Oh jeez, what happened to our beloved Linux posterchild? Don’t Clem and his gang give it enuff of TLC anymore?

Hej friends and lovers,

I know some of you clever peeps have switched operations from Windows over to Linux and, since you are wonderful and great human beings, you choose Linux Mint and, since you’re lazy buggers, you choose its standard desktop, Cinnamon. But now, what do I hear from diehard minty fan Jack M. Germain?

Lots of stumbling occurred while I was running Tessa on three computers that ran previous versions without encountering those issues. Out of the box, the performance was sluggish. At times the desktop interaction and system activity become unresponsive for fleeting seconds. A collection of little things and a few major annoyances made working with Tessa into an unhappy computing experience.

I deal primarily with the Cinnamon desktop, but the issues were not isolated to it. Some published documents offering “performance booster” tips for Linux Mint include fixes for MATE and XFCE editions.

I got used to the performance malaise to an extent, and I tried to ignore the issues. However, in recently testing other Cinnamon desktop iterations, I noticed that those same issues were not present.

Two that come to mind are Feren OS and Condres OS. There are others.

Hmmm, as true readers of OrcaBlog you know the editrix wasn’t too impressed by either of those, but Jack wrote good things about them. So maybe if you also feel perfomance hits and other weirdnesses, maybe you should try one of those. I hear Feren OS is even based on Mint. Hmmm, dunno what I’d make of a spin of a spin of a spin, but it’s entirely your decision.

If I were you, and had already some experience with Linux and knew my way around but was very much in love with Cinnamon (and, honestly, why wouldn’t you be?) I’d maybe try some Debian distro with Cinnamon DE. Oh hey, why not just switching to Mint’s own Debian spin-off, LMDE 3? It always was the faster version compared to bog-standard Mint. Or … be brave and install Manjaro or Namib! Both distros have Cinnamon flavours available.

And if you wanna do yourself a favour pleez read the comments under Jack’s article, too. Those problems seem to be far wider spread than I initially thought. It’s not Linux and not Cinnamon, they both have reached a good grade of maturity. It’s a problem caused by the Mint developers, which suffer the rock star syndrome and are full of themselves and hi as a kite. 😮