Taking a backward step
I took a regressive step yesterday.
I scrapped Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) in favour of Linux Mint 11 (Katya).
Once again, I was amazed at the simplicity of the move. While selecting the sectors for the installation, I simply told it not to format my Home sector. As a result, I lost nothing and my precautionary backup wasn’t needed.
So why scrap the latest version in favour of an older one? The answer is that I was having too many problems which in fairness I should probably blame on the laptop and not the software. Most of my programmes were noticeably slower, with some abysmally so. As laptops go this isn’t a bad one. It has a dual core AMD Athlon processor with 4Gb of memory so it’s a fairly nippy machine. I suspect that its graphics just wasn’t up to the mark when it came to Gnome 3. But even using Mate or Cinnamon didn’t help.
So now I’m back on Katya and everything is flying along. I had one mysterious problem in Lisa where I couldn’t detect my network scanner. It’s a wireless HP Officejet J4680, and while Lisa picked it up straight away as a printer, the only way I could scan was to bring the laptop to the unit and connect via USB. One of the very first things I did after the reinstall was to check this problem, and there was the scanner ready for use!
My only problem now is that I got somewhat used to the layout and functionality of Gnome 3, and now I have to relearn where everything is.
I suppose in time I will stop looking for the clock in the top right-hand corner of the screen?
I’d heard that you’d had undergone a regression of some sort. Glad to hear it was Linux related and not something of a more personal nature…
….
(much later)
….
Ya’ know, I just realized I started writing this comment 2 hours ago, got called away for dinner and never finished it. Too bad. it was going to be heck of a comment too.
This may sound like heresy but I haven’t once regretted my move. I still zap the cursor up into the top left corner the odd time, and it does mean an extra click to get to my desired programme. A whole click! Wow!!
It’s only now that I realise how many things were excluded from 12. It’s nice to have my old screensaver picture scrolling back. I had also forgotten that neat little yoke where you place the cursor over a music file in Nautilus and the file just starts playing. Little things like that.
But the speed……….!
Took me five hours to write that.
No heresy at all. That’s the beauty of Linux after all–choice. Being both it’s greatest strength and it’s greatest weakness (all apologies to The Architect).
You can still get that ‘Overview’ thing by driving your mouse cursor into the upper left-hand corner (or any other corner) via Compiz, by the way. Unfortunately, I’m booted into LM 12 at the moment and I can’t quite recall what you have to set in the Compiz Settings Manager to get this. I have this set in LMDE so I’ll boot into that later and let you know.