I installed the Mate version yesterday. It worked and looked good but not for me. I installed the Cinnamon version today and this is more to my liking. I wish I could get a 3d cube desktop.
I was running Ubuntu 13.10 with Cinnamon 2 desktop. I just blew out my ROOT partition, replacing Ubuntu with Mint 16/Cinnamon. Runs great!!! Because I had /HOME on a separate partition and used the same user name and password everything worked fine. Firefox even still had my add-ons and passwords. Wallpaper and desktop icons were all still the same too. Ahhh, I love Linux.
I'm waiting for a long weekend (ironically I just had a 4 day weekend) so if I have any issues with the upgrade, I can re-install from scratch. Graywolf - I'm glad switching over was a clean breeze. I've loved the fact that your home can be on a separate partition and then Linux can be re-installed in a flash without messing up your documents. I try to keep all of my game there too. Worst case scenario I'll just re-install LInux and then mess with a few settings and I'm ready to go. Was there a specific reason for leaving Ubuntu?
Cinnamon is my preferred DE and since it is developed by the Mint team I figured I might as well come back to Mint. I still have the solid foundation of 13.10 which gives me better driver support for my Intel HD 3000 video card. I have heard of slight performance increases when using Cinnamon with Mint 16 as opposed to Arch or Ubuntu, which makes sense to me since they are the developers. LAS has a review up on LM 16 by the way.
Regarding the Mate desktop and the 3d cube effects, does anyone know why they don't work? After all Mate is a fork of the old Gnome 2 DE, where Compiz worked flawlessly. I am aware Kwin could be used for this purpose, but I really don't like KDE.
Nope, never use the 3D cube. I'm sure its some kind of plugin for the desktop manager or windows manager.
In step number 6 HERE, during install if you choose "Something else" at the bottom, you can setup partitions yourself. I did 15 GB for ROOT (which is way more than enough), I usually do equal to or 1.5 times the amount of RAM as a SWAP partition. And then the rest I set as /HOME. Then next time you reinstall Linux you choose "Something else" again and choose that same partition as ROOT and tell it to format it. Same one for SWAP. And same one for /HOME but DO NOT format it. In the reinstall if you use the same user name and password the permissions will all still be fine for your documents. Most of the time I'm using Ubuntu based distros. I haven't tried it going to a distro based on a different Linux but I would think it would still work. Usually the only thing different directory wise on distros is system side, not /HOME side. Edit: Just remembered. I have done that when going from Crunchbang to Linux Mint and it worked fine. But then Crunchbang is Debian based and Ubuntu derives from Debian too.
I love partitioning for Linux too. Gives you so much freedom! 500 GB Drive: 25 GB - / 4 GB - swap 250 GB - /home 200 GB - /games or other
