I got a version of Mint (Cassandra) on a mag cover, some time ago but never installed it anywhere as I primarily use KDE and Open Suse, but I ended up with a free afternoon and the weather was rubbish, and I found the mag ina stack, so I thought I'd give the distro a spin. Due to licensing reasons the mag cover version was Light, with no proprietary codecs or software installed, but once installed there was a single package available in Mint Install to install all of the missing software and bring it up to the full version.
Well I was impressed. I spent the evening playing around with Emerald and trying to make it work with my Nvidia 6100 series video card before deciding this release was too buggy with my card. But I liked everything else enough to grab the current Full version 4.0 (Darina) iso from a torrent.
I decided to play dumb user and just try the defaults to see how easy a newbie could set this up, and apart from the live session not finding my mouse (odd, because the earlier version had no problems). No mouse and 800x600 basic screen resolution made the install tricky, as the install window was slightly larger than my screen res and could not be resized (which meant the action buttons were just of the bottom of the screen) but otherwise the install was flawless, and about 10 minutes later I rebooted into the full install. Unlike Cassandra Light, the new version instantly told me I had a card that could use a proprietry video driver and walked my through the install wizard, one more reboot and I had full 1650x1024 (detected the native res of my screen straight away) and fully funtioning XGL/Compiz desktop. I love it. Faster than OpenSuse on the same hardware, and no messing around getting all the media codecs working (primarily what i use my home PC for) right out of the box.
I'd definitely recommend this distro to anyone wanting to give linux a spin for the first time.
I like the fact that it just chooses the best of breed software, and makes it work. The email client default however is just Thunderbird and I prefer to have my calander, RSS feeds, news and weather all in one client. So. I simply installed Korganizer instead, wallpaper-tray to swap the wallpaper images around, K3B as I am familiar with it, then I was done. (I do still prefer many KDE apps over the default Gnome ones but the great thing about Linux is choice)
Install Time?
Mint 4.0: 5 minutes to burn the iso and boot the live desktop, about 20 minutes all up for the install (8 minutes of this seemed to be just formatting the harddrive) and about another 20 minutes to patch and install my preferred apps.