looking good

Just a glance at Linux Mint 16 "Petra" (Cinnamon), from a live session:

It does look very nice, and quite polished. Impressive. I used Unetbootin in Debian Wheezy to put it on a flash drive, and it runs quite well.

The last Mint release I installed here was Mint 9. I won't be installing this release, but I think it would be a nice choice for newbies, or even for experienced Linux users. Everything is set up quite nicely for the user to be able to get right to work.

Mint comes with the Nemo file manager, forked from Nautilus, and I think Nemo's an improvement over Nautilus.

The Cinnamon 2.0 desktop looks fine, easy enough to get around. Here are some shots of what's in the menu:

The live session looks good enough that I'll probably keep Mint 16 on a flash drive for awhile; might come in handy, as it includes all of the tools that I like to have in a live session.

Good job by the Mint folks!

nice tutorial

Of course this gets posted after I've stumbled through my first Arch installations on my own: How to install Arch Linux - easy way

I tried two "test" installations on a spare computer, just to make sure I understood things, before going ahead with the real deal. I had browser tabs opened to the Beginners' Guide and the Installation Guide (from the Arch wiki) during my installation (I mostly followed the former) but I would have had this tutorial open on another tab. I liked reading through this tutorial, though, and comparing what was written there to my own installations notes, which are quite fresh in my mind. Most of the steps are the same, except I used GParted from Parted Magic for the partitioning, didn't set up sudo, and installed Xfce (not KDE). A few other things.

While it's good that people write articles like this, I'd say that it's important to refer to the wiki's guides first. In any case, this tutorial looks like a good resource that nicely supplements the official documentation.

yay for xfce lovers

Dedoimedo gives Xubuntu 13.10 a 9.99/10 score in this review: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/xubuntu-salamander.html

planet debian

Good Debian site, for those who have some time to kill: Planet Debian

Over 90% of what's posted there is completely over my head, but that's okay. Might learn a thing or two.

keeping an eye on this one

When I first started looking into Arch Linux and Arch derivatives, Manjaro wasn't as appealing to me as Bridge Linux and ArchBang. I decided to go in a different direction because Manjaro was such a new distro, combined with the fact that Manjaro's packages come via Manjaro's own dedicated repositories (although I guess many or most of those packages originate from the Arch repos). Arch Linux has been around for a long time, and I figured that the best way to benefit from that longevity (aside from installing Arch itself) would be to go with Bridge or ArchBang, where the packages come directly from the Arch repos.

Still, Manjaro is a very interesting and attractive project, and I may want to run it in the future. Manjaro appears to have a strong development team and good documentation. The Manjaro Wiki article "Manjaro: A Different Kind of Beast" explains some of the differences between Arch and Manjaro, and notes: "An important benefit brought by Manjaro's use of its own repositories is that the developers will automatically implement critical updates on your behalf, and there will therefore be no need for you to intervene manually."

So, Manjaro aims to be more "stable" and more user-friendly than Arch, or even Bridge or ArchBang. It's getting a lot of attention around the Linux world, and I'm sure that the distro will be around for awhile. I think I might wait a year or two before trying it out for myself. Perhaps that'll happen sooner if I become unhappy with Bridge and/or ArchBang.

Here's Arindam Sen's review of Manjaro 0.87 Xfce: http://mylinuxexplore.blogspot.com/2013/09/manjaro-087-ascella-xfce-review-superb.html

Manjaro Linux at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manjaro_Linux

Manjaro's DistroWatch page: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=manjaro

And, Manjaro's home page: http://manjaro.org/

another one-man distro goes down

Anthony Nordquist is ending the SalineOS project:

I decided quite some time ago; that I simply do not have enough free time in a day to complete all the work that needs to be done to make a release that lives up to my own quality standards. Working an over 40 hour a week job and trying to assemble a fully complete and just works Linux distribution is just entirely too much work for one person.

http://salinelinux.proboards.com/thread/815/salineos-shutting

arch, archbang, bridge

I've been running Bridge Linux since February 2013 and ArchBang since June 2013. I like to spend a year or two with a distro to get a really good feel for it, but things have gone well enough with both of these distros that I'm becoming convinced that, along with Debian, I'll be using an Arch-based system for years to come.

I can't call myself an "Arch user" because I haven't installed "straight" Arch Linux. I'll probably do that at some point, but right now I'm having a hard time coming up with a reason to bother with a "real" Arch installation. ArchBang and Bridge get a user up and running with an Arch system much more quickly and easily; to me, it seems that installing Arch would involve extra, unnecessary time and effort, and I'd end up with an installation that wouldn't be much different (and perhaps no better) than what I've already got with either ArchBang or Bridge.

I don't know which I like better between Bridge Linux and ArchBang. ArchBang comes with Openbox, but other environments can be installed. ArchBang has been around a little longer than Bridge. ArchBang has more documentation, but that might not be so important because the user will refer to the Arch Linux documentation most of the time, anyway.

On the other hand, Bridge offers Xfce, GNOME, KDE, and LXDE/Openbox .isos (I've only tried Bridge Xfce).

In any case, both Bridge Xfce and ArchBang (with Openbox) are quite nicely done. I think that either environment is perfect for an Arch installation. Both distros include scripts to make it easy to get things set up. Bridge uses only Arch repos -- the [core], [extra], and [community] repos; ArchBang, along with those repos, includes the [archbang] repo, but I currently have no packages installed from that one (the command paclist archbang returns nothing). The Arch User Repository ("AUR") is, of course, available for both distros as well.

I think that eventually I'll want only one Arch installation, whether it's Arch, ArchBang, or Bridge Linux. Either one would be fine with me. For now, I'll keep both ArchBang and Bridge; I'm finding it helpful, sometimes, to be able to compare how things are done in each distro.