Back To Linux: Evaluating Linux Mint

By David Secor

Posted Saturday, January eleven, 2014 at 06:09pm EST

Up till six months in the past, I have been taking part in all around in the Windows planet for much more than a 12 months, after acquiring a new laptop that came with Windows seven pre-installed. A lot to my amazement, I variety of liked Windows seven, and it was not downright terrible like its predecessor, Vista. It was rather rapid and surprisingly steady, with many more features than my last Windows setting, XP.

But then, I acquired back into writing on the internet for once again. I had previously been a Linux user for several many years, using many diverse distributions, and I take pleasure in writing about Linux when I get a likelihood. That possibility came soon following I started out, and it piqued my interest in Linux when a lot more. I determined to try out a model I had thus far ignored — Linux Mint.

What grabbed my focus most about Mint was its use of the Cinnamon desktop, which I had not heard of, due to being out of the loop for a while. I have in no way been a huge fan of Gnome, due to its Mac-like look and even though I had enjoyed KDE for a long time, it was feeling kind of bloated, a minor sluggish and even a bit unstable with the four. and over releases, in my opinion.

I downloaded Linux Mint 15 as a curiosity, at first, and installed it on an external tough drive. The set up was smooth, given that the set up is based mostly on Ubuntu’s Ubiquity, and I identified that the interface was nice and clean, standard and quickly. Multimedia plugins were set up instantly, so I could listen to my MP3-encoded music with Banshee although I wrote Linux articles with LibreOffice, what I had been making use of on Windows anyway. Online videos worked wonderful and all my saved films played with out incident.

Soon after finishing those content articles and booting back into Windows 7 a few days later on, I remembered why I had left the Windows world to get started with. Everything seemed slow and sluggish, Windows update was screaming for my attention, as nicely as AVG. Window 7 had, apparently, just felt fast to me since of the spiffy new notebook, with much much more power than the old 1. I grabbed my Mint DVD, and popped it in, this time for a true installation on the inner hard drive. The installer effortlessly reduced the dimension of my Windows challenging drive and installed Mint alongside Windows. Set up natively, Mint ran even faster.

I have never looked back. Cinnamon, which has now been upgraded to 2., is a wonderful desktop manager, quite quickly and stable, without the new “Features” of the Ubuntu Unity interface, which I discover nearly as irritating as the Metro interface of Windows 8. Cinnamon continues to be improved with new features that increase my productivity, such as six-way window snapping and better user management. Mint’s Ubuntu core guarantees compatibility with a lot of Ubuntu-tailored plans and it builds on the superior stability of the Debian and Ubuntu lines. Networking with other machines is fairly basic and, like Ubuntu, NTFS compatibility is developed-in, permitting accessibility to files on my Windows partition as very easily as if it was a Linux-formatted drive.

Linux Mint sixteen comes normal with the LibreOffice productivity suite, Banshee media player, VLC video player, Firefox Browser, Thunderbird e mail client, Pidgin instant messenger, Transmission BitTorrent client, Xchat IRC consumer, GIMP image editor, and much far more. I have extra the most current edition of Virtualbox to try out new Linux distributions, the DropBox client for on the web storage, KeePassX for cross-platform password management and WINE for working the occasional windows system.

Back To Linux: Evaluating Linux Mint