also made it through this intense year. Enjoy your free time--you earned it!"

Thanks to him for that comment during the past week. This coming week, I will be spending time with family out of town, so I don't anticipate posting much until after new year's day. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting! Also, happy past-doomsday, happy holidays, and happy new year!

Done with 5th Semester!

Wow. This semester was longer and far more difficult than any previous one here. Most of that is courtesy 8.13, though 8.231 and 14.04 were certainly contributing factors. Final exams were also fairly challenging as well this time. My only regret is that my UROP somewhat fell by the wayside as a consequence. I really enjoyed learning what I did in my classes, and the experiences I gained were immensely rewarding in the end, but I am so glad that I am done with it now. Right now, I'm just focusing on going home in a few hours and spending quality winter break time with family and friends. I will be back over IAP to continue my UROP. After that, in the spring semester, I intend to take fewer classes, because I realize that I may have bitten off a little more than I could chew this semester. Anyway, happy holidays everyone!

Featured Comments: Week of 2012 December 9

There was one post that got a handful of comments this past week, so I will try to repost most of those.

Review: Linux Mint 14.1 "Nadia" MATE + GNOME 3/Cinnamon

An anonymous reader said, "It's too bad you didn't get to experience Mint 14 with Cinnamon. I have it running on both a Pentium E5300 desktop with Nvidia 440 GT, and on a 6-year-old laptop with Intel C2D T7200 with Intel 945GM integrated video, and it runs great on both."
Another anonymous commenter had this to say: "Cinnamon now comes with Nemo instead of Nautilus. I like it, but I am o so missing the ability to have scripts and actions from within Nemo. In my opinion it was made default file browser too early."
Reader ArcherB shared this experience: "I just installed MATE on top of my standard Ubuntu installation. Works great without the stability issues of Mint. Tried Cinnamon, but, like the author ran across, it was simply not stable enough for me. It would launch and run for a while, but then weirdness would crop up. It would either lock up, "tear", or certain aspects of it would fail. MATE works fine for me, so I'll stick with that and KDE."
Commenter Jonc said, "I've run into no stability problems with Mint 14.4 Cinnamon. Or any other problems. One of the pleasures of Cinnamon is that it requires little customization, unlike many other distributions that tout their configurability but release products that are ugly and disfunctional in their default state. I've found MATE to be slow after using it on Mint, Fedora and OpenSuse. The transitition from Gnome is incomplete (Check the Startup Apps: several instances of MATE processes running in parallel with their Gnome equivalents). I also wonder if the resources behind MATE are enough to sustain it and if it can make a successful transition to GTK3. If I wanted to run a Gnome 2 desktop, I'd go with CentOS. Now, that does require a good bit of tweaking to get a good looking usable desktop, but it is fast and very reliable."

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. This coming week, I have final exams, but after that is finished, I'll probably have a post out looking back on this semester along with possibly another review. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Review: Linux Mint 14.1 "Nadia" MATE + GNOME 3/Cinnamon

Wow. It's been a really long time since I've had the time to sit down and do a review like this. The reason for that is because this semester has been incredibly busy in pretty much every way, and today was finally the last day to turn in problem sets and other assignments. Now, I can finally do this review.

Main Screen + Linux Mint Menu

Linux Mint needs no introduction here. However, one thing to note is that this is the first release since version 4.X "Daryna" to have a version number with a digit after a decimal point. The reason for that was that some sneaky bugs got past final-release testing, so they needed to be fixed and the ISO file needed to be released as an updated image. Right now, the editions with MATE and GNOME 3/Cinnamon are out in final form, so those are the ones I am going to be reviewing today. For reference, the KDE and Xfce are coming soon, as those already have release candidates out now.

I tested this as usual on a live USB system made with MultiSystem. I did not test the installation. Follow the jump to see how this fares relative to my current preferred version 13 LTS "Maya".

Featured Comments: Week of 2012 November 11

There hasn't been a post featuring comments in a while because there hasn't been any post that has gotten comments in a while...until this week. This past week, there was one post that got a handful of comments, so I'll repost most of those.

