I am easily impressed
The question I keep asking, based on today’s efforts with my newest Linux boot is very basic. What is the difference between a “release candidate” and the “final version”? Obviously there may be bugs that are almost corrected, but this time around I don’t think the difference will be much more than a name. I’m completely satisfied with Linux Mint 7. This is their best effort so far, by a country furlong.
Let’s enumerate some of the high points. Installation time is about fifteen minutes (I ran it again just to see if the first time was a glitch). There are more choices available for your file system, so this time I’ve opted for ext4 just to see what happens. The detection of hardware has gone very well, and I have the best looking screen ever in Linux. The SD card reader is up, the wireless card is up, the sound system is up, the webcam is up, the CD/DVD drive is up. I have printing from the wireless network server, and multiple language keyboards. Even the funky touchsense controls on this keyboard seem to be working as well as they do in Vista.
I installed Skype. I installed VMWare server 2, and after a bit of reading about what user is expected I was able to log in via the web interface. There is a full complement of fonts (the ones from the Vista partition). OpenOffice 3 comes as standard (something that version 6 missed by “that much”, unfortunately). My bookmarks have imported flawlessly. The torrent client functions from square one. I could almost put aside logging into Vista altogether, if things continue. And to think that this is a “release candidate”. Impressive work.
