General: Linux Mint (Elyssa 5.0)

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I decided to give Linux Mint a go. I was very dubious about trying it, as from the outside, it looks like Ubuntu with a skin. However, this is a bit more than that going on.

Installing it, was just like installing Ubuntu, as of course it is based around Ubuntu – why change something that is working? With Linux Mint they have just taken Ubuntu and improved upon it – their tag line is “from freedom came elegance”. Debian appear to be ultra conservative and want everything to be open source. Ubuntu felt there wasn't anything wrong with closed source, as long as it was free. But even this approach of “freedom” can still be restricting. Mint has taken things one step further, and as standard allows access to the repositories such as Medibuntu, which have the questionably legal W32/64 codecs and the ffmpeg that is compiled with H264/AAC support.

As well as using Synaptic, there is also the mintInstall Software Portal. You can view all the packages on their website, but you download a .mint file, which has some extra information in there should mint feel there are some configurations that are needed on top of installing an Ubuntu package. This is a nice approach, as it means there aren't lots of forked Ubuntu packages floating around – things are just tweaked afterwards!

It was nice to be able to install Wine-Doors out of the box. It works beautifully if you haven't already tried it. With the click of a few buttons, I had DirectX9 and Steam installed. Then from steam I installed the new Sam And Max series, which I hadn't played yet, and it all ran flawlessly. I did find that to get the best performance, I had to emulate a desktop resolution of 1680x1050, rather than having everything seamlessly integrate with Linux. A lot of this was because the games couldn't detect the resolution of screen I was running – so some things just wouldn't run at all. It is impressive how far WINE is coming along though.

Here you can see that Compiz even copes with playing games while a switch tab through my running applications.

As well as this extra layer for installations, Mint has replaced the Ubuntu Update Manager with MintUpdate, which can obviously cope with updating Mint installed packages, as well as Synaptic.

Mint has also replaced the standard Gnome menu with its own system that feels more like Windows (not necessarily a good thing). The nice thing about this, is you can right click an application and uninstall it straight from the menu – something that should be implemented into Gnome anyway if you ask me. If you don't like the menu, you can install the standard Gnome menu.

There are a few other mintApps, such as mintAssistant, which was nice enough to ask me if I wanted to setup a root account after I had installed the system, or if I wanted the random terminal quotes turned on.

There is also a simple mintBackup utility, which does the job. A feature I'm surprised I've not seen in another distribution is the “Windows Wireless Drivers” utility, which is essentially a GUI for ndiswrapper. A very nice touch. Equally, the “AptOnCD” caught my attention – allowing you to customise your system, and then burn onto CD for re-installation at a later point, or send to a friend as your personal tweaked version.

Other additions are the “Simple Compiz Config Settings Manager” as well as the advanced settings, out of the box. Although Ubuntu can use these, it's nice to see them installed as default. Often, when it comes to consumers – if it's not turned on out of the box – it'll probably stay that way.

I wouldn't say I've been blown away by Mint, but it is “nice” and I'll certainly continue using it. There is no downside to using it, as you can do everything you can do on this system as you can on Ubuntu. It's just a tweaked Ubuntu with a better default skin. The question in mind is, perhaps the chaps behind Mint should have just applied their time to improving the Ubuntu project, instead of forking off.

I have a feeling most of the stuff in Mint is available on Ubuntu - it's just they have taken the time to package it this way.

Well, I am sticking with gnome-main-menu. I did not know what it reminded me of until last night, it hit me. Windows 3.11.