Linux Mint 13 – Cinnamon Quick Review
I installed Mint 13 with Cinnamon the other day. In a nutshell Cinnamon 1.4 is a major regression from Mint 11’s Gnome 2. Although I haven’t tried them all, from what I hear that is true of all the major players’ desktop environments today.
KDE’s plasma drove me away a couple years ago. I couldn’t stand Unity, so I parted with Ubuntu and found Mint.
I hadn’t tried Gnome 3, I couldn’t comprehend the logic to need extensions for the desktop to complete basic tasks that should be baked into the desktop to begin with. I just couldn’t see how that could be resource friendly. I took Cinnamon for a test drive to find out. After using it long enough to see that quite few basic functions could not be found I noticed the fans in the tower had sped up… Something must be exercising the CPU a bit, opening the resource monitor, it turned out to be Cinnamon using between 20 & 40% on one core. I wasn’t doing anything that should require that kind of CPU cycles, it was just Cinnamon spinning it’s wheels and going nowhere. I loaded XFCE and tried it and the core went back down to between 2 & 4% where it should have been in the first place.
In my mind that pretty much confirms my initial thoughts. Seems to me to be pretty sad days for the Linux desktop, I hope Gnome 3 can get though it’s growing pains. In the meantime I’m going to give Mint 13 with MATE a try.
When I loaded XFCE (I hadn’t tried that before either) I kind of liked what I saw, so if Mint with MATE don’t work out for me I may give Xubuntu a go.
Gotta love the options Linux gives you!
