While my initial plan for January was to stick with Windows 7 and perhaps try out Fedora 12, a bad DVD interrupted the Fedora install progress. Out of sheer convenience, I’d planned on running Linux Mint in a VM and had pulled the ISO earlier in the week. “Aha!” I thought. “I’ll install this instead of Fedora and see what’s what.”
My initial impressions are that Mint is perhaps the first Linux distribution that I’d enjoy using on a day-to-day basis. With only a few minor tweaks (activating multiple monitors and using optical out for sound), I have a completely functional desktop environment. Compiz is totally integrated into the experience, degrades gracefully if needed, and is used to enhance the UI rather than provide unneeded eye candy.
Taking a page out of Jon’s book, I also installed Banshee for media playback. What a difference from previous media player experiences – my BlackBerry was automatically detected, synced with my library and folders were built properly in the MediaCard/BlackBerry/music directory. Now, all I need is some better music and I’ll be set!
Wow maybe I should actually try this distro at some point
I’d definitely recommend giving it a shot. The KDE version is still on the Ubuntu 9.04 base, and Sasha mentioned that Mint 8 fixed a lot of his laptop issues, so you may want to get the GNOME disc and try putting on KDE yourself.
Is the KDE in the current GNOME version’s repos still the old one from 9.04 or is it up to date?
KDE is 4.3.2-0ubuntu3, which looks like the latest available in Kubuntu as well.
I find that Exaile is a very good music player replacement for RhythmBox…otherwise, am really enjoying Mint since Version 5
Glad to see you finally see things clearly and switched to Linux Mint. It isn’t that the other distros are bad and not that you can’t put everything in LM in other distros. Linux Mint is just so complete and polished out of the box it is like you would have paid for the OS.
And now a shameless plug for the Linux Mint podcast at http://www.mintcast.org
😉
I have enjoyed the experiment and keep the updates coming.
The current development build of Mint 8 KDE was approved for public release this morning. There’s been no official statement just yet, but it’s already available on one of the download mirrors. Hopefully this is soon to be followed up by the Fluxbox version.
I use Linux Mint and I love it. I have to boot into Windows for like five minutes every day just to sync my Zune HD, and that’s it. Get me a Zune client, and Windows is toast.