Vlogcanic

Linux Mint is a Linux distro for i386 compatible architectures based in Ubuntu and aiming to improve on Ubuntu’s usability by making audo and multimedia codecs availalble by default, binary drivers for graphics cards, installation ease and other tricks that make the user’s life easier. It’s been a big mover and shaker among Linux distros in the last few years, constantly getting good reviews and becoming a favourite, even with experienced users.

It started as Clement Lefebvre, a french developer and experienced Linux enthusiast decided to come up with a very friendly desktop-oriented distro. That was Linux Mint Barbara, in 2006, which combined Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft with Lefebvre’s ideas (basically, Ubuntu with codecs). Barbara got a share of attention, became popular and attracted a lot of comments and new ideas by its user community. In the following Linux Mint releases some other tools became available such as mintConfig, mintDisk or mintDesktop, which are mainly easier to use configuration options software. It only made the distro more popular.

Besides a bunch of custom tools and usability improvements, Linux Mint also features a series of under-the-hood system improvements mainly invisible to the end user but very useful in terms of performance. Despite all those modifications, compatibility with the software available in the Ubuntu repositories is retained.

Variants.

Linux Mint uses GNOME by default, since that’s Ubuntu’s choice as well but other editions have appeared over time featuring KDE or XFCE in the graphical environment. Also, a community development effort is on the way to produce a stable Linux Mint edition with Fluxbox.

Along with every Linux Mint main release there is usually a light release to acompany it, made out of free software only.

Other characteristics.

Besides Mint’s proven usability, the distro’s community is very active and the developers very open to suggestions. This is one of those distributions in which the comments found in the forums actually turn up as a new feature quite frequently. Other important stuff about Linux Mint:

• All editions are installable LiveCDs so you can try them before installing them.
• It mainly leans towards desktop use.
• It reads and writes NTFS partitions automatically.
• mintUpdate: is the distro’s update utility.
• mintInstall: the distros’ installation tool, highly automatized and designed to take advantage of the distro’s own Software Portal.
• mintDesktop: a desktop configurator.