LinuxMint, that is…
Baph (my Linux machine) was getting less and less stable… so much stuff on it… she needed to be cleared up.
I had just been fiddling too much with it!
So I backed up everything, went to DistroWatch.com, looked at all the new & notable Linux distros, and settled on Linux Mint, a variant of the popular Ubuntu distro, tuned for watching movies, listening to podcasts or music, and hmmm…. yeah, I wanted all those things.
Dire warnings, blissfully ignored, about how media players that could actually play stuff might be illegal in certain places (like, the USA). They had a special version that couldn’t play DVDs, MP3s or anything else, but, being adventurous, I downloaded the one that could play my DVDs.
I bought these DVDs. Playing them on my computer is fair use. Nobody will ever get in trouble for playing legitimate DVDs they really bought and have every right to play, on their own Linux computer. There is no legal way to play DVDs on Linux in the USA.
Since Linux Mint was built on Ubuntu, I was able to save my list of installed programs and reinstall it with one command after the upgrade. I copied back my home folder from backup, redid the shared folders and printers, and that was that, took about two hours all told.
I was a little wary about enabling the enhanced desktop effects, as that’s about the time my old Kubuntu distro started going south… but it works fine.
Take-away: Linux Mint, easy upgrade, just like Ubuntu but with all the stuff you have to install afterward to make it usable already included.
