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What's Been the Best Linux Distro of 2014?
An anonymous reader writes With 23% of the year remaining, Linux Voice has donned flameproof clothing to subjectively examine what it feels have been the best distros of the year so far, including choices for beginners, desktop fashionistas and performance fetishists, before revealing a surprising overall winner.
I had the pleasure of working with Mint for the first time today, actually. It was a strange experience; I'd been tasked with resurrecting an iBook G4 and needed to find a usable OS for it. I knew there were PowerPC versions of Linux, but the question was, which one? Once I learned that Ubuntu had a compatible version available I decided to check it out, which set off a long and difficult slog of troubleshooting and inexplicable flakiness. I expected this going in, of course, given what I was working with, but even after I managed to resolve the major issues (the OS outright not loading because of a firmware issue, no wireless connectivity at first, video problems, no sound, the whole nine yards) I thought it performed poorly. I figured maybe Ubuntu had simply outgrown computers of that generation, or something.
Whatever. My next candidate was Mint. A coworker of mine had already tried but failed to get Mint working on the iBook already, but I suspected there was a problem with the discs he'd tried to use. (His Ubuntu disc didn't work either, while the one I burned did.) I wasn't sure what other issues he had, something about the kernel not installing and the system not booting right afterward. I figured it was worth another shot, and whaddaya know, on the very first try my disc worked. Mint installed without a single catch and immediately ran wonderfully; the computer ran smoother, didn't chug as much while opening programs or windows, it really felt like a new machine. There are still some firmware issues to iron out but fixes for the iBook G4 aren't uncharted territory (after all, researching them is how I got Ubuntu to work, and how I got sound working in Mint) so I'm certain that getting wireless and so forth working won't be too difficult.
Mint's look and feel closely matches Windows, so it's easy to get used to. The programs that come with it are nice, too. If it can get a computer like that to run not just passably well but actually run good, and ready to perform useful work within fifteen minutes, I imagine the user experience on more modern i386 machines is even better. If I retire Windows from any of my current computers I intend to replace it with Mint first unless something better comes along.