'Buntu Stuff

Mint 8 (Helena) has been getting some really good reviews, even though it's based on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), which is getting a fair amount of the kind of criticism that Ubuntu's six-month releases typically get.

Dedoimedo had a lot to say about Karmic, but even more to say about Helena, which he pretty much raved about:

"...I'm also confused that Mint, a Ubuntu derivative, can be so different from its parent. Not only does it up the good parts and adds the missing bits, it also elegantly escapes the problems seen on Ubuntu..."

The Helena review covered a lot of things, but I'm always wary of Linux distro reviews. Folks might get a much better idea of how things are going by simply spending some time at the forums. At the Mint forums, I think you'd find that things with Helena aren't exactly perfect. Lots of people are loving it, but the latest Mint is certainly not without its problems.

The most interesting part of the Karmic review for me was the section on Grub 2, especially this sentence: "GRUB 2 requires shell scripting knowledge, which is not a given for many users." That scared me a bit, until I looked around a bit at Dedoimedo's Grub 2 tutorial. I know a bit about shell scripts. I didn't see much scary stuff there. I think I'll be okay.

He says, "...GRUB legacy is going to remain the key player for at least 5-10 years," and "...GRUB 2 is only used by the Ubuntu family, which makes about a third to one half of the Linux desktop market."

But it's already available in Debian Squeeze, and the version of Mepis following this year's Mepis 8.5 will almost certainly have it.

Anyway, this year I'm probably going to be moving on to the next LTS version of Mint, Linux Mint 9 (Isadora), which will be based on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). Or, I might just go with Lucid, I'm not sure. Either way, looks like I'll be introduced to Grub 2 this year with a version of one of those two distros.

I do think that there's a very good chance that both Isadora and Lucid will be better than their immediate predecessors. Both Ubuntu and Mint seem to be making a serious effort at making sure these LTS versions are as "stable" as possible right from the start.

One concern I have about Isadora and/or Lucid is that I don't think that KDE 3.5 apps will still be available. I might not have my familiar Konqueror to lean on. Distrowatch's Ubuntu page, under "snapshot -- lucid," shows kdebase (4.3.5). So, new things in store for me this year, no doubt.