How did you come to Mint?

[msuggs]

I'm always interested in how people came to use their current distribution. My journey began over 10 years ago and has included in the main distros such as;

Red Hat
Caldera KDE
Mandrake
SuSE
Ubuntu
Arch
Zenwalk
OSX
Sabayon
Ubuntu (again)
Mint

There are others but these were the main ones. I must say that after years of playing and breaking various distros that Mint suits me just fine. Low maintenance, rock solid and everything just works. Linux the way it should be

How did you come to Mint?

[exploder]

I knew that Mint was the distro for me the first time I saw a screenshot of the menu. I thought to myself, these guys are on to something!

omns , nice to see I am not the only one that has used Caldera! Caldera was awesome in it's day!

[deadguy]

well, I too have tried various flavors of Linux.

I was using Ubuntu and I read in another forum somewhere (don't remember where)
about Mint being based on Ubuntu so, I gave it a try.

I've been here ever since (a little over a year now)
I don't see myself leaving Mint anytime soon
as it does everything I need it to do and is
very stable (IMHO of course)

[lakehousetech]

This is probably a stupid reason, but the fact that it's out of Ireland initially aided in my interest in checking it out. Before Mint I was using Mandrake. It was a nice change of pace.

[badmotor]

I used Ubuntu for about a year, was Googling some problems one day and came across this forum and started reading. The rest, as they say, is history

[Acid_1]

hmmm.

Windows XP
Ubuntu 5.10/XP
XP
Ubuntu 6.10/XP
Ubuntu 7.04/XP
Mint 4/XP
Mint 5 - NO WINDOWS HAHA!

Anyhow, others have been tried (Puppy/Arch/etc) and I'm looking to try openSuse sometime.

[foggytown]

Interesting topic.

I first tried Redhat 5.1 but was unable to get the modem configured, Corel Linux was the first one I made work and Mandrake was the first one that I was happy with. But I kept using Windows on my main desktop. I almost made the jump with SUSE but updates were always borking my install...tried versions 8, 9, 9.1, 10, 10.1...tried SLED.

When Vista was in beta I built a machine to run it-dual core CPU, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB hd...Nvidia graphics...

The graphics driver was so bad that I kept trying Linux. I kept hearing about Ubuntu, but it never liked my harddrive controller...then I discovered Mint (Bianca I think it was). Worked on my test box. Replaced Vista on my main desktop--everything worked. I moved Vista to my test box for games and TV and have not looked back...been using Mint as my primary OS ever since.

Shortly after making the switch, I put my reasons together and sent a donation to Mint along with this message:

Just want to thank you folks for a stellar job. Linux Mint is Linux without the sacrifice. Hardware support is impeccable, the start menu is elegant and usable, and the codec support makes Linux Mint "out of the box" the best OS I have ever used. If my small contribution enables you folks to "keep up the good work", then I am grateful.

Mint made it possible for me to finally get off the MS bandwagon, and to do so without sacrifice. So, thank you.

Those reasons (and many many more) still apply.

[Katzedecimal]

We hosed up our system with Red Hat 6, then couldn't get Ubuntu to recognise our LAN for love nor money - yep, long time between attempts but what can I say, once burnt twice shy and we *really* burned ourselves with Red Hat 6 So while surfing around the net looking for other ways to resolve the Ubuntu problems, I stumbled across a couple of positive references to Linux Mint. Not formal reviews, just user comments on unrelated forums (like Amazon, of all places), all saying good things. So I surfed for Mint and found that Elyssa had just been released. The rest, as they say, is history