Cinnamon on LMDE

Recently the Linux Mint team released 1199 updates for LMDE. Well one of these updates was the upstream release of Gnome 3.2. I really did not care for it at all and I can see why a lot of users don't. If it were a tablet only desktop I might have a different opinion.

So at the first chance, like less than two minutes, the command line was opened and sudo apt-get install cinnamon was entered. A minute or so later I logged out and logged in and the Cinnamon desktop was available.

It really wasn't what I expected but it was better than the one inch icons of Gnome 3.2 default. On my hardware I had to turn off some of the Compiz effects but to me that is a non-issue. Call me old-fashioned but I hardly ever see the desktop anyway and clear window headers are just harder on my eyes. But that is always the beauty of Linux is we have choices. Give it a try you may just like it and it is available for other Mint versions too.

Ubuntu Case Studies

I hear all the time from freinds and others that Linux just isn't making any strides in the desktop market. Well this link to Ubuntu Case Studies will definitely open some eyes as to whom in the corporate world is installing and using Ubuntu and why. From servers to desktops the stories are here and I found them quite interesting. How does the number 220,000 clients sound? In Andalusia Spain, Isotrol and Canonical's Premium Service Engineers were contracted to do just that, implement 220,000 clients for Andalusia's school systems. The list goes on for the spreading use of Ubuntu based systems. Ubuntu isn't the only distribution with case studies to be found either. Search any Linux distribution and you are sure to get results just as I did with Ubuntu. This is the top result from a Google search using these terms: case studies Linux. The open source movement is going in the right direction but we as end users can do our part by letting the various system admins we work for or who control our desktop, that we would like a choice and that choice is FOSS. Free and Open Source Software is the choice we as end users have the right to make and to use.