Minted!

With Linux that is!


Has anybody been playing with the newer versions of Linux Mint especially with the LXDE (Lightweight Desktop Environment) http://lxde.org/ ?

I've got it on a Dell 910 Netbook (1g RAM, 16Gb SSD) and on an ~10 year old Desktop machine.

I'd say for ease of installation, speed and a user friendly GUI, it's about as close to a Windows beating OS as anything I've seen has done yet.

Usually I stay away from Linux with GUIs, as GNOME and KDE always looked and felt 'clunky', bit like GEM used to be on the Atari ST so I stuck to SSH/command Line on Centos, which fine for managing servers.

But I'll definitely be 'flying a flag' for Mint now.

--
Chris.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
http://webmaster-talk.eu/

That does look pretty swish! Is it likely to supplant GNOME or KDE at some point do you think?

I fondly remember my Atari 520STFM and 1040STE (before their power supplies blew up!).

--
Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

Maybe not amonst the Linux "die hards" because their attitude is very often "Why do we need a GUI in the first place" but I'm sure it will gain some some fans in the users looking for viable Windows replacement.

Once the "geeky element" or requirement is removed from a LInux distro it should start to make a mark with more than the techy users.

I've had a few friends and relatives who have bought laptops and netbooks with Fedora or Ubuntu installed with KDE, and from their reactions you would think it was a piece of alien technogy that needed Daniel Jackson to decipher the language and Samantha Carter to figure out what it does.

With LXDE/Mint looking a bit more user friendly (even without the Teletubbies hill ) more people should be able to get up and running with Linux from scratch, the userbase should start to grow and put a real dent in Microsoft's market dominance.

--
Chris.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
http://webmaster-talk.eu/

@chrishirst: That would be nice - competition is good. I think most non-techy users are only comfortable using what they're used to (i.e. Windows), so for those users it can't hurt to make a distro that looks as familiar and user-friendly as possible!

--
Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/