The Leap to Linux

Death of a Laptop?
Thanks to a recent birthday, I have inherited my wife's old laptop.  It was the black sheep of my computer family, as it had the much hated Windows Vista operating system pre-installed on it when it was new 4 years ago.  After all those years of use, with no refreshing, the poor laptop had ground to a halt.  Even using the web browser seemed to drag it down like a pack of wolves attacking a bison; except there was no film crew on hand and Sir David Attenborough wasn't narrating.

So, what to do? Chuck it in the bin?  Dust off the backup disk and re-install Vista?  Well, no.  For a while now, I'm been dabbling with Linux every once in a while, so I thought that it was time to bite the bullet and see if I could live with using Linux on a more or less every day basis and give an old laptop a new lease of life.

Choices Choices...

Horny Heffalump?

But, which distribution to use?  There are quite a few to choose from to say the least.  The most popular choice these days seems to be Ubuntu in one of its many flavours, mostly because of its famed ease of use for first timers.  I've tried using it a few times, but to be honest, the default colour scheme just annoyed me. It was brown.  I gather these days it's some kind of purple, which is more appealing, but once bitten twice shy, so, what about something else?  

Minty Fresh!

Well, I settled for something that is based on Ubuntu (so should suit my ham fisted approach), but has a much nicer colour scheme.  LinuxMint 12 (http://www.linuxmint.com/).  This particular version also has a nice name, Lisa, which is much easier to remember than "Horny Heffalump" or "Kinky Kylie" or whatever Ubuntu releases are called these days.

Installation
Fairly simple really. Download a disc, burn it, shove it in the DVD drive and reboot the machine.  It loads the live CD version of Mint and then you just click on "install" to install it.  Ok, so you have to follow some prompts like telling it what keyboard you have, and what you want to do with your hard drive, but it's not that difficult.  All in all, a pretty easy experience, if anything, easier than installing Windows 7 from scratch (and I've had to do that a few times).

First Impressions?
Well, first it uses GNOME3 as it's user interface.  There's a lot of controversy out there in Linux Land about this one.  The power users tend to agree that they don't particularly like the switch from GNOME2, and there are many and varied posts saying how to undo it and make things like they were in the good old days.  To be honest, I'm not much of a power user, and to me, it looks fairly pretty and well organised.  You can search your programs to find the one you want, or just use the "start menu".

Oooh err, that's different from Windows!

The one criticism I would level at this interface is the lack of ability to right click on a program and add it to the desktop.  I love this feature in Windows and older versions of Linux I have seen.  I like to clutter my desktop with shortcuts, and I'm pretty miffed that it won't let me do it.  Ok, sure, I can find a way around it using command line to create a shortcut, but your average user might find this a bit tricky, and I'm not the greatest fan of the CLI, I like my GUIs.

At least you can add your "favourite" programs to the favourites bar on the start menu, but it just doesn't feel the same somehow.

Installing stuff is a doddle!

Aside from this gripe, the rest of it looks pretty good.  The package manager makes installing new programs a real doddle, and the system runs pretty quickly compared to the years old clunky Vista machine it was until recently.  A look at the system monitor tells me the laptop is barely breaking a sweat, which is nice.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?
So will I keep this up. Well, yes, I think I like this setup and I'll use it for a while to see if I can get used to Linux on a more regular basis.  I've already got my podcasts and radio stations set up using Rythmbox, and I can use Firefox or Chrome just like I do on Windows.  Let's wait and see how this plays out.