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Move from Linux Mint 16 to Fedora 20

Fedora 20 with Mate DE and Mint Menu
Fedora 20 with Mate DE and Mint Menu

For those of you who have been following my Linux posts, you know that I have been a Fedora user since February of 2005 with Fedora Core 3. I tried Ubuntu from time to time but always had problems. However in the middle of last year 2013 I moved to Ubuntu based Linux Mint 15 preferring it over Fedora 19. For some reason I couldn’t figure out the Fedora 19 installer correctly. When it did install Fedora 19, my files on my user account were inaccesable. I didn’t get the home partition correct. I tried Linux Mint 15 instead and it installed without a hitch.

Linux Mint 15 worked very well for me. But after I upgraded to version 16, suddenly I had problems. I couldn’t install any 32 bit apps on my 64 bit system! They worked fine on Linux 15! Specifically those apps were Wine and Skype. Without Wine I cannot run two Windows programs I need that have no Linux counterpart. I could live without Skype on my PC because I can use it on my Google Android tablet, but I wanted Wine back. The Linux Mint application installer (apt-get) kept giving me error messages of unmet dependencies. None of the advice on the Linux Mint forum about how to fix the problem worked. And I couldn’t even get Acrobat Reader on Linux Mint 16! It aborted in a error message

The Fedora Linux 20 installer worked well, and all my favorite applications are now back including Acrobat Reader! Fedora always seemed more complete, more polished, and more stable.

I tried to use the Mate DE in Fedora 18, but it was buggy. This version of Mate works well now and I could even install the useful Mint Menu in it as you can see from the photograph. I had to use a camera to take the screenshot showing the Mint Menu because the screenshot application does not work with the menu open.

Move to Gnome 3 from Mate!

Update on Feb. 2, 2014: The Mate desktop environment GUI stopped loading for some reason. I logged into the standard Gnome 3, began to use it and started to like it! When Gnome 3 first came out I absolutely hated it. Either the Gnome developers improved it, or perhaps because I’ve been also using a Google Android tablet for the past half year, I now understand better the reasoning behind the now Gnome interface. I think its simpler and cleaner looking than Mate having no Desktop icons or complicated menus. And I can switch between open windows faster than I could before. I feel comfortable with it and can actually do some real work using it.

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1 thought on “Move from Linux Mint 16 to Fedora 20”

  1. Hi James,
    I like your article I have been trying to use fedora for years but found it didn’t play well. Here we are again I really want to run fedora 20 and like it but things still don’t feel right, like fonts are not clear to running smooth with the apps I like.
    I did go through all of mints linux’s desktops and found that xfce works very well, but I am concerned about mint using ubuntu as I am so not keen how ubuntu seem to be evolving. I did try gnome 3 I really wanted to like it but really couldn’t work with it, I understand why it has gone that way especially with touch devices.
    Thank you for listening to my crazy talk
    Kind regards James

    Darren

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