[GLLUG] Recycling computers with Linux

[Joe Ressington]

>Mint nearly has everything right.

At risk of being accused of trolling this list I'm going to have to speak
up. I used to be a Mint user and I would install it for people who were new
to Linux or even just new to computers. I think Cinnamon has sensible
defaults and is easy to use. I even used to do a podcast about Mint.

However...

When the Mint website was "hacked" in February, I started to question the
competence of the Mint team. I started to research the technical decisions
that the Mint team has made and uncovered some uncomfortable truths about
the distro.

I've come to the conclusion that Mint is an ugly hack of a distro that's
run by amateurs with just enough knowledge to get themselves in trouble.
Their update policy is questionable at best, they fork applications
seemingly just to give them new names (which often conflict with other
Debian packages) and they create a Firefox profile with the same name for
all installations in order to make their start page work (mwad0hks.default).

Have a read of this for a bit of background:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3036600/linux/is-linux-mint-a-crude-hack-of-existing-debian-based-distributions.html

Now this isn't your typical "my distro of choice is better than your distro
of choice" nonsense. This is a serious concern about a distro that people
ought to avoiding, especially given the vast choice of Ubuntu flavours and
derivatives. Not to mention other well put together distros like Fedora.

Joe
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