1. First impressions and ease of use
The Cinnamon ISO is 1.4 GB in size and can be downloaded from here. You can choose from Cinnamon, MATE, KDE, and Xfce versions. So we load the Cinnamon desktop. Mint is equipped with Guest Additions out of the box like almost every distro I’ve reviewed so far.
Notice the “software rendering” notification on the right. The fix in virtualbox is to enable 3D acceleration and give the VM as much VRAM as possible in the display settings. This shouldn’t affect most machines on bare metal.
The whole distro seems to be oriented at and familiar to previous Windows users. The bottom panel looks very much like that of Windows XP and the menu is similar to that of Windows 7.
Ease of use score: 10/10
2. Installer
The installer is Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer. Unfortunately, this means that you can’t dual boot Ubuntu and any other Ubuntu-based distro on the same EFI computer without a complicated workaround. However, this isn’t Linux Mint’s fault and Linux Mint only receives attention for this problem because it’s the most popular Ubuntu-based distro.
Installer score: 10/10
Release date
|
ISO size (GB)
|
Distribution base
|
Default filesystem
|
Install time
|
Boot time
|
Size of install
|
Desktop RAM use
| |
KaOS 2015.02
|
2/24/2015
|
1.4
|
Independent
|
XFS
|
18:03
|
0:36
|
4.6
|
415
|
Ubuntu MATE 15.04
|
2/25/2015
|
1.1
|
Ubuntu Vivid (15.04)
|
ext4
|
12:57
|
0:27
|
4.2
|
457
|
Manjaro 0.8.12 Xfce
|
2/6/2015
|
1.4
|
Arch
|
ext4
|
11:33
|
0:27
|
4.7
|
351
|
Netrunner 15
|
2/16/2015
|
1.9
|
Ubuntu Utopic (14.10)
|
ext4
|
16:20
|
0:41
|
6.4
|
714
|
openSUSE 13.2 KDE
|
11/4/2014
|
4.4
|
Independent
|
Btrfs (used ext4 because of known bug)
|
15:29
|
0:39
|
4.4
|
422
|
Bodhi Linux 3.0.0
|
2/17/2015
|
0.6
|
Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)
|
ext4
|
5:50
|
0:34
|
2.2
|
348
|
Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon
|
11/29/2014
|
1.4
|
Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)
|
ext4
|
8:45
|
0:42
|
4.5
|
343
|
Average of all distros
|
1.8
|
12:42
|
0:35
|
4.4
|
436
|
3. Design
The design of the distro is nice looking and current and modern. I say current because it doesn’t have anything really special to distinguish it from the rest. The distro looks slick, but it also looks quite generic. This is not really a bad thing though, and it shines in terms of design, especially in fonts, which usually make or break an operating system’s design. The default font rendering is probably the best of any distro I’ve used.
The login screen is very nice. The background is a slideshow.
There are also many tweak options for the theme.
Design score: 8.5/10
4. Applications
Linux comes with the de facto GNOME-based application set.
Web Browser - Firefox
File Manager - Nemo
Email Client - Thunderbird
Text Editor - Text Editor (GEdit fork)
Image Viewer - Image Viewer (GNOME)
Terminal Emulator - Terminal
Music Player - Banshee
Office Suite - LibreOffice
One thing to note is that Firefox doesn’t come with Google as the default search engine but instead uses Yahoo. However you can add Google.
Applications score: 9/10
5. Installing packages
Linux Mint comes with apt-get and a wide software repository, extendable via PPAs, and an excellent package store.
However, because this is an Ubuntu LTS-based release, the software repositories will get older as we go on, so we might want to enable the backports repositories. This is easily done in Software Sources.
Mint also comes with the best update manager of any distro.
Installing packages score: 10/10
Final Thoughts
Mint is a great distro for any Linux user looking for a distro that is easy to use, stable, and configurable. Unfortunately, there is one major hiccup - the lack of inclusion of Google. However, this is easily fixable. So I have no problem recommending Mint to any Linux user of any expertise level.
Final score: 47.5/50 = 95%
Distro name
|
Final Score
|
Manjaro 0.8.12 Xfce
|
99
|
Ubuntu MATE 15.04
|
97
|
Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon
|
95
|
openSUSE 13.2 KDE
|
93
|
Netrunner 15
|
90
|
Bodhi Linux 3.0.0
|
84
|
KaOS 2015.02
|
80
|
Average of all reviews
|
91
|
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