[clue-tech] Linux Mint

[Michael Fierro]

I finally found some time to play with a few different Linux distros. I had 
mentioned here that I tried Sabayon Linux, which looks absolutely beautiful, 
and was kinda fun. But Gentoo is so far out of my comfort zone that I decided 
Sabayon wasn't worth the time that it would take to re-learn things.

I'm not a Red Hat/Fedora, so I didn't even consider any distro derived from 
it. That left me with Debian-based distros. I've been using Xubuntu for a 
long, long time, so I figured I would try something with Gnome as the main 
desktop. I was listening to LUGRadio, and they had an interview with the 
Linux Mint guy, so I figured I would try that out.

Linux Mint is actually very cool. There are mostly subtle differences from 
Ubuntu (codecs installed by default, compiz active, different/nice theme). 
But a couple of the huge ones are the Mint Menu (modified version of the 
Slab) and Mint's control panel. The Menu is very cool. I normally launch apps 
either from a terminal or via ALT+F2, but I've found myself using Mint's Menu 
pretty frequently.

Mint's control panel is pretty handy, too. It's well laid out, and seems to 
give more options than the standard Gnome control center. But I am not a 
standard Gnome user, so that could be totally wrong.

Mint also comes with some pretty good default applications. OpenOffice is the 
office app, of course. Firefox is the web browser. Interestingly, Thunderbird 
is the email client. As much as I want to like Thunderbird, it just isn't 
flexible enough for me. So I switched back to my standard mix of mutt 
(remote) and kmail (local). Mint uses Amarok as its music player (a most 
awesome choice, and an obviously sign that Mint is not Gnome app specific), 
Totem for video playback, Pidgin for IM. And it is packaged with a few really 
good games (OpenArena, Singularity, a Worms Armegeddon clone, and more).

The first thing I did was to test-drive the standard Mint install. And Linux 
Mint makes a surprisingly good desktop OS. For someone who just wants to sit 
at their computer, surf the web, watch videos on YouTube, send and receive 
email, play games and use a word processor, Linux Mint is perfect. And it has 
a good amount of eye candy, with compiz-fusion turned on.

Of course, I am not the type who uses an out-of-the-box Linux install. So I 
did an aptitude safe-upgrade to make sure I had the latest version of Mint. 
(Mint includes a custom application named Mint Update, but I'm an aptitude 
kinda guy.) Then I installed my "can't live without" suite of applications:
openssh-server
gnu screen
links2
mutt
slrn
slrn-face
centerim
kontact
liferea
logjam
(And a couple of others which I use all of the time but cannot remember now.)

I was able to take a shortcut by copying over config files and my bin 
directory from my Ubuntu install, so I was able to test as soon as the apps 
installed. And I have to say, I was extremely impressed!

Linux Mint actually performed better than Ubuntu (gutsy) on the same machine. 
This is almost definitely because of cruft on my Ubuntu install, though. I've 
gone through a couple of major upgrades  on my Ubuntu install without trying 
to weed out applications that I no longer use. I had a couple of different 
XFCE installations, and numerous other applications that I compiled myself. 
And I had done a surprisingly poor job of separating apps that I compiled 
from distro-provided stuff (I really need to remember the --prefix=/usr/local 
switch for configure).

But no matter, the fact is that Linux Mint is extremely fast on my machine. I 
notice that in day-to-day work, and I especially notice it in 3d accelerated 
games (e.g. OpenArena).  I really didn't expect this kind of performance 
gain! I am quite happy about it.

There were a couple of downsides to Mint. The first was difficulties with my 
soundcard (Soundblaster Live! 5.1 Gamer). The card was detected, but the 
mixer settings were all wacked out. It was trivial to use alsamixer to 
correct this, but a n00b would've been lost. I don't like the choice of 
Thunderbird for the default email client, though I would prefer that over 
Evolution. 

Those are mere quibbles, however. I am actually quite happy and very impressed 
with Linux Mint. Enough so that I moved Mint over to be my main OS.

-- 
Michael Fierro                                  miguelito at biffster.org
Y! Messenger: miguelito_fierro                           AIM: mfierro1
http://biffster.org                           http://weightjournal.com
--
do nothing yet leave nothing undone
- Tao Te Ching