All the hoopla about Ubuntu Natty, Gnome 3 and Unity forced me to look out again at the Linux community in a bit to search for the perfect Linux desktop OS for me. UbuntuStudio was the first place I looked since their stand against Unity. The UbuntuStudio community has adopted XFCE as their new desktop environment so I took a look at the latest offering of Xubuntu. Not bad performance wise but, in my view, from an appearance point of view, not attractive at all - they are where Ubuntu was 3 or 4 years ago. Then I remembered LinuxMint which was actually my the first Linux distro I installed. I gave it up at that point because of repeated CUPSD crashes and a few other noob and hardware issues that made usage of the OS more than a bit challenging.
Boy oh Boy what a lovely surprise I had. This is without a doubt the most attractive OS on God's green earth PERIOD. I installed on a Dell Inspiron 1720 17 inch. Installation was intuitive and quick, much quicker than Ubuntu which was surprising as I opted to go for the full 64 bit flavour that had all the multimedia goodies set up in the installation ISO. These guys definitely know how to put an OS together because for the first time since I started to use Linux I have not needed to install any thing other than my own development soft ware. Media codecs, Flash player, VLC, you name it - any thing that is needed for you to be up and running immediately after installation was there. This is truly the way all linux distros should go. Quite frankly I am amazed that they have not overshadowed Ubuntu if this is the manner they have been offering this distro over the last 2 years. I'm a total convert. All I needed to do was install FDT4 and I was ready to develop. With Ubuntu every new installation and it was at least a days job to get the machine to the sort of state where I was happy with the look feel and performance. Katya, is a magnificent demonstration of what an OS should look, feel and perform like. The only downside and it was not really a downside was the fact that you had to configure Compiz yourself - but it was already installed so in a few minutes I had my DeskCube and all the goodies Compiz has provided that have made my computing such joy.
If you have not tried Linux Mint - Please please do. One should not deny himself such pleasures.