As usual, Mint installed from the live session with no complications or problems. One oddity was the absence of a splash screen during the boot: looking at a black screen, I was wondering what was wrong. It’s not much different if you configure Grub to give messages, since Upstart doesn’t have much to say for itself. All the programs worked well. You get 3 video players, with pre-installed codecs, and 2 actually gave perfect results with my ‘mp4 from hell’, specially kept to tax players to the limit.

The big changes are Gnome 3 and Mate (the Gnome 2 fork). The Gnome Shell has been provided with a compatibility layer developed by Mint (MGSE) to make it more like Gnome 2. I couldn’t test that, as I only get the fall-back version of Gnome 3.

I did test Mate: to select your GUI, click on the little gearwheel on the log-in screeen. Mate is still very much beta software, and the configuration tools are a little temperamental, but it is usable. Nautilus is renamed Caja and Metacity, Marco. CPU usage was 100% but there is a fix for that: switch the theme to carbon or mint-z-mate; log out and use Gnome to delete all of ~/mate* and ~/.config/mate-session; log out and return to Mate.

Another change is that the default search engine is Duck Duck Go. That doesn’t track its users (and so doesn’t show different results for different people) and is built on, and contributes to, FLOSS.

I am using Mint release 12 64 bit with no problems whatsoever, everything worked out of the box.

Cheers

using it on 64bit, I deleted ubuntu 11 as soon as mint12 came out, and glad I did.

I use Mint 12 (Lisa) 32 bit.
I moved from Ubuntu after it moved from Gnome. Don't misunderstand, I think Ubuntu is still a great operating system and I have only good to say about it. Having said that, Mint 12 has Gnome 3, is reliable and user friendly. I will be sticking with Mint for the foreseeable future.

Was using Ubuntu on a dual boot system with Windows 7 64 bit - then tried Linux Mint Lisa. Now both my laptop and desktop are single boot with Lisa and I have waved goodbye to Windows once and for all. My brother has a dual core (pre the "i" intel series of cpu's) laptop and was using Windows xp pro - he was having various problems with it such as it not recognising his onboard wireless card - I put on Linux Mint Lisa 32bit and installed with all his kit fully recognised and working fine. I just spent a few minutes with him showing him around and pointing out how updates worked etc and he has been totally blown away how fast and easy to use it is. He says his laptop is no longer sluggish, buggy and frustrating to use at times but now more like a new machine with lots of zip. I think therefore Mint is far more of a Windows killer than Ubuntu (if Ubuntu ever was!).