I first installed Linux about six weeks ago.

It is really quite remarkable how easy I have taken to it.  I rarely use the Windows setup these days, and only boot into it if there is something specific I need to do, such as running Photoshop, as my Gimp skills are still not fully developed!

What has surprised me is the way I have started to experiment.  Last week for example, I scrapped my installation and did a fresh install of Linux Mint 10 Julia, which is still at the Beta stage.  It is only released with Gnome, but comes in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavours.  I decided to go for broke and install the 64 bit flavour.

The first thing that strikes me (apart from the very nice graphics) is the speed.  The developers have trown in a load of fancy gimmicks that allow your windows to dance around the screen or act like jelly, and I tried a few of them out.  The developers needn’t have bothered.  The system is so fast that I never get a chance to see the gimmick before the window closes.

Up until now I had been using KDE as my front end, but I am getting very used to Gnome at this stage.  Just for the craic, I installed KDE into Mint 10, and it works very well but does have a few minor quirks, which I would expect.  One major quirk is the inability to shut down.  It allows for Sleep, Hibernate and Log off but there is now way to shut it down without using the command prompt, or switching user (from myself to myself) and selecting Gnome.

There are a few things I really miss in Linux though.  The biggest one is probably Windows Live Writer which I used for all my blog posts.  The nearest in Linux is Blogilo which is very definitely the poor brother.  It lacks most of WLW’s features, and to my disgust, I can’t get even that to run under Gnome (and believe me, I have tried).  I have had to fall back on Scribefire which is a Firefox plugin and therefore platform independent.

If there is anyone out there who hasn’t tried Linux, I would suggest giving it a bash (hah! Linux joke!).  Like other flavours of Mint it can be installed within Windows so no partitioning, or allocation of diskspace is required.

Go on.  Give it a try.  You never know – you may become a convert?

You can download from here.