When you say under heavy development... Who's distro are you talking about when you say that? Mint? As you mentioned, Mint8 XFCE was released yesterday... along with Mint8LXDE having come out of beta (perhaps you overlooked that?).

And are you certain that LXDE is the problem here?
It seems to be when you retrofit it (as an afterthought) on TOP of an existing Gnome distro that we see distros with problems. To illustrate my point: KNOPPIX has been using LXDE for quite some time now, and it works great! No betabewareheavydevelopment there.

What I am starting to perceive, is that there are incompatibilities between Ubuntu (especially 9.10) and LXDE... because I've seen a few distros that attempt to deliver what Lubuntu promises to be and they all have more problems with 9.10, while the versions based on 9.04 work but are beta quality.

Will Lubuntu become the better choice, once it comes out, instead of MintLXDE?
Note the ISO sizes... Lubuntu is going to be around 350MB, while MintLXDE is the same order of size ISO as Mint standard edition... not exactly what we're coming to expect from the newer LXDE distros. Ditto for the XFCE community edition.

Now are we going to see a Mint Lubuntu in the future? When Lubuntu is finished?

This begs the question:
Is Mint8Lxde just the wrong distro for running lxde?
And if so... do we go on to ask whether Mint8xfce is the wrong distro for running xfce?
Same for Fluxbox, etc.

Are we back to square 0, and need to evaluate every distro, to find a faster more compact one?

What are plans over at Mint? Have they even considered this yet? To create a Mint Lubuntu?

Personally I don't care for Mintinstall in addition to synaptic... it just makes me use twice the amount of tools to add and remove programs, and I don't quite understand why both are required. I like Mint because everything works out of the box, whereas it doesn't in Ubuntu, and I hate Canonical for that - for their stubbornness to not finish the job and make a distro that is truly for the people! (as they like to call it)

Personally Timmi; I also believe 9.10 has issues, and not with just LXDE.
However, LXDE between some versions is very different

on my Phalanx 9.04 LXDE works pretty good
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Syste...DE-52442.shtml
I made it off of Masonux 9.04

and it seems in slackware 13 its very good, no noticable issues

I also noticed that LXDE seems to be broken in Squeeze, along with 9.10

It seems that the buggiest part of LXDE when running on Ubuntu is LXDM. In Mint, SLiM is used instead and most of the problems are avoided. Something to note is that the internal testing at Mint is particularly vicious. It would probably do Canonical a lot of good to hire the entire Mint team just to test releases.

The reason the iso size is significantly larger in Mint than Lubuntu has everything to do with the default application list.

I will say that Lubuntu Beta is faster than Mint LXDE, but pretty much all the Lucid Beta's are way faster than Karmic ever hoped to be. I'm exploring the possibility of basing the Mint 9 LXDE edition off of Lubuntu, but no decisions are final just yet.

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Not a distro at all, but it's LXDE that is "under heavy development." Up to and including a re-write of the PCManFM file manager from scratch. LXDE runs fine in several distros (PCLinuxOS has an awesomely fast and stable version), but in Ubuntu and its offspring, LXDE is buggy and troublesome. I call it "the 'buntu bug."

I tested the Release candidate of Mint 8 LXDE. I know it was released the same day as the Xfce edition. But on my computer it's buggy, halting, and crippled, whereas Xfce was very fast, well-balanced, and trouble free. Your mileage may vary, of course! If it works well for you, great! Just be aware that big, major changes are coming at you fast. The new PCManFM Alpha is on it's way to the Romeo repositories, and many other components of LXDE are still "under heavy development" too. It's basically a Beta desktop environment. Non-Ubuntu-based distros that are using the earlier versions of LXDE have good implementation of it - but as the new developments make their way in, who knows.


As I said, I call it "the 'buntu bug." LXDE ran great in Debian Lenny for me, and KNOPPIX users enjoy LXDE without all the maddening bugs I encountered even in a minimal Ubuntu+LXDE mixture. U-Lite - the earliest attempt to create a "Lubuntu" - was equally buggy.

Bingo. It's the 'buntu bug! Eeeek! Get the spray!


Mint 8 LXDE is built on Karmic, Lubuntu is being built on Lucid. Mint 9 LXDE, if there is one, will be built on Lubuntu and I'd bet it'll be a hellofalot better. Mint 8 LXDE, has all the heavy-duty stuff that Ubuntu Karmic has. Lubuntu is using a suite of lightweight applications, like Abiword and Gnumeric in place of the OpenOffice suite. There's really no comparison between what Mint8 LXDE is and what Mint9 LXDE will be. I think Lubuntu will be buggy (unless they've finally figured out to rid it of "the 'buntu bug") - and the Mint 9 LXDE edition could be it's much less buggy counterpart. The difference between Mint 8 and Mint 9 is the same as the difference between karmic and Lucid.

