I'm using a mint4win installation of Mint 9 since it was released, and I wanted to share some thoughts with everyone.
First of all, I'm not a total newbie in Linux, I played in quite a few distros over the years, but I can't say I ever used one as my primary os, I just wanted to learn.
Before Mint, I had Ubuntu, but I wasn't too happy with it (won't go into details now). So I decided to give this a try. To my surprise, things went on much smoothly than with Ubuntu. The +es:
- my dual-monitor setup worked like a charm after installing the nvidia proprietary driver. In Ubuntu, although the monitor setup was ok in nvidia's control panel, the monitors worked only in clone mode, I couldn't drag windows from a monitor to another, for example.
- the network worked right from the start (dhcp, ethernet cable). In Ubuntu I had to manually type the ip, dns, etc. Yes, dhcp was enabled, but for some reason it wouldn't update.
- overall system performance is very good, and keep in mind that it's not a "true" installation (I understand that the mint4win way has some performance loss).
- no hardware issues at all, everything was recognized, even my crappy webcam.
- great software manager and great update manager.
- I even got my keyboard's special keys (Logitech G11) to work with Exaile, and I really needed them when I'm in a fullscreen game or something.
Now, for the "not so good" part:
- fonts rendering. This was always an issue in Linux, and I can't believe nothing was done about it so far. I have two examples: the fonts in Chrome are much worse than those in the Windows version. Yes, I have the same fonts in the Chrome options, and yes, I've played around with the fonts settings in the appearance window. Also, I'm using SMPlayer for videos, with the same subtitle font that I use in Windows (SegoeUI, installed from Win 7 fonts folder). In fullscreen, the font looks really ugly. If I resize the player the the default, the font looks fine, exactly like in Win. I'll post a screenshot later.
- huge icons and text. The tray icons in Gnome (or KDE for that matter) are HUGE (compared to the Win tray area), and they get even bigger if I resize the "taskbar". Also, another Chrome example: in Win, I can see all my bookmarks from the bookmarks bar, in Linux I can see about half of them, because the text and the space between them are much bigger. This is not a Chrome issue, because it's the same in Firefox.
*I will update the above sections when I can think about other major +es and -es.
I also have some other issues, but not Mint specific. I could easily find alternatives for (most of) what I use in Windows and, for the others, I installed Win in VirtualBox, works like a charm, but eats up my cpu badly. Gonna give VMWare a try, I heard it's much better than VBox (should be, it costs money
). There are some apps that really give me headaches, like Pidgin (avatars don't show up on all contacts, I can find a plugin to make the offline contacts show up in italic (like YM), and...where do you find themes for this??), or a nfo viewer that won't open those files even if it's set as the default app (I always get that prompt about running it in terminal, display contents, etc.), or emerald theme manager, that closes without any error if I click on anything after I open it.Anyway, overall I like Mint, and I'm slowly using it more and more on a daily basis. If I can get those issues sorted out, might just stick with it as my "weapon of choice".
