Mint’s KDE installation disk is much the same as the others, save that for some reason the option to encrypt /home has been removed. Why?

Startup was very sluggish, and I couldn’t prevent the update manager from running every time because it’s not actually listed as a start-up program and also the interface to it is broken. New programs are added with Synaptic, for this version lacks the Software Centre. The software installed includes LibreOffice, Firefox, Kmail, Kopete, Amarok, Kaffeine, VLC, DigKam, and Gimp. Kopete, Kmail, Amarok, and Kaffeine all left ‘may not work as expected’ warnings when run from the CLI. Codecs and Flash are installed, although the Flash plugin (hidden in /opt) is the version that won’t run with 32-bit AMD chips. Multimedia was a total failure on my computer. VLC wouldn’t play anything and had to be manually killed, while Kaffeine was unusably slow. I tried installing Xine, which was too slow, and Parole, which didn’t work. The sound configuration tool only worked on KDE applications, so Firefox didn’t use my USB speakers until I’d edited two configuration files.

This version of Mint confirms my feeling that distros are best experienced with their default desktops. It would probably do better on a more modern computer, but I’ve had no problems with other KDE distros like PCLinuxOS and Mepis. With so many good KDE distros, I can’t really recommend this one.

I installed Mint 14 on my computer, my husbands computer (both 2.5 years old), and an older computer we use at his parent's house. While I had to go back to openSuSE to get my sound card to work, the other two are working well with Mint.

Mint is stable. The package manager allows him to install most software without using the terminal. It runs the programs he needs without any problems, and has enough games available to keep him entertained.

With that other OS, the older computer was practically unusable. But with Mint, we can get online easily, run Skype, Blender, and Dropbox without any issues, and do not have to wait 15 minutes while each program loads.

Overall I find Mint to be a good distro for less savvy linux users. It works without a lot of terminal configuration, and when the terminal is required, there is plenty of documentation from Mint and Ubuntu websites to get things done without any grief.