Today I decided I needed something other than Mint on one of my systems. I chose to do this because Mint has had security issues that led to their website being hacked and giving out malware, and their forum database passwords stolen. Which brings down the whole reputation of their project, unfortunately.
There were only ever going to be two possible alternatives to Mint and they are Debian and Ubuntu. I had a play with Debian, which provides Cinnamon within the distro as a supported desktop environment. Although the current Debian release has quite an old version, 2.2, you can switch to the unstable repository to get it to update to 3.0. The main issue with Debian is under the hood. Software packages I use all the time are unavailable from the official repositories because of their dislike of the licensing. They even went so far as to rebrand both Firefox and Thunderbird on the grounds that the logos are copyrighted by the Mozilla Foundation, and the resulting Icedove mail application wouldn't recognise my Thunderbird profile. Is that a big deal? Well yes, if it saves you having to reinstall all your email accounts and download all the mail all over again.
So what looked quite promising ended up being a waste of time as while I can hack installs as well as a lot of expert users, the lack of support for many things that Ubuntu/Mint have catered for was going to be a really big issue making it nearly impossible to have a smooth running system and a painless transition from Mint.
So then I had a live preview of Ubuntu followed by Xubuntu, and quickly chose the latter because its desktop environment Xfce is as good as if not better than Cinnamon. And the biggie of course is it can install Ubuntu packages, which comes down to much wider support in some areas than Debian. Ubuntu itself is limited in that Cinnamon is not officially available on it, so the way seemed clear to break with Cinnamon completely. As it happens, Xfce bears more than a passing resemblance to Cinnamon.
We shouldn't knock Debian of course as it is running under Ubuntu and all its flavours - just that it is more of a system that favours expert users, and has some limitations. Which is why building Ubuntu on top of it has the best all round outcome.
So LoungePC is getting another makeover, the third in the same week. The installer is almost identical to Mint's, both of which are somewhat better than Ubuntu's. The RAID-1 got brought back up fairly quickly and I am just finishing off some installs.
I guess eventually the map computer will also be migrated to Xubuntu but there is no real hurry for that.
