The end of Mint is complete
Mint was the best distro for a decade because it removed the painful aspects of Linux setup. This was the original reason it was created.
The first Mint version I used (Bianca IIRC) was a winner because it shipped with Sun Java and multimedia codecs. It was jaw dropping that you could take a fresh install and simply insert a DVD and play it without hours on Google.
Not long after, they had a menu system that was very Windows-XP-like -- perfect for introducing people to the Linux desktop. I was the most hard core Mint evangelist imagineable.
The ease-of-install aspects have slowly gone away, sadly. Now that Ubuntu re-introduced Gnome 2 and Mint is dropping codecs (having dropped Java years ago), there is no reason to use Mint anymore.
It was a good run, though. Thanks, Clem!! Good luck on your new adventure.
