[ubuntu-uk] Distro hopping / Laptop running hot

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 8:02 PM, Barry Drake <bdrake at crosswire.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-01-20 at 19:34 +0000, Liam Proven wrote:
>> Do bear in mind that there are currently 2 flavours of Mint. It is
>> *possibly* on the threshold of a big change.
>
> I had a play with it out of interest.  Seemed Ok and installed very
> easily, but there's so much you take for granted in Ubuntu that's
> missing and needs to be installed compared with Ubuntu.

There is? Like what?

(Bear in mind I have shipped pushing 1000 machines with this on now
and have a fair bit of experience with it.)

Nothing is missing, AFAIK. It has Thunderbird instead of Evolution
(which is my own preference) and Pidgin instead of Empathy (again, my
own preference). It has a different "start" menu  and a different
updater. Different theme. Extra multimedia plugins. And that's about
it.

What is "missing"?

> I guess Mint
> would be a good starting point for someone who wanted only to do basic
> things like internet, e-mail and word processing.  Anything more and I
> don't really see the advantage.  Nice distro though.

The key advantages are:
 - A familiar Windows-like panel rather than the confusing 2 panels
with tons of wasted space on the top one
 - no need to install any extras for media playback - it's ready to go
straight off the disk
 - it's not brown :¬)  (I like the brown myself but many don't)
 - and more subjectively it has what I and they feel are better, more
mature email & chat programs.

Not huge but quite significant.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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