Goodbye Ubuntu

I’ve been an avid user of Ubuntu for many users, from desktops and laptops, all the way up to servers. Like all good things however, my journey with Ubuntu is drawing to a close. Or more correctly, its being closed for me.

With Ubuntu’s move to use the Unity desktop environment several months ago (see here for my rant on Unity), I’ve been trapped in an operating system state of limbo. I was able to remove Unity so that I could at least use my system, but then the system was left unsupported and unable to pick up new important updates.

Ubuntu is a brilliant OS and have no problems at all with it, except this inability to update thanks to the addition of the horrible Unity ‘feature’. A feature that in my eyes is truly awful.

So with the number of pending updates peaking now over the 530 mark I thought it was time to bite the bullet, either suck it up and use Ubuntu’s Unity environment, or find a new OS. Needless to say that wasn’t a tough decision to make when push came to shove. It was time to go OS shopping!

Now being a Ubuntu-boy, I wanted a distribution that was something at least vaguely similar, so no openSUSE or Fedora for me (yet). Why stick with what I know? Well at the moment I’m busy with several clients and realllllllllllly need a working laptop. I don’t want to struggle getting even the basic things working, so best to stick with what you know in those scenarios!

So anything Debian based would be suitable, as Ubuntu was a derivative of its codebase, so the learning curve should at least be scalable. Also the APT updating system would be preferable, as would a GNOME environment. It had to be an active OS project, so bug patches and updates would still be pushed out at least semi-regularly. Similarly the latest major release would hopefully be less than a year old, as well as be supportive of 64 bit processors.

Throw those things into the mix and what do you get…

Linux Mint, Debian Edition!

It seems to tick all of the boxes I wanted; obviously Debian based, 64 bit architectures supported, last major released was September 2012, use of the APT system and GNOME environment.

Here’s the Linux Mint OS Homepage as well as the Wikipedia entry for Linux Mint

I shall hopefully be posting some articles on Linux Mint in the near future, so stay tuned!