Linux Mint 15: C & M

Cinnamon and Mate. Review-like ...
I did it for nostalgic reasons (Mint was my first distro on Linux road; and also because I started this blog as intended help for n00bs.
Both Mint ISOs were 64bit Lives, written with Unetbootin to USB.

# Cinnamon
I didn't bother to install, just clicked around in Live.
It booted OK and desktop looked (again very) traditional Mint.
Cinnamon is simple-user oriented, allright. No question about that. I - as an advanced user - shouldn't whine about things-missing... but I do anyway.

Pros:
- Two panels are possible! Progress!
- Driver Manager: Now separate app.
- Software Sources: Much better usability.
- Get some frills and bling stright from internet. And new data is NOT mixed with default. You can pick what you want to add.
- Classic menu still installable (maybe - as it failed in Live).
- Login Window conf: New place to play.
- Cinnamon is ready for all usual user tasks, and has all ubuntuish 'restricted extras' (codecs, etc) installed.

Cons:
- MintMenu is still not resizable, not very-much-configurable Windowish thingy.
- File Manager Nemo is average. Definitely better than current Nautilus, but despite of various preferences, it's not especially configurable. Partitions list is not very clear and it is not in logical order. If partitions happen to be without labels, then it's probably total mess. (And the same goes for Mate, and it's even worse.) And of course you still can't remove some bookmarks. (And it's even worse in Mate.) Media handling default is clearly for idiot (err... careless?) user - play everything automatically.
- There is 'settings' icon on panel... it behaves ... strange and stupid way? Why it's there?
Desklets: Useless bling. Trying to be KDE?
- Startup Apps: Dumb-user stuff. Very few items there. Has 'maybe-options' all started... and real important things are not shown at all.
- Preferences: Looooong list of things... some of them are in System Settings, others you can get when using those apps. I suppose it's a bit confusing for Mints' intended users.

I think Mint Cinnamon devs succeeded again. It's a distro for a genuine 'User'. Nice. Smooth. Works out of box. Reminds of MS Windows - in a good way.
And it's definitely not for someone who wants to seriously tweak, tune and customize.
It's very good for a common user, and not so good for a tweaker.

# MATE
This one was installed for real. And strange enough - first Live boot hung just before desktop, I wrote USB over and then it booted OK.
As an afterthought - could be the same bug what appears later.
Installer is Ubuntus' usual - simple. Desktop is copy of previous one (Cinnamon).
Boot came with greeter error - but it 'switched' something and recovered. Next time was OK. After that I got some 'recursive error...' and everything froze, reboot - and greeter problem again.
By the way - boot time is twice longer than Debian Wheezys'.
Here, like in Cinnamon, everything is installed out of box.
Some things (Caja, Menu opening, System Monitor, ...) are a bit laggy to open, in operation, or when closing.

PROS:
- The same as in Cinnamon.
Additionally:
- There are no desklets and no strange 'settings'-thing on panel. Oh, good!
- I might be wrong, but there seems to be more configurable items in Control Centre compared to Cinnamon.
- Startup Apps: Sure, a lot more options to check/uncheck, and those are real, important ones.
- Services: Kinda 'Startup Apps' part separately. I am not sure if it's good to separate them... but they are available - which is good thing allright.
- Mint screensaver: Whatever looks better than stone-age Xscreensaver. Good.

CONS:
- There seems to be serious issue with boot and/or greeter.
- Mintmenu looks different here. Still can't resize it. I still don't like it. But classic one is available (pro-thing).
- File Manager Caja seems even less pleasant than Cinnamons' Nemo. List of partitions is especially cryptic, and default bookmarks are ALL undeletable.
- Time/Date on panel is automatically taken from location and not from language used - which is quite bizarre thing to do.
- Preferences and Control Center  are duplicates.
- Compositing seems to be the usual: tearing when scrolling and so on.

All in all: Mate seems better than it was in previous version. Generally a nice desktop for doing all simple user-stuff in most efficient way. It's n00b-friendly. And it leaves a bit more playground than Cinnamon. Definitely recommended to Linux newcomers. The same as with Cinnamon - userfriendly.

6. Mint 14.1 Cinnamon + Mate

How Mate looks (as of February 2013)

Those two desktops co-existed almost two weeks. Record for me, of course. Partially it's explainable by my then-fixation with software. Means, I didn't make too many efforts to better my Linux (read: break it).

