Linux Mint

Canonical have their own ideas on what the UI should be, so they go ahead and create it. They call it Unity. They get a lot of backlash as other distributions first reject Unity, then a few accept it as an option further down the road, then reject it due to frustrations in not getting the cooperation they need from Canonical. Canonical want Ubuntu to have a unique selling point, Unity gives them that, so where's the problem?

One of the signs that we're getting older is the tendency to narrow down things in life that we like, opinions we hold and principles we have. I've noticed that I'm less and less interested in trying out new distros or environments, I've grown at home with the Debian family running XFCE. For the last year this has also extended to my choice of NuoveXT2.2 icon set too. It's time for a change.

I've stumbled upon a version of an as-yet-unannounced new edition of Linux Mint, LMNR (Linux Mint Netbook Remix). It appears to be a netbook UI on top of the regular Linux Mint 9 Gnome edition. It looks very nice, and appears to be the answer to those with small screen netbooks who want the polish of Linux Mint.

I've spent the last couple of days distro hopping on my netbook and ended up with a pretty impressive UNR (Ubuntu Netbook Remix) 10.04. It had been happily running Linux Mint 8 XFCE with full Compiz effects before that.

Since switching back to Linux Mint 7 XFCE I've made a point of spending time in the #linuxmint support IRC channel on irc.spotchat.org helping out other users where I can. It's a way that I can give something back to the Mint project. This is very common in the FOSS community, where people who use a project give something back in terms of their time, code, artwork, translations, forum replies etc.