New to Linux
 

Hi Everyone.

I have recently shifted to Linux from Windows 7. I installed Linux Mint 13, set it up and it seemed great until one day I ran mintupdate, rebooted, and voila, gnome 3 or cinnamon menus/panels/icons all just vanished. I tried LinuxMint forums, until now I have not recieved any help, strange for such a common distro.

Nevertheless, I decided to move on and try another distro - not because I think Mint is not worth it, but just for the sake of learning, however, I'd prefer a stable one. I did run into quite a few problems with Mint throughout (Cinnamon seems a little buggy).

I was wondering what could have gone wrong in the first place during the update?

Also, is it possible to run openSUSE with 1GB RAM?
Any guide on which distro I should try?


Thanks.


PS: I forgot to mention that I ran Gnome 3 shell and cinnamon on the same machine and it ran quite well with the said amount of RAM

Well if you're keen to learn then troubleshooting is a great way to go about it, you learn a lot about the ins and outs of linux systems. OpenSuSE will be fine with 1GB ram but it really depends on what apps you're intending to run. Just try a few distros til you find one you like

Cinnamon is still very new and it's just a layer on top of Gnome, which I think is very poor. Did you try the Mate desktop in Mint? If I remember correctly, it is installed. At log-in, click on Session (I think that's it) and choose a Mate session rather than a Cinnamon one: it should work.

If your computer can cope with Windows 7, it shouldn't have problems with a KDE distro like OpenSUSE. Since you've been using Mint, another Debian-based distro may be better, though, like Mepis. You might like to look at Xfce, if you're not concerned about eye-candy: SalineOS is good and also Debian based.