SOME OBSERVATIONS

One thing which makes a noob-user gawk is main menu hodge-podge after successfully adding another session. Means – new DE adds its menu-items to your existing menu. Not all of them – there are some rules – but quite a lot, and in this case there were bunch of same things (editor, calculator, terminal etc) but of slightly different version. Explainable by mixed Gnome 2 and 3 sources. Then I had Cinnamon-settings in Mate, and mateconf-editor in Cinnamon...

Made me quite angry, you know – I had carefully perused nicely available (not every distro provides that) menu-editor, had made some group-changes (shitty thing to do!), uninstalled apps, added apps... I had made a system, and now it was …$%$... very unruly.

Cinnamon and Mate both have editor for such kind of work. After you have hidden/shown/moved/deleted things in both sessions' menus – it stays like that. Except maybe couple of items which might have their own life and behave … differently despite of your wishes. But that's the free thinking of Linux.

I am not going to blab about how editors exactly work. The process is quite self-explaining. Try it. But try not to delete things only because you can – to get them back is not self-explaining.

Mate has panels to add! They are movable and re-sizeable. You can swap your Stuff between them. Or move this Stuff into different order. And you can add new Stuff. Right-click the panel, discover the menu and find out. It's possible to create quite funny mess! Just kidding. Or not...

Settings/Appearance. The place to visit, and fast – to show those devs that they do not know an iota about real design. Play around, get new themes, icons, and shit. They do not work all as they are supposed to – but that's a part of fun. Throw out what you don't like. Tweak others (if you can). Download even more themes, icons, stuff. In some point you will have problems – as said, not everything is 100% compatible, despite being there and free to take.

INFO. Took me some time to get the idea: There are two separate managers in Linux for making windows on your desktop. One makes window frames (windows manager), another creates inside-style of every window (desktop manager). So you can apply features from different theme sources – frames from one theme, insides from another – and of course, icons from third. I like it.

Customizing, tweaking:
I like darker wallpapers and darker panels – means some black text gets invisible. Changing themes makes some things better, but probably not all. Panel-clock text, for my theme choices, tended to remain black. Following is taken from Mints' web-tutorials, and it also works. So, proceed like that:

Simple text file (use default text editor) has to be created, name has to be .gtkrc-2.0 (with dot at the beginning too!), save it to ~home/username/ - means, to root of your real home directory.
Put following code into your new file.

"my-panel-clock" 
{ 
fg[NORMAL] = "#FFFFFF" 
font_name = "sans bold 11" 
} 
widget "*.clock-applet-button.*" style "my-panel-clock"

Save. After logout/login – clock text will be white. #FFFFFF means white and font_name is also place to test your hand.

Silly and annoying default time-formats.
Sequence %F %H:%M displays the time in the format 2012-10-13 15:17.

Problem is, Mate clock doesn't have field for adding this. To aid comes mateconf-editor. Open editor, navigate through tree to: /apps/panel/applets/applet_clock

and click on "format", change value to "custom" - then click on "custom_format" field and change it to abovementioned string.

Took me several tries because of moronic mistakes, but finally it definitely worked.

More interesting and educating reading concerning time-formats.

5. Two different sessions

I decided to make my first two-different-sessions install.

Add Mate to already installed Cinnamon, that is.

I tried to install Mate through Synaptic – repository package is 'mint-meta-mate'. No cookie. Synaptic refused to write over one specific file (which name I can't remember), but it was Mint's identity file. Impossible to have two of those, wrote Clem himself somewhere.
Well - me noob, not finding solution, abandoning ze plan (though, I had impression that it is possible to install without this troublesome file... never found out how).

WHINE: 80% of what you find with Google is a crap. Sifting through it can be sometimes a bit too much... Two hours tend to be limit for me – after what I try to find other solution, well, like ignore, delete, format or simple cursing.

But, hallelujah, this time I already had new sneaky plan – to download Mate piecemeal from repository and install it as Mate and not as mint-mate metapackage.

Explaining: Mate is separate/independent DE used by Linux Mint (and already many others). Mints' own DE is Cinnamon. When Mint makes Linux Mint Mate then the original Mate is a bit tweaked and package will be 'mint-meta-mate' (or, if ISO, Linux Mint Mate). If You get Mate from source, in original form, then it doesn't have any Mint's fingerprints on it.

Who didn't catch the difference (DE compared to distro)– other DE-s can be installed as sessions, from inside your existing DE, no ISO-s needed. You install it, log out and have new choice in log-in sessions. Nothing appears in grub boot menu. Comfy, no bootin' every time.

And – no need to add drivers, flash, fonts etc again – those are system-wide.
Well, main menu will be fucked-up - more about this in next chapter.