[Lancaster] linux mint - quick review

[andy baxter]

Hi all,

Just installed linux mint - I wanted to have a look at because a friend 
had recommended it as a good beginners distro and I wanted to see it to 
see if I would feel happy recommending it to other people as well. It 
also includes all the multimedia codecs by default, which is unusual for 
a distro nowadays - the people who release it have decided that since 
software patents are officially illegal in Europe they will take the law 
at its word and include the codecs.

I'm pretty impressed so far, with a couple of reservations. The whole 
system looks very good, with all the window effects running by default, 
and it's pretty simple to install. I really like the way they have 
integrated the package manager with an online website where you can just 
click a link to download a program - this could be really useful for 
people who just want to know about the relatively few commonly used 
programs through an easy interface. Synaptic is still there if you want 
to use it.

It was running a recent version of gnome - I hadn't seen the new gnome 
menu before but quite like it. There was one major bug - when I tried to 
open an unmounted partition and then cancelled, the desktop locked up. 
Ctrl-alt-backspace worked to get back to the login window, but this is a 
bit worrying when I'm thinking of recommending it to beginners. Also I 
didn't think they should have enabled fortune cookies in the terminal by 
default - the first couple I saw were just annoying. I know some people 
like the fortune cookies, but it seems odd to have something so much 
from the linux old school in a system that's obviously meant to appeal 
to a mass audience. Can't think of any more problems so far, and the 
lockup may well be particular to my machine or the way I have my system 
set up, so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt on that.

Overall I'm pleased I took the time to look at this distro, and I'm 
thinking of keeping it on my disk as a backup to my main debian testing 
partition.

andy