I have switched to a new distro on my laptop. I have been quite impressed overall with this Ubuntu derivative called Mint. I use my laptop for web development and all the more common/less geeky things like editing photos, browsing the internet, listening to music, and doing office work. Mint has performed beautifully in all areas. While it doesnât do much that Ubuntu canât, its many steps closer to the âjust worksâ OS, and that makes mint my current top recommendation for anyone considering giving Linux a try 
Linux Mint has some important advantages over Ubuntu. A number of them have to do with appearance, some are functional, and others have to do with system stability. First up is appearance. Compared to Ubuntuâs dull defaults Mint comes with a more visually appealing theme and a nice selection of desktop backgrounds. For users accustomed to Linux those are very minor conveniences which wouldnât really be worth the switch. I am no expert with customizing Linux look and feel, but I thought I had a pretty decent handle on it. That said, Mint has improved a number of small touches to the look and feel that are beyond what I knew how to do - boot and login screens are examples of this. Good fine grain aesthetics are hard to describe, but my opinion is that the polish is pretty good, definitely superior to any distro I have seen out of the box. Beyond looks Mint feels a little smother once you get to working with it. Some things work better, and others are just slightly more convenient. For example:
- It comes with a simple configuration interface for Composition installed. You can get this and better on Ubuntu too, but since it doesnât come installed its one of those things that many people stumble over when they are new. It took me hours to get the cube going the first time I installed Ubuntu!
- an all in one menu with some nice built in filters
- less frequent updates
- âopen as rootâ is just a nice option for those who like to use the gui file manager, but still want to be able to do power user tasks.
- The terminal is more friendly to my eyes as it comes with some nice color coding, and there are fun fortunes to boot! (if you enable them during the installâŚ)
- numerous codecs pre-installed
- gnome-do pre installed
- installing new programs - most of the time I use synaptic, but for less experienced users mints customs system would pretty nice I think
- I donât know why but my javascript animations in Firefox are just smoother and certain things print anti-aliased that didnât with Ubuntu - like Dia projects.
Part of the âjust worksâ idea is that you donât have to constantly fiddle with things to keep it working. Its why a friend of mine loves Macs, less time tinkering with the system, more time doing real work. Some people think the tinkering keeps them sharp and in a good state of mind regarding their machine⌠I digress. Mint requires less tinkering, but like any open source software will still let you if so inclined. An important contributor to this stability is that Mint uses a custom update system that rates updates on the likelihood that they will cause problems. The result is a more stable, but half a step behind environment. So long as you arenât concerned with having the latest software the day it comes out this shouldnât be an issue. I myself run a development build of Ubuntu on another machine, and while I like playing with the bleeding edge stuff, I also have come to really appreciate the stability of Mint. As a disclaimer I am not at all entering the discussion of mint as a server. I think it is meant to be a desktop not a server, and the stability I am referring to is all about the desktop. With Ubuntu 8.10 due out in days I am eager for the release of Mint 6 that will follow shortly after. I hope to add an article on customizing the desktop and maybe another on setting up a Groovy and Grails development environment after that release.