Linux Mint 3.0 Cassandra – A Review

Last night I was sitting around watching some baseball when I decided to bring out my aging and dying laptop in hopes of writing a new article for Shift+Backspace. I booted the old Inspiron 8500 to find out that I still had an old beta version of Linux Mint 3. This spawned a great idea! I immediately downloaded the image file of the full-release version of Linux Mint 3.0 Cassandra. I now had my topic for the evening…a review of a complete operating system!

What is Linux Mint? For a nice succinct summary lets go to DistroWatch, the all-knowing Linux information site:

“Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution whose goal is to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including browser plugins, media codecs, support for DVD playback, Java and other components. It is compatible with Ubuntu software repositories.”

According to the DistroWatch ranking system, Mint has quickly jumped from a ranking of 44th in 2006 to 9th over the last 6 months to 5th and then 4th over the last 30 and 7 days, respectively.