[Leaplist] quick opinions - ubuntu vs. mint

[Steve Litt]

On Tuesday 08 December 2009 10:28:36 Dan Cherry wrote:
> I've been breaking my Kubuntu installations more often than I care to
> work on (mostly my own fault).  And I'm going to give gnome a try for a
> while - I'll go back to KDE4 when it stabilizes a little more, or when I
> stabilize a little more;)
> 
> Time to clean up and reinstall.  Ubuntu 9.10 or Mint 8?
> 
> I hear a lot of good things about Mint - but not familiar with their
> community support, and Ubuntu is really well supported by the community
> (almost too well supported - lately there seems to be 20 fixes for every
> problem, which is why I may be breaking my KDE boxes more frequently).
> I want to stay with the debian style repositories for familiarity's sake.
> 
> Any sage advice on either of those two OS's, before I click "install"
> this afternoon?

>From my perspective, Mint is not free software. It requires the user to take 
sides in an international conflict. Even Stallman, who has tons of political 
opinions, some radical, keeps his political opinions separate from his 
software. Clem LeFebvre is not so wise. The Mint project has never 
conspicuously repudiated his requirement to take sides.

I wrote more on the subject here:

http://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/200908/200908.htm#_The_Politics_of_Free_Software:_Pet_predjudices

I had installed Mint on all the kids' computers before hearing about Clem's 
requirement, and had planned on installing Mint on mine. After hearing of 
Clem's requirement, I installed Ubuntu on mine instead, and have been very 
satisfied with it. It's fairly easy to make Ubuntu as loosey-goosey with 
nonfree apps as Mint is. I wrote some content on how to do that in the above-
mentioned Linux Productivity Magazine.

I now dislike troubleshooting my kids' computers -- I like the Ubuntu user 
interface much better. When it comes time to upgrade the kids, they'll be 
getting clean Ubuntu installs.

HTH

SteveT

Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt


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