It’s been a while since my last post, I think 7 months is a personal record. In my defence I have got a full time job and three young kids.

Back to the titular subject, picking a distro.

For a long time I’ve had a dislike for Linux Mint, I’m not even sure why. After much experimenting with Ubuntu, Linux Deepin, Peppermint and a variety of other Ubuntu flavours I finally tried the newly released Mint 17 cinnamon – I’ve got no love for KDE or the Gnome 2.x throwback that is MATE. I was pleasantly surprised. Everything looks good, and most importantly my laptop hibernates without any fiddling around and crossing fingers.

The single best thing about Mint is its increased adherence to Fitt’s law: the program launch menu is bottom left, Chrome/Chromium browser tabs are at the very top edge, close window is top right and I can even (after a slight customisation) control the volume by scrolling on the bottom right. As pretty and fully functional as Ubuntu is, I find its program launcher and browser tab location a complete pain.

So, Mint: it’s as pretty as Ubuntu and it doesn’t make me swear.