Okay: Linux is free and very cool and, really, is always in kind of a beta state. You know going in that this operating system is free and is designed and maintained by teams of volunteers. That being said modern day Linux is pretty amazing. Anyway – I have been using Mint for awhile and the Cinnamon desktop is pretty darned stable. It doesn’t randomly do weird stuff. Mate is not horrible, but, it periodically does some weird stuff. For instance:
- I created a folder and could not rename the thing: Yeah,this is a thing with Mate – minor, but weird. I had a directory on my desktop and I created a directory inside of that directory. Of course the new directory gave itself the name “untitled folder”. I went to rename the thing and there was no response to my right click. I surfed the web and found this is just a thing with Mate and the Caja desktop manager. Fixing the problem was as simple as re-sizing the larger folder – still, this is pretty bush league compared to (hate to say it) something like a Windows operating system.
- Attempting to add a keyboard shortcut freezes the desktop – ugh: I recall using Mate some time ago and this was a thing – this seems like the kind of thing that would have gotten fixed over time, but, nope.
- Random freezes, especially when copying large files – and, sometimes, freezes when not copying large flles.
- Asks me twice for keyring password every time I open a browser – I have installed three times and it does this every time…..no idea why.
- Some Wine apps cause problems: I have a Scrabble game for Windows (yeah, I’m an old person) and it runs full screen on Linux with Wine. When I exit the game using Cinnamon my desktop looks and functions normally. When I exit the game using Mate and Caja any icons on the bottom half of my desktop are missing and remaining icons are (1) jumbled around, and, (2) cannot be moved. I have to restart the desktop by dropping into a console and typing service lightdm restart
Caja and Mate are just kinda buggy…
I’ve had frequent freezes for reasons I don’t even recall….or never determined in the first place. It’s really a lot of little things. When you install most programs the launch icons won’t show up until after you’ve done a reboot. That happens from time to time with Cinnamon…it’s just not as common.
It’s a bit faster than Cinnamon and usable – but I’m back on Cinnamon.
RANDOM MINT 20: Wine Install, etc.
#!/bin/bash sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key sudo apt-key add winehq.key sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ focal main' sudo apt update sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-stable