I hear about mint being a lightweight and more idealistic (community instead of corporate) alternative to Ubuntu, so I want to check it out, perhaps install it on my grandparent’s computer, to replace the Ubuntu installation.

I go to linuxmint.com/download.php and see that there are four flavors.

I stare at the screen for a few seconds. I have no clue what “MATE” is or “Cinnamon” are. I know XFCE and KDE but I have no clue how to find out what is the wisest choice and and I’m not really willing to do more than look at a colorful feature table to do so. So then I close the tab.

Cinnamon has a solid release? I’m pretty sure SolydXK won’t do a Cinnamon release. (Sorry, I had to go there. Take a drink.)

As far as why Ubuntu’s making such drastic changes goes, it seems to me like they may be making them because they can, and because The Spaceman has said he wants the change made. That seems to be good enough reasons for them, and it’s the very reason why so many of us have installed other distros on our systems. There’s a nice discussion about this, and the possible fate of Mint, over on the SolydXK forums and several of us are concerned about what the upstream changes will do to clem and the Mint team. I’ve got Mint 14 KDE running in a VM so I can run Webilder but I’m not even interested in upgrading it to a more current version since I only need it for that one app that I can’t install on SolydK due to a dependency on python-appindicator, which is a pain in the rear for anyone not running an Ubuntu-based distro. That bugger has so many dependencies I can’t even get it built from source, and I’ve tried on several occasions.

I second Rob’s recommendation of the Freakanomics podcast. It’s one of several public radio podcasts I subscribe to and it’s always entertaining and informative.

You may want to consider having this page in an open tab during each recording:

http://www.linuxmint.com/oldreleases.php

It seems like every other episode you two spend an unnecessary minute trying to recall which release of Linux Mint coincides with the corresponding Ubuntu counterpart. Just a suggestion. Look forward to each weeks’ podcast!