Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Linux Mint

You may have seen this xkcd comic before.
I guess that can only mean one thing. The year of Linux Desktop is here!

After a fairly long hiatus, I tried out a new Linux distribution (new to me) called Linux Mint which has recently surged in popularity. It appears (from less than scientific sources) to be about three times more popular than other distributions with name recognition (Fedora and OpenSuSE), although it still trails Ubuntu quite a bit. Interestingly, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, which in turn is based on Debian.

My first few impressions. It worked just great on the six year old laptop that was lying around my house. Installation was a breeze, and since it downloads audio and video codecs, it worked "out of the box". The interface is clean and friendly.

Given improvements in LibreOffice and the grain of truth in the comic above, I think it might finally be time to wean my parents off of their heavily infested Windows installation.

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