My principal desktop, as regular readers will know, is forever changing. One minute it’s Windows XP, another Windows 7… and the next it’s one flavour of Linux or another. If it stays the same thing for three months on end, it’s (a) unusual and (b) signifies that there’s something unusually satisfying about that particular OS or distro.

So maybe it’s worth mentioning (or maybe not, but here goes anyway) that I’ve been using Linux Mint for three months to the day, and I’m impressed enough by it to have coughed up some cash for it (by way of a donation) -which makes it only the second distro I’ve ever paid money for, Suse 7.3 being the first.

It is, of course, Ubuntu with some (green) knobs on -multimedia codecs already installed, for example. But I like it more than Ubuntu simply because it’s not playing silly buggers with things like the default choice of desktop (Ubuntu 11.04, due any week now, is ditching the standard Gnome desktop in favour of “Unity”) and the placement of window management icons (maxmise, minimise and close buttons are all, by default, on the right in Mint, left in Ubuntu 10+). Yup, you can change Ubuntu back to standard Gnome, and you can alter the placement of the windows management icons, but I prefer not having to.

For all that, Mint inherits the general simplicity and functionality of Ubuntu, making it a piece of cake to use. It seems snappy enough, too, and the software is usefully up-to-date.

Not everything in the garden is rosy, I suppose. Having said I disliked Ubuntu’s choice of windows decoration placement and it’s forthcoming choice of Gnome shell and X layer, I have to confess that Mint’s choice of one panel at the bottom of the screen annoys me too -and I changed it 2 minutes after installation into the more-standard one-on-top/one-on-bottom arrangement. I also ditched the special ‘Mint’ menu and reverted to the standard Gnome Applications/Places/System one -though that’s one decision I might change. In any case, these seem small cosmetic issues -whereas Ubuntu’s innovations are right at the core of what a desktop does.

Of course, this might all end in tears: the Mint team seem already to be flirting with fiddling for no good reason (with things like logos). Who knows what will happen if Mint ever stops being fun and starts being an exercise in corporate branding and recognition?!

I also note that the Mint developers seem to be toying with the idea of leaving their Ubuntu roots behind them and building themselves on top of Debian. (I know Ubuntu is itself based on Debian, but I think the Mint guys want to stop being something that’s built on something that’s built on Debian and just go back to the pure ‘source’ for themselves). That actually sounds like a good idea to me, since I happily used Debian itself as my desktop for several months… but there’s no denying (I think) that Debian is generally a little less easy, a little less friendly to use than Ubuntu -so one would expect Mint’s own scores in those areas to regress a little.

Actually, there is already a Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), and they’ve done a great job in making Debian look and feel, for the most part, just like its Ubuntu-based cousin. But it’s not quite as polished as ‘the original’ and I haven’t adopted it as my own desktop just yet. Maybe soon though, since the really good thing about LMDE is that it’s a ‘rolling distro’, meaning you don’t have ‘big bang’ releases every April and October. You just install once and keep on upgrading for ever, confident that as you do so, you’ll always be on the (b)leading edge. That sounds like something I’d want my desktop to do, for sure.

(Oh, and if you’re that way inclined, there’s also a Linux Mint with KDE version and a Linux Mint with LXDE version (I use that last one on my netbook, since LXDE is a much ‘lighter’ desktop environment than either Gnome or KDE). There’s a whole ecosystem of Mints out there, in other words, and they all try hard to be themselves whilst exhibiting general family characteristics.

I dare say I shan’t be on Mint for ever. But I like being on it for now, so it gets a hearty thumbs-up from me.