Yet LXDE remains "Beta" unless the devs choose to use the older LXDE stuff. "Mint Lubuntu" will be called Mint 9 Isadora, LXDE Community Edition.

Xfce and Fluxbox run awesomely well on Ubuntu. Therefore their respective editions run wonderfully on Mint. It is LXDE that is buggy on Ubuntu/Mint, not the other desktop environments. If you want to use LXDE and you want it Minty fresh, I suggest you wait for Mint 9 LXDE edition. But go ahead and at least try Mint8 LXDE. You might find that it works great for you. There are several people in the Mint Forums who love it and have no problems! You won't know 'til you try. For me, though, on my 'puters, that "'buntu bug" rears it's ugly head even in Mint8 LXDE.

Robin

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I have been secretly fantacizing about that for a long time! LOL
And every now and then I run into some ubuntufan who awakens that fantasy by telling me Ubuntu and Mint are identical, thus should go with Ubuntu instead. (I do think however, that if Mint were to perhaps approach the makers of Synaptic, they may be able to integrate their work on Mintinstall into Synaptic, and the question to integrate mintinstall into ubuntu would be a moot topic). It would make things so much better for all: one install program instead of two, less changes to make to Ubuntu to finalize it... maybe it will become a simple question of adding a "completion app" to Ubuntu rather than having to maintain an entirely different distro... and this could benefit many debian-based distros and not only Ubuntu... a good way for MintInstall to benefit more than just the undeserving team at canonical. ;-p
And I agree, if only Canonical didn't have their pride in the wrong places and could, as you say, hire the whole Mint team...


And the reason people go with LXDE in the first place, is they want something lighter. So, perhaps a good strategy may be to focus on lighter replacement applications (like Abiword and Gnumeric for the office part, and lighter utilities too). Those who want a heavy set of Office apps are not the target end user base for a lighter LXDE version of an OS anyways - after all, according to the people at Sun, Office can potentially be up to 2GB depending on how much of it you install. Is there an easy/quick way to pare Mint8LXDE down, and re-release a lighter Mint8LXDE? Target iso size: 60% of what it is now?
Either Lubuntu is so good that we won't need a Mint LXDE, or there is room for improvement, by making it smaller, faster, with WiFi and media codecs working out of the box.

I've tried Mint8LXDE and run into issues, and switched back to my Mint8 standard. Also someone mentioned Masonux: it seems fine out of the box, fast and light, but even release on 9.04 turned out to have lots of bugs once I started exploring deeper by using some of the utilities packaged with it.

So here is what I'm feeling so far can be done with the current state of OSes:
I agree, I'll wait for Mint 9 and Lubuntu before making my final choice for the core2duo.
But Puppeee is going onto my eeePC900sd once it is finalized.
And unless Mint LXDE gets lighter on the default applications, I may be ending up with either Puppy, Lubuntu, or Knoppix on my Celeron desktop (Knoppix ran fine, and Puppy ran fine wired on that one, both very fast).
If by some miracle MintLXDE become so light and fast that it can even be used on a netbook, I would put that one onto ALL my computers in the name of uniformity. (my mini-brain only wants to handle so much).

Also, I can't help but wonder: was Mint7 faster than Mint8? Was there a Mint7LXDE? As I recall, the main difference going to Mint8, from an end-user's perspective, was auto-update in MintInstall (and maybe Synaptic too).

I've recently discovered the power of fluxbox on Ubuntu. This was after I decided to test it out on my Slack boxes just to see what everyone was talking about. After learning to add programs to the menus where I wanted them, I was sold. It's just so quick. I haven't tried it on my laptop where Network Manager being right up front is quite important, but now that I've thought about it, it's going to happen tonight!

so are you set on LXDE

For maybe less resources fluxbox and the other *box wm's can outdo LXDE
in performance and eyecandy.

Look here at Macpup Foxy e17
http://macpup.org/

awesome

look at weaknets fluxbox
http://weaknetlabs.com/main/?page_id=18

these are representtive of what customization to lite wm's anyone can achieve as many
like fluxbox use simple text files for configs

see ArchBang's Openbox
http://www.archbang.org/

LXDE would have a hard time competing I think..

you should try those and if you want a huge list of those
I'll scrape one up

so are you set on LXDE

For maybe less resources fluxbox and the other *box wm's can outdo LXDE
in performance and eyecandy.

Look here at Macpup Foxy e17
http://macpup.org/

awesome

look at weaknets fluxbox, e17 too
http://weaknetlabs.com/main/?page_id=18

these are representtive of what customization to lite wm's anyone can achieve as many
like fluxbox use simple text files for configs

see ArchBang's Openbox
http://www.archbang.org/

LXDE would have a hard time competing I think..

you should try those and if you want a huge list of those
I'll scrape one up

linux72: you posted the same message twice (see previous to this one).

