Worst Blog Ever

I had no idea how difficult these things were to do on a stock installation of Linux Mint.  For instance, when you first install Mint, you are presented with two task bars: one on the top of the screen, and one on the bottom. If you're working on a desktop computer with a large monitor, this doesn't pose much of an issue, but when you're working on a little Dell Inspiron 1420 laptop, screen real estate is at a premium.

So the first thing I tried to do was get rid of one of the task bars, so reflexively, I right-clicked the task bar and...nothing happened! I tried it again and again, as I obviously right-clicked wrong the first time. Well, predictably, nothing happened those two times either. And so began my journey into customizing the Linux Mint desktop.

The first place that I explored was the settings. There I found that I could adjust settings on the desktop such as a few themes, and change the background, but not make the changes that I wanted.

I also started Googling for the answers, and saw many helpful forums that gave step by step command line instructions, but I wan't prepared to go that route as I like to have an idea what the instructions I am following actually do. None of these forums gave that information. The said: Do this, and do that, but they didn't say why I was doing it, and what it would do to the computer. Also, the instructions didn't really make clear if they were meant for LMDE, KDE, GNOME 3, or what.  Truthfully, at the time, I didn't know what the difference was between all of these. Somehow, while Googling, I found a few sites that mentioned using Cinnamon on Mint to customize their desktops.

When I went to the Cinnamon site (http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/) it initially didn't make it any clearer. Ok...a quick side note (rant) to the people who developed Cinnamon: Put an About section on your website and tell us, in really dumbed-down language for people like me, what exactly Cinnamon is! You get to the site, and all you see are blog entries about which version they are on. Ok, now I know what version is the most current, but I have no idea what your product does!  And no...it wasn't obvious! Sorry for that rant.

So anyway, I found out that Cinnamon is a way of customizing your desktop experience. Something that allows you to take away one or both of the task bars, change the menu layout and look, add various themes, etc. But I must say that I was kind of expecting that these features would have been built into Mint itself. These types of features have been built into Windows and Mac's OS for ever.  I know that Mint is fairly new on the scene, but I still would have thought it would have been baked in there.

After I had installed the package using the software manager, I was ready to go! Or so I thought. It looked the exact same as it had before! And I still couldn't right click the frigging task bar! Oh, I could right click it to my heart's content, but nothing was going to come from it!  Frustration started to set in. After what seemed like ages of investigation, and Googling, I somehow found out that in order to use Cinnamon (or Mate for that matter), you have to click on the little cog icon of the login screen and select the user interface you want to use.

*blink*, *blink*

Why the hell isn't that in the first few sentences of the documentation??? In big, red, flashing letters!