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Linux Mint 12 (right now a release candidate) definitely stands out in the crowd of Gnome 3.x Shell Linux distributions. It seems the Linux Mint team cares deeply about giving the community what it wants but doesn’t have. Linux Mint 12 is a Gnome 3.x Shell distribution that stands out on its own because rather than accept the default Gnome 3.x Shell interface like most Gnome 3.x Shell Linux distributions have done Linux Mint 12 tries its best to emulate the Gnome 2.x interface through the use of Gnome Shell extensions.
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Linux Mint 12 (right now a release candidate) definitely stands out in the crowd of Gnome 3.x Shell Linux distributions. It seems the Linux Mint team cares deeply about giving the community what it wants but doesn’t have. Linux Mint 12 is a Gnome 3.x Shell distribution that stands out on its own because rather than accept the default Gnome 3.x Shell interface like most Gnome 3.x Shell Linux distributions have done Linux Mint 12 tries its best to emulate the Gnome 2.x interface through the use of Gnome Shell extensions.
Even though Linux Mint 12 looks like the old Gnome, it still has all the features of Gnome 3.x Shell for those of us that have gotten accustomed to its interface:
Linux Mint 12 also comes with a nice selection of default software. Pretty much everything you would need is there, including GIMP and LibreOffice.
Here you can see Linux Mint 12 comes with the standard Gnome set of accessories. Brasero CD & DVD burner, a disk usage analyzer, a disk utility, Gedit – they’re all there.
This is the graphics menu for Linux Mint 12. It’s nice to see GIMP listed here, as well as a document viewer, image viewer, and LibreOffice Draw.
The internet menu in Linux Mint 12 gives way to Firefox browser, Thunderbird email, Pidgin instant messenger, Java, and X-Chat IRC.
The office menu in Linux Mint 12 features all the components of LibreOffice.
The other menu in Linux Mint 12 has Gnome Tweak Tool (always a good surprise on a Gnome 3.x Shell Linux distribution), APTonCD (a backup utility for applications), a firewall configuration editor, GParted (for formatting/partitioning hard drives), an even a domain blocker.
The sound & video menu in Linux Mint 12 is a little bit of a mess, with three movie players listed (four if you include Banshee). I have to wonder why the Linux Mint team chose to include three movie players. Could they not make up their mind?
The system tools menu opens up to the configuration editor, Xterm, Gdebi package installer, and the rest of your standard Gnome goodies.
Something I would like to note is that the internet ran really, really slow on the Live CD. So slow it was unusable. This Live CD also took a long time to boot, so I would not recommend it for low spec machines.
Other than that though the Linux Mint 12 RC Live CD left me really impressed with Linux Mint where I have not been so impressed by it in the past. Rather than just being another spin on Ubuntu, Linux Mint 12 has carved out its niche among those users that miss the old Gnome 2.x interface while not leaving lovers of the new Gnome 3.x interface out in the cold. It includes everything you need to get started on a Linux distribution and nothing you don’t need (besides having four movie players). All in all I have to give this Linux distribution an 8 out of 10. Full Story |
