|
Thursday, 29 November 2007 |
|
I have been running Kubuntu or Ubuntu as my main OS for sometime and even run a 64bit Kubuntu 7.10 at work. So far I have been very impressed with the progress and have had many great experiences with them, but 7.10 left me unimpressed - long boot up time for both Ubuntu and Kubuntu on my home system as well as some other minor problems, including sometimes just hanging on startup indefinitely. 7.04 ran so great that I figured life would be good from then on out, at least until my hardware aged to a point of no return, but I was wrong. Also, the fact that multimedia setup changed again left me just thinking, WTF? I shouldn't have to relearn the trivial things every release!
Anyway, I heard good things about Linux Mint and decided to give 4.0 a spin. Mint live cd booted and I was instantly impressed visually, Mint is classy in it's appearance out of the box. The install was basically the same experience I had with Ubuntu , but once installed I found a very fast system complete with video and mp3 support. I enabled my Wacom in the xorg.conf, which is the same procedure as (K)Unbuntu and works perfectly. I installed the ATI driver with the restricted manager and installed composite (xserver-xgl) restarted Gnome and enabled Compiz . Nice! The next thing I decided to play with is Avant Window Navigato r, which is a dock similar to OS X. I found an easy install of the Avant Windows navigator applets here . I must admit, Linux Mint is Ubuntu on steroids! Will I go back to (K)Ubuntu? Not at this time! If you are wanting to try Linux, Mint would have to be the easiest distribution to start with. Being created from and compatible with Ubuntu it is well supported, stable, and easy to manage as well. I highly recommend Mint as an alternative to Windows. |