I was thinking of Mint, because it works out of the box for everyone: noobs too (and it's a 'buntu, which pleases noobs and experts alike, and has extensive support and applications). Some of the distros mentioned may just well be with only one individual improving an existing distro, where the distro's longevity/continuity becomes a concern to users wary of having to hop.

Yes, by coincidence I was looking at Fluxbuntu this morning... and the project looks pretty much dead! This is getting me to question Fluxbox's longevity (maybe there are technical or user preference issues I don't know about that this may not be the best horse to bet on for the long term?) I mean, otherwise there WOULD BE a current Fluxbuntu right now, wouldn't there? What frustrates me with the Mint Fluxbox CE, is they still have a large installer... it would be so nice to be able to select something other than openoffice as the default. The whole purpose of this thread was to see if Mint could be used across a range of computers one may own. Having a huge install size does not resolve that.
FYI, I tried removing openoffice, and the files required by it, and I broke something else in the OS... it's so much easier to add, than to take away. Openoffice is needed if you are going to war with the small to medium business Windoze market, but not required when going after pure Linux enthusiasts and home users. It is sort of counter-productive to slap a speed and space-saving windows manager and still pair it with the largest of applications... the OS will run fast... but once you load those huge applications, they may not run much faster in the end...

A note on Mint XFCE: it will not configure audio automatically (see "known issues" on the Mint site) and 2 steps are required to find out if after your 2 steps it will work (not reassuring to those extensively using internet for their communications with others).

This journey is starting to make me wonder if we should just choose the windows manager that ships by default in a distro?
Mint xfce: fast with eye candy but with known issues
Mint kde: fat and with some know issues
Mint fluxbox: fast but still bloated by openoffice (but may be the best choice so far despite it's plain vanilla looks)
Mint gnome: fat but works just fine on fast machines with lots of memory
Mint lxde: 'buntu-bug affecting all ubuntus with LXDE... we may want to wait for Lubuntu to come out and see if there is hope... it may have been premature to be looking at Mint LXDE first quarter 2010 (and perhaps second, depending on whether Lubuntu gets finaliThis journey is starting to make me wonder if we should just choose the windows manager that ships by default? ed or not, and whether a Mint Lubuntu may bring satisfaction to those speculating this may happen).

Timmi what about debian Live's LXDE
have you tried it?

http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/re...e/i386/iso-cd/

You can really customize Debian Live stuuf from scratch and
I can show you how if you want.

If you dont wanna burn to cd, just either use Unetbootin for usb
or put on usb manually

The reason for having OpenOffice installed by default in Mint Fluxbox and Mint LXDE was a regression in Ubiquity for Ubuntu Karmic that pulled in the entire suite (and OpenJDK) due to a language pack dependency chain issue. This was also present in Xubuntu 9.10. Due to bandwidth restrictions in some parts of the world we made the executive decision to have OpenOffice installed by default in all the Mint 8 releases as the accidental download would pull in about 170 MB.

Shane Joe Lazar (the previous Mint Fluxbox maintainer) reported this as a bug during the Hardy development cycle and it was fixed then. We reported this as a regression for Karmic and the fix came in Lucid Alpha 3. It's my intention to go back with Abiword and Gnumeric for Mint 9, subject to internal deliberation with the rest of the Mint team.

We fixed ubiquity from pulling in OpenJDK by editing the preseed files before building iso's for the Mint 8 releases.

Regarding the *buntu bug for LXDE, replacing LXDM with SLiM solves most of the issues (at least on a Karmic base). I have Lubuntu Beta 1 running on my laptop right now and I've experienced no stability issues whatsoever so it's likely that it will be the core for both the LXDE and Fluxbox editions of Mint 9.

I'm looking forward to trying the LXDE edition of Mint 9 when it's ready! I'm really glad to hear that the 'buntu bug is being worked on so diligently. You guys rock!

-Robin

I just use plain old Ubuntu and use Synaptic to add fluxbox.

Personally on my laptop I'm transitioning to SalixOS. It's slackware based, with an apt-like package manager called slapt-get, plus Gslapt which is graphical. I was able to use slapt-get to install NetworkManager which is my favorite feature of Ubuntu on my laptop. It is pretty small (one program per task) for a full distro. It uses xfce by default and is just FAST compared to Ubuntu. It's probably as fast as Slackware proper. The last thing keeping me from making it the default boot is power mangement which I haven't gotten to tinker with, but if it does that well too then I'm done.

It also has a "multimedia-codec-installer" that gets me all the patent encumbered codecs etc. in a single click.

Thanks, but I was always under the impression that Ubuntu was friendlier than debian, and Mint was truly people-friendly. That's why I haven't looked at it. I think we will see this in the form of Lubuntu and maybe an updated/corrected/fixed Masonux (if it's author decides it continues to have a reason for existing once Lubuntu is out).