Trying out Linux Mint on my old laptop

Since I’ve been all in favour of Windows on the desktop, a colleague of mine has been bugging me for quite some time about Linux Mint, a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu (which is based on Debian, and Debian, I love!).

Well.

I gave it a test spin on my old laptop. It found all the hardware, and it’s working as expected. Feels quick, except when I do something involving flash – but that’s closed source and anal behaviour from Adobe rather than a specific problem with Linux.

Enough said. If you have not yet given Linux a test spin on your desktop, the Linux Mint distribution is probably what you want to be looking closer at.

Click the beautiful logo to get you to their site. Choose “Download” from the drop down menu, burn the ISO to a CD and boot into the live CD enviroment to give it a test run so you can see what you think about it before you wipe your current installation!

After a few days with Vista SP2 …

… I am actually quite happy to have installed it. The initial system crash seems to have been something completely independent of the upgrade, and I’ve noticed only positive things with both my own and As laptop running Vista since the install.

Faster response and less heat generated are two very good things, especially considering this seems to become a very warm summer.

It would be intresting to run Ubuntu or Mint on this laptop, but I still don’t see Linux as the superior operating system on the desktop (yet).

Server side – completely different story!