Mint is the new green

Or, why we’ll all be using Linux soon

Two of us run this outfit – Rob and me. Rob is the visuals guy, a designer to his bones, so naturally he uses a Mac and an iPhone and has ‘Cupertino’ running through him like the name of our city runs through a stick of rock.

I’m the geek, the code-monkey, so naturally, every 6 months or so I surrender to my impulses and load up a Linux distro, dust off my command-line chops and try to expunge the odour of downtown Redmond from my nostrils.

3 weeks later I’m usually cursing, re-backing up and reaching for the Windows DVD (I know the folks at ‘problem activations’ by name – we exchange cards at Christmas).

Well, maybe I’m being a bit premature – it’s only been a month – but I think those days may be over for good. The reason? Linux Mint.

Out of the box, LM has pretty much everything a general user could ask for. It ships with Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office and all the rest of the best-known FOSS alternatives for major general computing tasks. When I installed it the system picked up and supported my nVidia graphics card, my WiFi and all the rest of my laptop’s hardware without a hiccup – a Linux first for me. The installation process also includes an option to install non-free drivers from nVidia, which I did. The distribution includes the Flash plugin, mp3 codecs and a variety of other proprietary software without which, no matter what the FOSS zealots might say, one’s internet experience is likely to be a little rocky.

All other things being equal, the one thing that generally sends me running back to Windows is the lack of native binaries for the Adobe CS apps that I need regularly to use. Rob sends me templates in Illustrator format and it wouldn’t be fair of me to insist on him converting them to some Linux-friendly flavour just to accommodate my geekery. Enter VirtualBox, which now (version 4) manages to run Windows 7 somewhat faster (it seems) than a native installation. Add to that shared folders, Dropbox and easy mapping of our fileserver as a network drive and the problem disappears.

So there I am – running an incredibly stable, beautiful-looking, endlessly tweakable OS; running W7 (and Snow Leopard; naughty me!) virtually whenever I need them – and did I mention it’s free? I can, for the first time, see no reason to return to Windows (and no reason to buy a Mac) for the foreseeable future. I’ll post back here as my relationship with LM deepens and matures – possibly the odd tip or app review as well – and perhaps you’ll decide to give it a try yourselves someday.