I've been using Linux Mint since I was forced off of Ubuntu by having no interest in using Unity or Gnome3 for my desktop experience. For a release or two on Ubunutu I was able to use "fallback mode" on the desktop environment and it would give me Gnome2 but they eventually pulled that out entirely so I tried a bunch of distros (including Kubuntu) and settled on Mint with Mate to keep the same general look/feel as gnome2 and since it is Ubuntu based I have the same tools and packages generally available. So I've been trucking along for a while and things generally just work. I am long past the time of wanting to play around and tinker with every little thing so there is not much excitement for me there anymore to explore a distro. So when things just work, that is one of my major measures of success. When things don't work and it takes very little time/effort to fix, that is also pretty fantastic in my eyes. I just recently upgraded my workstation from Linux Mint 15 (MATE 64-bit) to Linux Mint 17 (MATE 64-bit) so I can be on the LTS release. The upgrade went pretty smooth, having multiple hard drives and partitions I was able to maintain access to my previous Mint 15 install while keeping /home identical across both. Turns out I did not need bother with that as everything worked out well. I only really needed to re-install the apps that I use, for which the main ones I keep a list on a wiki page as well as notes and other useful hints to remind myself on certain /etc/ config file settings, iptables rules, etc. After running for a couple of weeks or maybe it's been a month I decided to do a similar upgrade for my laptop but I did not intend to maintain the original Mint 15 "/" partition and just overwrite it due to disk space constraints. I also keep /home on a separate partition so I did not have to worry about that data or the multitude of user-specific settings. I can't believe how smooth the upgrade process was. Absolutely no glitches or issues. When I booted up my desktop screen looked exactly the same as before (thanks to /home being untouched); I just needed to go through the same re-install apps process and re-work a few /etc config files again. Now when I say "upgrade" I mean a fresh install in both cases of my $dayjob workstation and my laptop. I don't know what else to say but for normal desktop power-user use, I have basically nothing to complain about when it comes to Mint. Also a few months back I decided to give back and setup a public Mint mirror at $dayjob. So now I have even have local LAN access to packages, updates, ISOs, etc for Mint (as well as Ubuntu and CentOS). In any case I give a +1 for Mint all the way. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20141203/177ea7d0/attachment.html>