Thread: Linux Mint

Linux. Mint has a great development team; a dedicated and helpful IRC channel, and a whole bunch of tricks up its sleeve to ease the transition from Windows to Linux for new users.

In fact, we recommend that Linux Mint be the first distro that you tryout, for a number of reasons. First of all, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, so it is compatible with the repositories of Linux Mint, Ubuntu as well as Debian, which is a wide range of software that IS compatible with the distro. A whole bunch of video and audio codecs are available out of the box, and even obscure document formats such as jpg images packed in a rar file or comic book formats are opened by the document reader by default. Linux Mint, in fact, offers more document support out of the box than the latest release of Windows 7 does. One surprising little functionality is the ease with which Linux Mint can interface over WiFi. WiFi functionality is present out of the box, which is still very rare in Linux distros.

Linux Mint also takes efforts to look great, and along with Sabayon and Mandriva, is one of the neatest distros that we have seen. Every time you start the command line, instead of a boring prompt, there is some ASCII art and a joke. Linux Mint basically takes the weight of learning a new Operating System, and one meant for the 1337 crowd off your shoulders, and makes you feel comfortable from the word go. There are also a small bunch of tools, mostly written in python that comes with Linux Mint. These tools are small extras for the user, and are pretty useful. One of the tools, for example, can transfer files from one Mint Install to another over the same network. Refer to the Ubuntu installer for installing Linux mint.