Ok I was back on Windows 7 for about a month. I don't hate Windows 7 and am not bashing it, I totally see it's uses and it's appeal but It also has it's bad points just like any OS (the anti virus prompts for one though I recommend Avast free). But anyway 12.04 beta 1 caught my eye and I thought I'd take the plunge and wipe/install. I've been using it for a while now and first impressions were I liked the core but it was rough around the edges (beta so I'm forgiving of that). Updates seem to be coming in every other day, these include major kernel updates (3.0 to 3.2) and an update to beta 2. Stability fine, it seems to have settled down and the updates helped a lot. It's very quick and snappy and is quite an improvement from what I remember of 11.10, the final build will be quite a release if these betas are anything to go by.
The AMD GPU drivers on the other hand have been hit or miss and mostly miss. I have got artifacts and a few glitches, so I tried to install the latest drivers off their website and after a few system updates and a reboot (over a few days) it switched to unity 2D and there was nothing I seemed to do that worked. The worst was booting to a white screen when I tried to uninstall and transition to the default drivers. Luckily I still had the dvd with the iso image on it so I wiped and re-installed and this time ignored the extra drivers and went with the out if the box x.org drivers. This seemed to be fine for a while (a week or so) but today after updates this too has reverted to unity 2D without warning (again after a reboot). Now don't get me wrong unity 2D is perfectly usable and functional but I can't help feeling that if my laptop can handle the extras (which it does easily) then I should be getting them.
Anyway, today while on reddit I saw that Linux Mint Debian Edition has just been released with update 4 and I thought I'd torrent the iso (this is legal they provide the links on their site) and check it out. This introduces Cinnamon 1.4, Mate 1.2 and a whole rake of other changes. Now I have used Cinnamon in the past on Mint 12 (by installing it manually) and liked it a lot. I like the idea of a rolling release like LMDE but will prob get itchy feet after a while and switch up when either 12.04 final comes out or Mint 13. I have in the past preferred the Ubuntu based Mint distros rather then the straight Debian editions but we shall see with this release. I'll have a poke around with it in Virtual Box but am unsure as of yet if I will replace 12.04 with it.
I will post an update on my thoughts soon and am considering doing an ItchyHippo review on LMDE update 4 (though this isn't written in stone and would prob take longer). I am downloading both the Gnome and XFCE 64bit versions at the moment and will share my thoughts on both and which one I prefer.
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