This is a big DVD: 3.2GB. OpenSUSE and Fedora are bigger, but they include server software and this is all for the desktop. The obvious value is to those wishing to install without broadband, or even without any internet connection. Of course, that depends on finding a vendor or someone to download. The selection of software is not always very rational. There’s a lot of duplication — 4 browsers and 6 video players — but Scribus is missing and KMyMoney is no real replacement for Gnucash. Unusually, Wine and Skype are present.

I wasn’t able to actually install, for that takes 8GB and my guest partition isn’t big enough. The live session went well, though. My only complaint was that it asked no questions about settings, assuming the user was somewhere in the American West. The software I tried all ran from the command line with only minor complaints, except Totem, which was broken (why do distros bother with it?) Codecs and Flash were installed and worked perfectly. There are 3 repositories set up — UE, Mint, and Ubuntu — which seems like a recipe for conflict.

I’m not sure of UE’s advantage over Mint, but the forum has 15000 members, so it obviously meets the needs of a lot of people.