Minty Review: Linux Mint 16 (cinnamon flavor)

After being on the top of the chart for more than a couple of years, I finally decided to give Linux Mint a try, after all why are people using it so much? I must say I was biased previously because I though Mint looked a little too boring for me and aside from being an easy to use sort of distro, I didn't see the appeal. To be perfectly honest, I never thought Ubuntu was hard to use so even that appeal I don't quite understand.

Anyway, now that I've played with Mint for about a week, I feel like I can form a more relevant opinion, and to be honest I was not impressed. First of all, as I feared the OS to me looks very vanilla, and offered as far as I saw, nothing dramatically interesting. As I mentioned, often mint is labeled as a great distro to start with, and while it is easy to use, I had two crashes in my first day of use and one of them was while watching a regular video. I feel that a distrubution that is known for media compatibility out of the box should be able to play simple videos without a hiccup.Ubuntu 13.04 VM or my Xubuntu 12.04 VM. I had a lot of issues getting a few pieces of software, including my email client to work smoothly and that didn't help me have a good opinion of it.

I do need to disclose that I was running it as a virtual machine, so perhaps my experience would have been better on a hard install, but these are issues I didn't seem to have with my

Perhaps I am being unfair by reviewing Mint as a VM, but I've done that with other distros before and considering Mint's reputation, I don't feel that it requires special treatment on my review.

Overall, I feel that Mint, much like Ubuntu, has really helped bring Linux to a lot of new users, and I applaud them for that. I think that if there is anything that can be done to make Linux more popular, it should be done. With all the discourse regarding online privacy, the NSA and hackers, a shift to Linux is a great first step into trying to protect yourself. The Internet is my favorite invention of the 20th century and I truly believe that popularizing Linux is just another step into giving people online freedom, and ensuring that we stay in control of our own private habits. So Mint gets points for doing that, however as a distrubution for someone like me, I wasn't impressed. In my opinion Ubuntu is just as easy to use to a user with some computer knowledge and it offers a much more inovative experience. I have to admit I am an Unity fan boy, even though it is bulky. If I want a less meaty distro, my current pick is Xubuntu, I have yet to see another really lightweight distro that looks so good and functions so well.