Linux Mint
Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” on a seashell software laptop
I really like the Cinnamon desktop environment over the Unity desktop of Ubuntu. I’ve added Cinnamon to my desktop computers for several years now, since Ubuntu 13.04. At first, things went well, but since version 15.10, it’s been crashing a lot more. My one remaining Ubuntu 14.04 desktop system is a hot Cinnamon mess. Cinnamon crashes on it by mid-afternoon, every day I’m teaching.
So, I’ve decided on the path of least resistance–install a distro that uses the desktop I like natively. I installed Linux Mint 17, “Rosa”, on both of my laptops. Rosa had been out for a while, and based on Ubuntu 14.04. Within days, Mint announced the release of version 18, Linux Mint “Sarah”, based on 16.04. A couple of blogs argued that it makes more sense to do a new install of 18 rather than upgrading from 17. Since I only had 17 on for three days, this was an easy decision.
The second install went just fine on my ASUS 15″ laptop. I did a basic install, exactly the same I did for 17, re-formatting, new file system, LVM. The install went without a problem, system restarted no problems. I installed Dropbox, re-synced those files, then added my essential programs. So far so good:
Linux Mint 18, with Coky Lua Red installed
All that remains for me to install are Wine, Scrivener (my writing/authoring package), and virtualization. I had both VMware Workstation and Virtualbox installed under Ubuntu. I’ll probably install just Virtualbox initially. I don’t teach the regular VMware classes for HDS as much as I used to (most of my VMware training is on the UCP converged platform), so I don’t need to upload VMs to lab servers. Given that, and that Virtualbox allows one to create VMs using the VHD (virtual hard drive) format, I should be OK with Virtualbox for a while.
Next up, install “Sarah” on the ultrabook. The mini-tower at my desk will get Linux Mint “Sarah” when the SSD I ordered arrives.
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