Since i’ve begun using Linux, i’ve always been an enthusiastic Mandrake / Mandriva user.
Anyway last versions of this distro have become increasingly unstable and sometimes unusable mainly due to a forced release roadmap, with two yearly versions (normal and spring) and sometimes the crazy optimistic introduction of unstable pieces of software like the early KDE 4 in MDV2009.
First of all this made me switch from KDE to Gnome (which i already used on my Debian powered laptop), and now, after some days of sadness and betrayal feelings, to another distro.
Since i was looking for a desktop oriented distro, i quickly discarded projects like Gentoo, Slackware and Zenwalk. At the same time i was willing to try something rather new… say fresher. Then i came to Mint.
Mint is an Ubuntu-based distro, basically a redistribution, which uses the same Ubuntu repository and some custom repos. In my case i’ve installed Mint 6, which derives from Ubuntu 8.04. This way i got a recent distribution without all the headaches of the latest version of Ubuntu (Ubuntu is also known for not-so-stable edge releases).
The nice spot, is that Mint comes with all proprietary drivers, and all plugins needed for the web, like Flash 10. By enabling Nvidia proprietary drivers it also turns on a subset of Compiz effects, which make the desktop fancier by keeping it light. Moreover it features a lot of handy utility to manage your software and system updates.
The desktop is now much lighter and the main advantage is that i can use all of the Ubuntu and Debian softwares, pushing aside all the compiling sessions.
I know, some Linux purist will say that this is not real Linux, and distros are quickly forgetting what a console is… but i prefer spending my time on a piece of JS code, than installing a software from source!
Enough for a rambling… 
