Bored with brown? Looking for more oomph in your Ubuntu installation? We test the latest release of Linux Mint, the shiny green distro that stands on the shoulders of giants and offers its own unique tools. Read on to find out whether Mint is actually a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu...

Linux Mint is a heavily customized community-driven derivative built on top of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. According to the creators, its purpose is "to produce an elegant, up-to-date, and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." The latest release, Linux Mint 5.0 "Elyssa", released this month, retains most of Ubuntu's stability and features, but distinguish itself with unique features and tweaks.

The Linux Mint team announced the final release of Linux Mint 8 "Helena" KDE Community Edition. Based on Kubuntu 9.10, Linux 2.6.31, KDE 4.3.4 and Xorg 7.4, Linux Mint 8 KDE CE boasts improved OEM installation, as well as "ignore updates" and multiple software selection features. The first (RC1) release candidate of the Ubuntu 9.10-based Linux Mint 8 arrived in November.

The first release candidate for Linux Mint 7 “Gloria” has been released along with a great selection of useful new features. I decided to download the highly anticipated Linux Mint 7 release candidate and put the much talked about features to the test. I was so impressed I decided to display some of the new Linux Mint 7 features in these 10 simple how to videos.

Linux Mint 12, code-named Lisa, is the latest release of the popular desktop Linux distribution. This is the version of Linux Mint based on Ubuntu Desktop, not the one based on Debian. That one is called Linux Mint Debian Edition, or LMDE.

I must say Linux Mint seems to always impress me with every new release. In this release Linux Mint has brought to us a new software manager called MintInstall, which allows you to browse the Mint Software portal offline, see screenshots that are available per package, and much more. Linux Mint has also brought you MintNanny, which allows you to control what domains
are blocked.

Last weekend I posted an article called Comparing Linux Distributions where I reviewed eight different Linux distributions on five different machines. I had used the freshly released Beta version of Linux Mint and kept getting read errors on the disk. This weekend I downloaded the real version of Mint 4.0 and was able to install it on my Dell Dimension 4300S. The install was a piece of cake.

Linux Mint is one of those distributions you just can't help but love. Easy to use, stable, flexible, and so much more. Built from Ubuntu, it's been my mantra for a while that Linux Mint is “Ubuntu done right”, as I've had issue with Ubuntu and it's quality for a long time. But the better Mint gets, the bigger the shoes it has to fill each time.

TechieMoe reviews a lot of distributions and he's consistently reviewed Mint since the release of version 3.1. He is the first to review Linux Mint 6 Felicia and gives it a rating of 3 out of 4.