Ubuntu's focus on improving the desktop experience for users is starting to take hold. Clearly nothing happens overnight. More than two years ago, Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth went out on a limb and said that his ambition was to make the Ubuntu desktop better than Apple's famously good-looking desktop.

This tutorial is supposed to guide the reader through the features of the Cinnamon desktop, Mint's new desktop environment to be used in Linux Mint 13. Cinnamon concentrates on holding on to classic design and functionality in times where Gnome 3 and Unity come up with different innovations to the user interface.

Every so often I wander over to Distrowatch to see whose at the top of the leaderboard (calculated byPC Linux OS page views on Distrowatch ) for Linux desktop "popularity". I fully expected to see Ubuntu at the top and maybe Fedora Core in second place. I was surprised to see PCLinuxOS in the number one position.

Linux Mint 12 is the latest edition of the popular Linux distribution. Not to be confused with Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), the version of Linux Mint that is based on Debian, Linux Mint 12 is based on Ubuntu Desktop.

Linux Mint is a heavily customized community-driven derivative built on top of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. According to the creators, its purpose is "to produce an elegant, up-to-date, and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." The latest release, Linux Mint 5.0 "Elyssa", released this month, retains most of Ubuntu's stability and features, but distinguish itself with unique features and tweaks.

I have been a big supporter of Ubuntu over the last few years and I have been using Ubuntu for many, many releases. I turned several friends onto Linux using Ubuntu and one of them has been quite excited about the operating system. Over the past year or so the Linux fan boys have been pushing eye candy on Ubuntu touting it as ahead of both Microsoft and Apple's desktop operating systems.

Linux Mint 12, code-named Lisa, is the latest release of the popular desktop Linux distribution. This is the version of Linux Mint based on Ubuntu Desktop, not the one based on Debian. That one is called Linux Mint Debian Edition, or LMDE.

I know that this subject has been hacked up by people all over the internet, but now it’s my turn. I’ve been using Ubuntu on my laptop for a few months now and I think it’s great. The operating system starts up and shuts down quickly. It hasn’t crashed or suffered any periods of slowness and I love the idea of being able to search for software and install it AND have the operating system maintain it. After my Ubuntu experience, I had to ask myself, “What’s holding desktop Linux back?”.

Linux Mint is one of those distributions you just can't help but love. Easy to use, stable, flexible, and so much more. Built from Ubuntu, it's been my mantra for a while that Linux Mint is “Ubuntu done right”, as I've had issue with Ubuntu and it's quality for a long time. But the better Mint gets, the bigger the shoes it has to fill each time.