I had a free night so I thought I’d try out Linux Mint. My only other experience with Linux is Ubuntu, and on my laptop, it wasn’t the best. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t seem to get the right resolution. That was a blocker for me so I got rid of it.

Recently, I’d heard of Linux Mint, which is based of off Ubuntu, but tries to make things a lot easier. For example, it bundles proprietary codecs so I can play things like mp3s out of the box. That’s a big plus for me because all my music is in that format on my Windows partition, and it’s a cinch to play it. Mint also correctly guessed my resolution. Yay! This could be the new version of Ubuntu, though. I only tired 7.04.

Mint boots and shuts down much quicker than Vista ever could so it’s worth using it just for that. I also like the subtle visual effects. I’m pretty sure they’re not part of Ubuntu. I especially like that I can drag a window off the screen and the screen will flip and the window will be in the other workspace. That’s just awesome!

This doesn’t have anything to do with Mint, but I am having a little trouble finding a nice gnome theme. There just don’t seem to be many cool ones out there. Maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place. I like the Lean Suite, Calla, and MurrinaStorm, but I just think there has to be something better out there.

Mint is Yummy

Overall, Linux Mint is a nice and easy distro for non-geeks that may be coming from Windows. It was easy to install, and everything works out of the box. Try it out! I’ll definitely be phasing out Windows now.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 2:54 pm and is filed under misc and tagged with linux, mint, ubuntu, vista, windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.