Whats all the fuss over Mint?

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Hey!
I was just wondering, whats so amazing about Linux Mint?
Like the other day, I was trading something in to a pawn shop, and they guy there had lots of computer knowlage like me. So we where talking Linux and stuff, and he said "Have you seen the latest Linux Mint? Its really nice." . I have heard lots of people say good things about MINT, do you think I should try it? I would like a change from Kubuntu.

I really don't understand this either. I used it for about a week, and at first it seemed cool due to the fact that a lot proprietary stuff was installed and proprietary .ppa's were loaded by default, but then I noticed that nearly every websearch that you did was through LinuxMint's search portal, with no real way of turning it off. This seemed malware-ish to me, so I got rid of it.

I also hated the annoying MintMenu, and the fact that the window slider bars were hidden.

--I think though that people like it due to all of the proprietary stuff, and proprietary .ppa's be active on the initial install.

The reason is that the newest edition LM12 contains a greatly edited version of GNOME3. It is made more user friendly than the default GNOME3 (although I still didn't really care for it). And they're developing their own version of it (I'm not sure whether it's a fork or what) called Cinnamon which I guess is supposed to be better still. Mint is very similar to Ubuntu (Mint is based off of Ubuntu), so it appeals to a similar market, but it comes without Unity and tones down the GNOME3 stupidity. That's why it's becoming popular. It also comes with MATE (a fork of GNOME2) preinstalled, which I really like. Still, there are a lot of small bugs with LM12 I found, so if you do want to try it then wait a few months for LM13.

Personally I really like the MintMenu, but I guess that's because I was a long-time Windows user and I find its similarity to the Start Menu to be nice and familiar. If you don't, though, you can remove it and use a standard GNOME menu. As for the slider bars, they are back now, thankfully. At least in the MATE desktop environment anyway--I can't remember about GNOME. And I have finally figured out how to remove the custom Mint Search. Now I am just going to a standard Google search (although, to be honest, Google already builds a profile of your search habits, so I can't imagine Mint could possibly do anything more spywarish than that).

To be honest, I don't much care for gnome 3 no matter how you modify it. It actually made my go back to Ubuntu and Unity.

Never mind the Unity Desktop, if you feel the need to use Ubuntu, you should check out the Lubuntu version that runs LXDE.

Basically, it comes down to, "Everybody who isn't mentally-challenged hates "Unity".

Mint is basically "Ubuntu without Unity". It's a way to snub Unity (and indirectly, Ubuntu and Canonical) without actually giving up the creature comforts of Ubuntu itself.

Unity is proof that Microsoft isn't the only entity insane enough to think that dumbing down desktop apps to the level of a tablet and phone is a *good* idea. Sadly, Ubuntu has been infected by the madness as well.

I have tried Lubuntu, I don't much care for it.

I think it depends on the spec of your computer, I think lxde is great for low spec computers, I tried Linux mint using xfce and it is quite quick for my machine.

That's not what I have against it. Lubuntu is great for older, or really cheep computer because it only needs 128 MB of ram. But if a computer can handle a larger OS then Unity isn't all that bad, just takes some getting used to (like any UI).

Yes, it's good on low spec machines, but on high spec machines it's super fast due to it's low resource requirements, and if you want even faster and lighter, you can login directly with Openbox.