Is Mint with Cinnamon right for me?

L

lkee00

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I bought an Asus UX31A-BHI5T11 Ultrabook 13.3" Touch Screen Laptop about 6 months ago and I love it. However, Windows 8 needs to go. By now, I've given it a fair shot and it really is as bad as everyone says it is.

I've thought about switching to Linux for a long time, so it seems like now is the time to take the plunge. I'm considering the latest versions of Mint / Cinnamon. I like clean, yet customizable and powerful GUIs.

I am concerned, however, that my laptop might not be able to handle Cinnamon. I also really like the touchscreen aspect of this laptop, while I've read that Cinnamon can support touch, I haven't found any first-hand reviews on it.

You can google the model above and get the basic specs of my device, but let me know if you need more info and I'd be happy to provide. Thanks in advance for any advice you can give!
 


Most distributions offer a live version so that you can try before you do an entire uplift to Linux. I would suggest that you try that first and go from there.
 
If you plan to use touch... Unity, Gnome 3 and KDE distributions are great, like younger versions of Ubuntu, Kubuntu or Fedora. I don't know how good Cinnamon is in terms of touch screen, but from little research it also seems like a nice choice.

Test really many live cds before falling in love.

A fine windows tool to help you test several Linux distributions and make the switch:

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/

Welcome beforehand to the Linux community!
 
Hi guys. I know it's been over a month but that's honestly how long it took me to find the time to follow through on this!

After merging the Windows Recovery partition with C:, I replaced Windows 8.1 with Linux Mint 16 Petra w/ Cinnamon. It works beautifully - even the touchscreen, although I had to increase the resolution a bit to make it easier to click checkboxes, etc.

The bad news is that I am having bluetooth issues. I can get it to recognize/pair with two different devices. The first is a SoundFly BT speaker and the other is a pair of Arctic Sound P311 headphones. The headphones can connect but sound terrible, like the music is playing in a tin can. The speaker can connect but will not play sound at all. Obviously these devices had no problems when I was running on Windows.

With a clean install I had "bluetooth", "gnome-bluetooth" and many smaller components (including bluez and libbluetooth3). I added "blueman" but that didn't help. Any ideas?
 
Bad news, good news...

Earlier in the week I was determined to fix my bluetooth issues so I tinkered with it some more. I thought it would be a good idea to create a new user and/or reinstall Cinnamon. In my linux newbieness, I ended up foobarring BOTH user accounts and completely hosing my system so I couldn't even get a log-in screen. After a day of panicking and trying to save my installed apps, I gave up and reinstalled Mint completely. :(

So guess what works after a complete reinstall? Yep, bluetooth. Why? I have no idea. The only thing I can think of is that, the first time, I installed Spotify's Linux Preview before trying to pair audio BT devices. This time I paired and connected to BT devices, tested them, then installed Spotify. I doubt this is the issue, but since the Spotify release isn't stable/official, who knows...

Overall, after a week of using Mint exclusively, 0% of me misses Windows. Seriously, none. I am a convert!
 
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