If you’re into the whole Linux thing, you might be interested in Linux Mint. It’s an Ubuntu-base distribution and aims to ship with more of the software one might expect of Windows and the likes. Personally, I like the GTK theme Mint uses over Ubuntu’s (though, I don’t like GTK in general). Let’s take a look:
Unlike Ubuntu, the Linux Mint folks have altered the default layout of the theme to be more in line with Windows. I kinda like the application (Mint?) menu, though it is a little buggy. Admittedly, some of the mouse-overs on the various submenus are a bit of a nuisance. Though, being as it’s based on Ubuntu 9.04, the fonts look really quite nice.
Here’s a shot of the terminal window:
Interestingly, sound worked right off the bat for me–and they’re using PulseAudio.
All in all, it looks like it’ll be worthwhile to play around with. I might even install it on a spare drive!
If you like Ubuntu, give it a try.
4 Responses to “Quickie: Linux Mint”
So, I gave it a go and I like the eye candy.
But as you’ve helped me discover, Ben, Ubuntu-based distro’s lack the standard packages and libraries that come with most other Linux distro’s because they don’t think people are going to be building stuff from source.
Ain’t that a bitch?
Yeah, and I wish I could offer some suggestions on what to install, but I haven’t messed around enough with Ubuntu to find out.
I might do that sometime! The last I tried it was a fairly lengthy list of things that needed to be installed.
Hah! No worries!
Nearly everything I went to install had some sort of dependency, library, or package of sorts that needed to be installed, and to install that, it had a handful of others. The list just went on ;)
I grabbed the LiveCD for Gentoo last night, but I remembered that I had completely partitioned this drive for my XP install. So I may need to find some sort of solution to this without having to start from scratch. ^.^
Definitely try Gentoo in a VM first. You’re apt to go through the installation proceedings numerous times.
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