debateOS: Linux for students and debaters

Linux Mint just put out it’s Release Candidate for Linux Mint 13 “Maya”  with both the Maté and Cinnamon desktop environments.  One of these two desktop environments on LM 13 will be the base for the next debateOS spun release at the end of this summer, although we hope to establish an LXDE edition based on Linux Mint 12 LXDE, as well.

So . . . what’s the hang-up?  The digital tub doesn’t quite exist for Maté or Cinnamon, yet.  At the moment, you have to work through a file-browser window, which is clunky and takes up too much time in an actual debate round.  That being said, it took just 2 weeks from my finding out about Cinnamon and discovering the lack of a “Timer” applet that worked for debate to a very usable one being released.  The development rate with the Linux Mint team and community is startling.

I have found both Mate and Cinnamon based systems to be less resource hungry than debateOS’s Gnome 2 interface, and, in a side-by-side test of identical machines, my alpha look at debateOS Mass Transit booted over 45 seconds faster than debateOS Columbia (32 bit editions).

The more I work with Cinnamon, the more I prefer it to Gnome 2, Gnome 3, and Maté.