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Re: [LUG] A windows user rescued.... new blog post - please cast your eyes over it...

 

Bad apple, this is a completely value unencumbered question, but - are you a Fedora guy. Just curious.
Cheers.
By the way your posts often crack me up. Thanks for that.

bad apple <ifindthatinteresting@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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

--
Egon Spengler
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