Desktop O/S's

Well for professional reasons I loaded up Vista Ultimate on my desktop. I created a tarball of my trusty Gentoo and dove into installing Vista. Since I'm running a dual core AMD64 with 8 Gig of RAM I went with the 64 Bit version on Vista. The install was a basic Microsoft install, pretty brain dead. Once it was loaded up and I applied all the patch's I went sniffing around. I absolutely hated it, they bury everything and make it so damn convoluted to get to anything. But I was determined to make a good honest effort at it. The system was noticeably slower than my Gentoo even with all the eye candy of 3D, transparency turned on with Gentoo it still runs circles around Vista. Well after messing about for a few hours I wanted to listen to some music, low and behold Vista didn't have the drivers for my Turtle Bay 7.1 sound card. I was kinda shocked since the card is a only couple of years old, but hey I could just download the drivers right? WRONG! After digging around the net come to find out there are no drivers for my sound card for Vista. Now it's not some obscure make nor is it old legacy hardware. That was the final straw, Vista you're a Bloated, Slow, convoluted piece of shit!

Well that was a day shot and I had to go to work, so while at work I said what the hell and downloaded and burned a copy of 64 Bit Linux Mint Elyssa RC1. Now the 32 Bit has been out for a while and I've recommended Mint for a while now. So I thought I'd give the 64 Bit version a spin on my Desktop before I loaded Gentoo back up. Well I've been messing about with it for a little over a day now and I'm damn impressed. I've always really liked the way Mint struck a nice balance of features and usability. It's not overkill with a lot of bloat and the ease of customization to your own tastes is very nice. Clem based Linux Mint on Ubuntu but has given it some badly needed polish. At the moment I'm downloading the release candidate of Felicia, (Mint 6.0) and will be installing it on my laptop. I don't know folks but if things keep looking as they are I may be changing my Desktop distro over to Mint.

So what it all boils down it, it's an excellent Distro, by far one of the best I've seen and with the bonus of being free. If you're fed up with paying a fortune for bloated and buggy software you should really take it for a spin. Literally everyone who I've recommended Mint to and has tried it love it. I'm still a huge Gentoo fan but it's looking like I'm going to keep Gentoo on my servers and start using Mint as my Desktop/Laptop software

A Screenie of my Desktop