Long-Term Review: openSUSE 12.2 KDE

An anonymous reader shared, "Regarding this: the YaST2 GUI package manager and updater would not work as it would complain about PackageKit... OpenSUSE uses PackageKit, because of the KDE appstore application(called Apper). This constantly looks for updates and intervenes with Yast (very annoying). The solution is simple: remove Apper as soon as possible after every OpenSUSE install. Personally, I never encountered the problems with Okular you described."
Another anonymous commenter had this open question, "long time ago , last time i tried a Desktop linux, i did some simple test, using kde. I Opened a remote SMB share and play a 100 Mb avi. What i had : the system told me it was coping the entire file in /tmp and after that it was going to open it. It did 'not work and copy the entire file in the local system is quite a silly thing. Working on a big company it happen many times a day to open file in remote SMB shares ( linux , Netapp , readyNAs and others. ) If this thing will not be fixed linux on the desktop of a big company can't go much further IMHO. Stefano . Italy."
Yet another anonymous reader provided a response to that: "Next time, try using an application which uses the .gvfs system like Nautilus or from within gnome / xfce and NOT kde. Then you will not need it to be copied first and then played."
Still another anonymous commenter said, "You can remove Apper, but what I've done (with both openSUSE 12.1 and 12.2) is to simply stop Apper Monitor from starting up (Main Menu > Favorites > Configure Desktop > System Administration > Startup and Shutdown > Service Manager -> uncheck the box next to "Apper Monitor"). Then, I think you'll need to restart the session. After doing that, I have had no problems simply using YaST Online Update Also, I read this comment at DistroWatch -- if you don't remove or disable Apper, you may want to check to see if this solves the problem: "The package kit problem can be solved by editing the list of sources. The DVD is left enabled and package kit keeps looking for it." Besides that issue, openSUSE 12.2 looks very good after a couple of months on two different computers."

Thanks to all those who commented on that post. After the middle of this coming week, I will be home for Thanksgiving and will likely be busy with all the associated events there, meaning that I probably won't have much out this week. Also, if you look at the post from this past week, I've said that I probably won't be doing many distribution reviews until possibly IAP. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Long-Term Review: openSUSE 12.2 KDE

I did this long-term review on my normal UROP desktop computer with the 64-bit edition of the OS. Follow the jump to see how it fared. Also do note that there are more days logged because I intend to use it for about 60-80 full hours of work, which is the equivalent of 7-10 full days in the summer, though now I am working on a part-time basis as classes have started. Finally, for some reason Blogger decided to delete the content of what I had here, so everything up until "Day 2" is very much paraphrased from memory.

2012 Election

This is just a quick post that tomorrow is the 2012 election in the US. I have voted absentee from my home state. I know a lot of people who are apathetic about voting because they feel like in the face of large corporations and lobbyists, their votes don't mean much. I used to have an apathetic attitude like that too...until SOPA/PIPA got rejected. What I learned from that is that the people still matter; no matter how much corporations may support a particular agenda and no matter how much it seems like a local or state politician has been bought out by special interests, if people like us bombard them with letters to support a particular position that we want, the politicians will always come cowering to us rather than the lobbyists because it is our votes in an election that matter at the end of the day. In short, your vote does count, and democracy is not dead, so get out and vote!

Featured Comments: Week of 2012 October 7

There haven't been any "Featured Comments" posts in the last few weeks due to the general dearth of posts in that time stemming from my busy schedule. There was one post this past week that got a handful of comments, so I will repost all of those.

Review: Cinnarch 2012.10.01

Reader Alexandre Filgueira, who is the lead developer of Cinnarch, said, "Hi, [...] Thanks for the review. It was very interesting. I wrote down some things that you said to improve the distro I will include a link to your review in our monthly stats."
Commenter Greg shared, "I accidently messed up my install by editing the menu while trying to move my WINE app from Other to WINE submenu. I unclicked my app off the other menu and my screen started flashing and then got an error saying OOPS. So I couldn't log in anymore without this error. So I chroot into my install from the livecd, cleared my home folder and rebooted. My install went back to a more "default" Cinnamon. I have the show desktop back, the icons were the gnome icons, the menu had the widget instead of the Cinnarch logo. I like it. Also, I uninstalled files-bzr and installed nemo-fm. I think it's better because it gives more options, like a location bar, which I have a hard time living without."
Reader Eddie agreed: "Totally correct. Cinnamon is a work in progress. It's not bad now but still needs some polish. Just a checking it seems that the problems are more related to Cinnamon than Gnome3 and I do believe they are upstream problems as you stated. Anyway, nice review."

Commenter Denis Leukhin said simply, "Great review! Thanks."

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. I was intending to do a review for this coming week, but it didn't work out at all, so I won't be posting anything else about that. I probably won't have time for many other posts, as has become the norm this semester. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Review: Cinnarch 2012.10.01

I haven't gotten the chance to do a review in a while. It's a long weekend, so I finally do have some more free time now, and I need to take a break from the otherwise endless stream of work, so I'm taking a look at Cinnarch now.

Cinnarch is a relatively new distribution on the scene. True to its name, it is based on Arch Linux and uses GNOME 3/Cinnamon as its primary DE. At first I figured that the packaging would be fairly stock, but as it turns out (and as you will see later in this post), there are a few other mild customizations present as well.

I tried this on a live USB using MultiSystem; I did not try the installation. To be honest, this is going to be more of a look at GNOME 3/Cinnamon in general rather than Cinnarch specifically as a distribution, though there may be certain things in the distribution affecting the experience of the DE. Follow the jump to see what it's like.