Linux Mint 17 Review Round-Up

Reviews of Linux Mint 17 dominated the news feeds today. Our round-up includes five reviews, video tour, and a screenshot slideshow. It's probably not much of a surprise, but consensus is two thumbs up for Linux Mint 17.

Jim Lynch was probably first out of the gate with his Sunday review of Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon. He said the Update Manager (and Software Sources) received lots of improvements this release. It's faster, doesn't search for fastest connection each start-up, it doesn't require root, and no longer locks APT cache. The Driver Manager can now install from disks if no Internet connection and multi-monitor support is vastly improved. He concluded, "Linux Mint rarely disappoints when a new version is released, and Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon is no exception. I think most Linux Mint users are going to be delighted with it."

Next is Jamie Watson with his focused review of Mint 17's UEFI support. Despite warnings that one should turn off Secure Boot, Watson says it's "absolutely not necessary." His report is actually quite boring in that he had no real issues to list. But check out his full piece for more on installing on UEFI enabled machines.

Self-described non-techie Arindam Sen at Linuxed published a pretty thorough review of Mint 17 Monday. He goes into quite a bit of detail but most interesting are his benchmarks. He includes several graphs of Mint 17 performance in comparison to about two dozen other distributions and awards Mint 17 a 9 out 10 in this category. Sen concluded, "I am very happy of what I see in Mint 17 LTS. For me, Linux Mint has done it again and I go with a score of 9.5/10 for Mint, higher than Pinguy OS or Ubuntu 14.04."

The Hectic Geek posted a thorough review of his own. He too found great performance in Mint 17 especially in responsiveness when multi-tasking. He said, "It boots & shuts down fast, memory efficient, performs well under stress, officially supported until 2019, consumes a bit more power at idle but that can be fixed, I cannot see why I should not recommend it!"

Open Source Critic Mike Johnston also noticed all the improvements and tweaks but experienced something disturbing with performance. He said, "One thing of particular concern that I noticed when viewing my resource monitor, however, was that at idle with no applications running, my system was using between 30-40% of my CPU." He also noted "that copying of large files back and forth between USB and local drive results in a relatively significant slowdown prevent[ing] everything else including app launches." Be sure to check out Johnston's full report for more on that.

And finally, Ubuntu Portal has a Linux Mint 17 Qiana Cinnamon : Video Review and Screenshot Tour and Sean M. Kerner has a screenshot slideshow if you still haven't gotten enough.