Linux Mint Pros and Cons
I need to know the Linux Mint pros and cons.
I’m assuming you want more than yeah, it is not Windows!
I’m looking at several different Linux versions to install. Linux Mint is one of the top three.
You get the Ubuntu distribution with what some consider better usability like the ability to configure the desktop environment, a simpler menu structure, easy to use software installations and multi-media codecs some other distributions do not have.
What on earth is a codec?
That’s the software that lets you watch a movie, listen to music and play a lot of media files. Mint comes with a lot of these codecs that other distributions make you level up your Linux skills to get your audio and video files to play.
Not having to be a system admin to play the multimedia library I already have is a big draw.
It has several different versions of the interface, such as the mate, gnome and cinnamon desktops. There are KDE and Xfce desktop interfaces, too.
They really like playing on that dessert theme.
One of the downsides of the version is that they do not put out security advisories.
It’s Linux, so security is not a problem.
People thought that until the Ghost vulnerability showed up around January 2015. And the varying versions of Ubuntu do not always have the features that the main version promises.
So I get the official version and modify at will.
While Ubuntu is one of the easier Linux versions for new users, it takes a lot more work to set up than Windows.
If I wanted Windows, I would not be considering Linux.
You have to be careful of the user interface you pick for Mint. The Mate interface on Mint does not do Bluetooth support as well as it does on other versions.
So I use Linux Mint with Cinnamon.
Cinnamon Mint has an active community with lots of applets and productivity tools, but it needs 3D acceleration, and your computer hardware may not be able to handle that.
My hardware is not that new.
Cinnamon also is not as mature as Mate, and is not quite as stable.
Any version of Linux is more stable than my PC right now.
Mint’s biggest advantage is running straight out of the box, while you may need some fiddling to get other software apps running.
I need a Linux version that does not presuppose I’m a sys-admin like Arch, or train me to be one like Debian. Mint sounds perfect in that regard.
