I've kind of settled on Xubuntu over Mint Xfce, but I'm sure I will give this a whirl once out of beta.
I'm sure this comment will not go down very well with the Mint fanboi's but Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the dash to panel extension ( with the new ungroup option to give a classic task bar ) makes Mint pretty pointless. And before anyone says "Gnome shell memory hog" the leak has been fixed and it now runs silly fast even after many hours of heavy usage that it now makes Cinnamon feel slower and clunky. Just putting it out there.
I find Xubuntu makes Mint pointless since I use Xfce, so I agree with you. Cinnamon always has and does feel clunky (and crashy) to me. I think it's just another pointless forking fork of a fork. And Mint Xfce is just Xubuntu with xapp annoyances and extra bloat to remove. It comes out much later, but still inherits all the bugs from Ubuntu...what's the point.
Yeah , Mint no longer feels innovative , it just feels like a pointless reskinning theme or as someone else put it a Fat bloated Elvis Presley impersonator living in yesterday. That may just sound like Mint hate but until recently Mint was my daily driver and it's still installed on friends and family computers.
@TinMan , yep, and thanks for the info. I tested out Mint Xfce 19 a bit. It's nice, no hate, but it did inherit the bugs from Ubuntu 18.04 as expected. Example, the mouse sensitivity slider does absolutely nothing (in Xfce) and it has WAY too much acceleration. It can be tamed via some system file tweaking, but that's beyond the scope of this post. Removal of gksu has broken gdebi, system-config-samba, etc. Using the menu editor reports invalid/broken menu entries. All Ubuntu problems from months ago still in Mint. May as well use *buntu instead, where things may get fixed sooner.
@Dude Guyman - I can't comment on the Xfce edition, because I am using the Cinnamon edition. But, after reading so many comments on the Linux Mint blog, with a lot of bugs reported, I've decided to keep 18.3 Cinnamon on my main computer. I've installed the LM 19 Cinnamon BETA on my wife's laptop and it didn't feel right in the beginning. But, as the final version was released today, I've run the commands from my previous post and I'm going to give it a couple of more weeks and then decide whether I'm going to keep it or reinstall the 18.3 from scratch. To be realistic, bugs were to be expected, as this is based on the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS code base, so it is going to take some time for the LM development team to squash most of them. Of course, this depends on the upstream bug fixes, from the Ubuntu developers. I am happy with Cinnamon and, for me personally, it is a great DE. I never had any issues with it. On the other hand, I don't like Gnome's way of doing things and it's paradigm, so I'll stick with Linux Mint and Cinnamon for a while. So, as you say, it's not personal, it's just the matter of preferences But then again, I'm going to get an ssd in a couple of weeks, so I just might give Ubuntu 18.04 Gnome a try, with a dash-to-panel extension, as our friend, Ubuntu fanboi, @taylorlawson suggested...
Hey @Tiger-1! Apart from the fact that I've had a major issue with my car engine and that it's going to cost me a fortune to repair I'm fine, thank you! How's everything in Brazil? Best of luck for your National Team against Mexico!
I decided to slap Mint 19 Xfce on my second PC and give it a whirl for a while. It seems ok...lots of errors (harmless I think) during boot and "start job running" in red text that takes a loooong time. Meh. I also disabled "Suspend" and a couple reboots later it was back. That is annoying.