Mint 17 the Best, Foe to Friend, and KaOS Review

Topping our coverage tonight, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols declares Linux "Mint 17 the best Linux desktop to date." Terrence O'Brien describes his journey with Linux as from foe to friend, sort of. And finally tonight, KDE tablet Vivaldi appears to be defunct and KaOS gets the once-over.

Linux Mint 17 is due out any time now and I'm waiting on pins and needles, but Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols jumped the gun and loaded up the release candidate. No matter, he says Mint 17 RC is "the best Linux desktop to date." Now that's no small praise, after all, Vaughan-Nichols was writing about Linux before there were too many distributions to test. He gives it a fairly good workout and concludes that with Mint, "you have a very fast, very secure, and very smooth and easy to use desktop."

Terrence O'Brien at www.engadget.com said that it took many years and several attempts, but he is now a "dedicated Ubuntu user." His story probably sounds familiar to anyone who can recall loading Linux from a stack of floppy disks (after recompiling the kernel to support your particular laptop). He and his "were forced to accept defeat" then, and the next time, and the next time... but now he counts Ubuntu among his friends.

Liliputing.com is reporting that a year after a major redesign and big announcements, the KDE Plasma tablet Vivaldi "may never actually ship." Brad Linder says it appears that there just weren't enough pre-orders to contract the manufacture to tool-up. He figures with all the cool advancements in embedded and mini-computers, projects like Vivaldi and Improv are already obsolete.

Lastly tonight, Jesse Smith in today's Distrowatch Weekly reviews KaOS, a rolling-release distribution in the veins of Arch and Chakra featuring the KDE desktop, Chakra installer, graphical package management, and lots of software. Smith said, "What it comes down to is I am not sure how to evaluate KaOS as I am not entirely sure what it is the developers are attempting to do. The project appears to be focused entirely on the small niche that wants a 64-bit, rolling-release, KDE/Qt only operating system with crude & fast package management."