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I’ve been a fairly heavy user of Spotify for about 3 years, playing about 40-60 hours per week. I’ve liked using it and am pretty happy with it on Android, Linux (at home) and Windows (at work, for my sins).

When Google music all access (snappy!) launched, I thought I’d give it a spin and stopped my Spotify premium sub.

My first thoughts were that it seemed OK. The PC client is web based, so is platform agnostic. I’ve noticed occasional stuttering during playback as it doesn’t cache music as well as Spotify. It also seems to have problems when the browser is bogged down with a few heavy tabs. The music selection seems pretty good, no complaints. The price is pretty much the same as Spotify too.

I’d be happy using it if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s Google.

I’ve got nothing specific against Google, but it’s everyone’s best interests to keep competition alive and prevent another Microsoft style monopoly. It doesn’t matter if Google music is better right now (it isn’t). When my free 30 trial is over I’ll be going back to Spotify, not because it’s has better caching or a good full-fat client application, not even because it has an offline mode. I’m going back to keep Spotify and competition alive.

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I’ve been trying a few different Linux distros recently, trying to find something better than my previous combination of Xubuntu with AWN. Unfortunately AWN hasn’t been updated in quite some time, so time to find something new.

I tried Elementary OS, but found it’s complete lack of desktop icons annoying. The developers seemed dismissive of user comments on this, which is annoying. You *can* run nautilus to draw the the desktop icons, but that leaves with two file managers depending on where you click and potentially illegible icon text if you use the wrong colour wallpaper. The program launcher also seems a little sluggish.

After a long time avoiding it, I have decided to give Mint a shot. Version 15 was released recently, so it seemed a good time. My only issue with it was that the laptop fan was stuck at full speed after a wakeup from suspend. A little googling came up with this solution:

sudo touch /etc/pm/sleep.d/99_cooldown.sh
sudo chmod +755 /etc/sleep.d/99_cooldown.sh
sudo nano /etc/pm/sleed.d/99_cooldown.sh

In the file paste (ctrl+shift+v) this:

#!/bin/sh
# Stop fan in HP2510p after resuming from sleep
/bin/echo “0” >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device0/cur_state
/bin/echo “0” >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device1/cur_state
/bin/echo “0” >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device2/cur_state
/bin/echo “0” >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device3/cur_state
/bin/echo “0” >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device4/cur_state
/bin/echo “0” >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device5/cur_state
/bin/echo “0” >/sys/class/thermal/cooling_device6/cur_state
/usr/bin/synclient tapbutton2=2 tapbutton3=3
exit 0

The line before exit is optional, but super awesome, allows you to middle click on the trackpad by tapping with two fingers. Useful for opening new tabs from links, closing tabs etc.