Linux Mint: first impressions

Some time ago I saw on Habrahabr the announcement of the Russian-language Linux Mint 8 Helena , impressed with beautiful pictures and the promise of various buns when switching from Windows. And so, two days ago it happened - in the evening, having nothing to do, I wrote down the disc, installed it, tried it, poked it and ... completely forgot about Windows. It just so happened that the seven, with all its beauties, was relegated to the secondary role of "operating system for games."


Warning: for those who sit on * nix for more than two days, the material will be useless. Unless for the sake of interest.

Installation

The installation process was great, thanks to the pleasant interface of the LiveCD and the high-quality translation into Russian. The only thing I did during the installation was to select the “find a place for installation” option, after which everything was marked out by itself and Linux was placed on the previously released 15 gigabytes. In GRUB-Loader (a bootloader that allows you to select the desired OS when the computer starts up) Mint immediately added Win7, so you didn't even have to pick anything. Is that the sound when booting from the LiveCD is not picked up, I had to sit in silence for twenty minutes.
')

Soft

Immediately after installation, I sat poking around in the packages, because the program manager was not so impressed with me. And it turned out that I don’t have to change most of the desktop applications during the transition! Perhaps it played a decisive role.
Remained in the transition:

• Audacity is a very good audio editor.
• Inkscape is a vector graphics editor.
• GIMP - the smartest raster graphics editor, runs twice as fast as on Win7!
• Opera - Firefox and Chrome here.
• FileZilla Client is an excellent FTP client.
• Skype is just needed.
• QutIM - IM with support for Jabber, OSCAR, MRIM and more.
• IDLE is a Python development environment.
• OpenOffice.org is not pleased with the speed of work, unlike GIMP.
• VLC is a video player, though, this is not its best use.
• gedit - a text editor, after a brief tinkering in the settings, replaced the usual PSPad.
• 7-Zip - archiver.

In general, almost the entire set of office applications has not changed a bit when the system is changed. But something is missing ...

Audio player

Although my favorite XMPlay perfectly worked under Wine, in addition to small graphic artifacts in some skins, I had to give it up and search for something native.
The list of candidates included:

• Amarok - eliminated immediately, because I do not like combines.
• XMMS - in spite of the fact that it used it once, was also not particularly impressed.
• Audacious2 - a player unknown to me earlier won the tender!

Having added the XMP plugin to Audacious2, I got almost the same XMPlay with a slightly uncomfortable winamp-like interface.
Note: I tried to put tar.bz2 with the GlobalHotkeys plugin for a long time, because I did not find it in the repository. After several unsuccessful attempts, I looked more closely at the settings of the player, and found that the plug-ins are installed all at once. Very unusual for a Windows user.

LinTray or whatever

The first thing I missed was the keyboard layout indicator. As it turned out, everything is very simple
Right-click near the tray-> Add to the panel [PrintScreen does not work while holding RMB?]
From what was there to me:

• Mentioned already layout indicator .
• Deskbar is a very handy thing to launch and search for applications.
• Forced completion - kills any application, in contrast to the xkill command there is an opportunity to change your mind and press Esc.

By the way, when adding indicators, two layouts appeared at once, apparently, one of them should have been visible immediately. Nothing, the second can now be removed.

Local software

In the repositories there was a bunch of useful things that you can only dream about in Win.

• Guake - the console as in the game Quake, only appears now by pressing F12, and not tilde. Thanks to this uncomplicated console with tabs and a nice interface, working in the terminal is much nicer.
• htop is a very convenient task manager, although it only came in handy for me once.
• gpointing-device-settings is a utility for customizing manipulators like a mouse and touchpad. I was extremely happy with it, because under Win7 I could not disable the touchpad due to the lack of drivers for a laptop for this system. By the way, the touchpad can be cut down when the mouse is connected or typing , see just do not break anything.
• cairo-dock is a very beautiful doclet with OpenGL support, which has much better effects than RocketDock or ObjectDock. In order not to ask too many questions, it is better to run with the parameter "-o".
• rdesktop is an RPD client. I looked at a couple of graphic wrappers for it, I didn’t like one of them, it’s easier to perform from the console. It is better not to maximize the full screen (I never found how to minimize it), but run it with the larger window sizes.

What is very pleased:

• Beautiful interface and very beautiful effects.
• Screenshots are saved in PNG. Previously, you had to use XnView for this purpose.
• No more need to use nix software binaries!
• Very good localization
• ???
• NEVERBALL !!!

What a little upset:

• After the nth restart, the animation image at system bootup changed from pleasant Mint to the eerie Ubuntu.
• When you open a new window, it sets the active keyboard layout, rather than the default one.
• Once the system stopped responding to mouse and keyboard events. I had to kill X.

At last

Very useful article and one more . On these links you will read almost everything you need to know a beginner linuksoid. Everything else is on the forums and in your new community .

Have a good transition!

Ps. Thanks to Veider for the invite, thanks to him this post was edited a bit, got rid of spelling errors and moved from the sandbox to the blog. Despite the fact that at the moment I have been using Mint one and a half times longer than at the time of writing the post, I decided not to change anything in the text. Now I am a little away from the search for replacements for Win-applications and have dug into scripting, so the next article about the not easy life of a Win user under Linux will most likely be on this topic.

UPD: Transferred to the collective blog.