Apart from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Linux Mint is my next most-used Linux distro. Deepin Linux of course has a place in my heart as well, but right now, the file-managers available are just too 'primitive' for my liking. The Deepin developers themselves seemed to have already decided that the Gnome3-based file-manager ('Files') was a bit of a dog, so started developing one of their own. This is great to see, but right now, the Deepin file-manager itself is fairly limited, and as a result, I rarely use my Deepin installation anymore - I'm waiting for the Beta of the next version to be released.
So right now, Mint 17.3 is my main OS - with the Mate desktop of course! When Mint 18 was released, one of the main Mate developments was the phasing out of the 'old' GTK2 libraries, to make way for their GTK3 equivalents. Given how much I detest the Gnome3 desktop and its associated components, I took this as a bad omen as far as Mate's future was concerned. Therefore I gave Mint 18 a pass. When Mint 18.1 was released however, curiousity got the better of me. Booting 18.1 from a USB drive, I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.
First surprise was that Compiz seemed to work perfectly, right out of the box. Next was how 'unchanged' the Mate desktop appears, despite its use of GTK3 - well done Mate developers! It also ran nice and quickly. Things were looking good.
Given these favourable first impressions, I decided that I may as well replace Mint 17.3, but backed it up beforehand - lucky that I did too!
First problem that became obvious was that 18.1 fails to 'validate' my Transcend SSD. It 'detects' it ok, but when it fails to 'validate' it, it just disables it completely - major bummer! This ruled out any possibility of replacing 17.3, at least by performing a normal installation. Not to be outdone, I then decided to install it on a Hitachi hard-drive, make an image-file of the installation, then overwrite the 17.3 SSD partition with this. After doing all of this, imagine my disgust when Mint 18.3, after booting from the SSD, then proceeded to disable the same SSD when it couldn't complete the 'validation' process! Fighting the good fight, lastly I tried installing a few different kernel versions in the hope that one of them could validate the SSD - nope. Having run out of ideas, I switched to the Hitachi HD for a week of Mint 18.1, to see if it really was worth pursuing any further.
It wasn't. There are just too many bugs present, some old, some newly introduced. The SSD thing itself is a deal-breaker. Then there's Compiz, which despite my earlier hopes, is just too unstable, regularly crashing. Unbelieveably, the audio-preview 'Caja-freezing' bug is still alive & well. Audio-previews, which are disabled by default, tend to suggest that the Mint developers are aware of this problem as well but are unable to fix it. Thing is, when I compile Caja from source, on 17.3 anyway, the problem disappears! A next bug involves audio as well. Speaker audio works fine. However when you plug in a headphone/external speaker plug, audio is always muted, requiring that the user calls up Audio preferences and toggles from Speaker to Headset or vice-versa - doesn't matter which, it just needs to be toggled to start audio getting piped externally. Bloody annoying. Then there's the Bluetooth fiasco. First off, I couldn't get the fully-featured 'Blueman' to work at all. After many hours of trying to get Bluetooth working through 'Blueberry', the feature-lite but new bluetooth manager, I eventually figured out the 'sequence' of actions needed in order to get it running. Problem is, once you disconnect the bluetooth headset, you need to go through the same rigmarole in order to re-connect, which is just not acceptable for everyday use.
There it stands. Another Mint that was worth a look, but with my hardware at least, is just too buggy to be usable. Thanks to the 17.3 partition image that I had created, switching back was a relatively painless procedure. I was impressed though with Mate in general, so much so, that I actually donated €10 towards the project! The developers are doing a great job staying true to the Gnome2 desktop model, despite having had to go the GTK3 route. Although I submitted a bug-report on the SSD problem with Mint, I later tried the same SSD on a HP Pavilion laptop with Mint 18.1 running from the USB, and Mint had no problem detecting & validating the drive. So it's a kernel/hardware combination incompatibility that is causing the problem - after all, on the same Dell laptop, Mints from 16 -> 17.3 work perfectly with the Transcend drive.
