In a previous article I indicated indecision in picking the distro that will finally be in control of my desktop PC. I made a decision to install Linux Mint 7. The live CD looked promising and I could always replace it with some other distro if I had problems.

Mint is supplied with a highly customized Gnome desktop. There is only a single panel at the bottom of the screen. This is where my problems started. Gloria comes with GnomeDo installed. This is a launcher app,  not unlike the Launchy freeware available for Windows users. GnomeDo has a “skin” that makes it accessible as a dock. I like docks.  The first thing I did was to enable the dock (Docky).  The dock appears at the bottom of the screen and is not movable. This takes up more space at the bottom of the screen. Gloria does not have virtual workspaces enabled by default. This is easily fixed but doing so results in yet another object at the bottom of the screen and things are messy to say the least. I disabled Docky and installed the Cairo-Dock I had used in Ubuntu. This dock is movable but the virtual desktops remained a nuisance at the bottom of the screen.

At about this time the system crashed. X-winows could not be restarted. The machine could not be powered off, at least with the soft switch. I finally pulled the power cord out and restarted.

Continuing on, I installed VMware Player. Player normally shows up on the “System Tools” menu. But wait, there is no “System Tools “menu although it is correctly configured to show! It is available via the “All” option, but this is quite a nuisance. Also missing is an icon for the Trash Can. The Trash is now in the Places menu. Another nuisance and one that is bound to cause problems.

Before struggling with the shortcomings of this distro any further, I installed Super OS (a.k.a. Super Ubutu).  Mint strives to achieve simplicity and elegance. To some extent it achives this goal but only at the expense of functionality. It might be okay for a Windows migrant, but an experienced Linux user will not be happy with it.