Linux Mint 15 Olivia has been officially released a few days back, and its dubbed the most ambitious Mint version ever. The spring edition comes with the standard Cinnamon and MATE flavors, with tons of changes, lots of polish, and solid functionality out of the box. On paper.
It's time to see whether the grand promise stands to a test of reality. We will begin with the Cinnamon version, on a T61 laptop with 2GB RAM, two SSD, Intel graphics, and no proprietary drivers. Then, next week or so, we will branch over to my other laptop with Broadcom and Nvidia stuff, and also test MATE separately. Ought to be interesting.
Live session & installation - Me moron
Mint comes with a nice splash screen, and no flickering and virtual consoles intruding. Then, you hit a familiar Mint desktop, with its staple wallpaper, and the soft gray and green motifs. The Cinnamon environment has been polished extra, with nice notifications in the top right corner. Familiar, solid, good.
However, since I'm an idiot, I forgot to save the screenshots I collected in the live session, and therefore, all of what I'm telling you will have to go without any images. It's a real shame that I'm ruining such a fine review with clumsiness, but hey, it happens.
All in all, everything worked, so that should make you happy.
Using Linux Mint 15 Olivia
Here, we will redo all the missing bits and pieces, I promise. First, Mint installed without any fuss in the quad-boot setup that this machine has, with the bootloader controlled by Ubuntu 12.04 Pangolin. Second, it came up fast and quick. Then, Wireless settings were preserved from the live session without any problems. Bluetooth connectivity worked, as well as Samba sharing. No screenshots yet, I'm teasing you now.
Look & feel
Before doing anything too serious, I decided to beautify my Mint. So I downloaded extra themes, wallpapers, windows borders, and icons, and applied them. Just like we did in the past. Almost trivial.
All of the system items come under a single unified menu, and you no longer have a conflict between Cinnamon and Gnome 3, and no duplicate or semi-crippled items. Moreover, to aid its friendly aspect toward new users, Olivia ships with a drivers utility, which lets you search for proprietary drivers for your hardware, akin to the older and now missing Jockey tool.
Mint comes with an improved theme management, allowing you to download online themes quickly and easily using the system settings menu. Furthermore, you can add desklets, which are sort of like widgets, to your screen. The current collection is not that big, but it ought to get better and bigger with time. Like other system items, the default, necessary items are protected from removal or change.
The file manager is also quite neat, and has useful right-click options. Another great thing is that Copy and Move to options now include all items listed in your Favorites in the left sidebar, so you can send files to NFS or Samba shares, directly. And you also have disk usage bars for your filesystem and home directory.
Multimedia playback - 99% Perfect
I tried quite a few things. There was Flash on Youtube, 720p trailer on the iTunes website, so this would be what, Apple QuickTime, MP3 files, as well as Microsoft Media Server (MMS) streaming. No worries, whatsoever.
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