I love Linux, but sometimes I hate Linux. But most of the time I love it.

I've been using Linux for years now. In the early days I tried Fedora and I liked it, but I was never a big fan. I eventually jumped on the Ubuntu bandwagon, but it never felt quite polished enough. I wanted to love it - there was certainly a lot I loved about it - but it also frustrated me too. I wanted to stick with it though and when I found Linux Mint, it seemed like I could have my cake and eat it too.

I've been using Mint for quite a few years now and have installed a few different versions on various PC's. I have been developing on a Macbook Pro for a couple of years but wanted to go back to using a desktop when I'm at my desk, and keep the laptop for when I'm out of the office.

I bought a second-hand Dell Optiplex 780 a few years ago. The intention was to use it as an HTPC, but it never really worked as well as I wanted it to. It was too big and because I wanted the HTPC running 24x7 (so I wouldn't have to wait for it to boot-up - I know, I'm too impatient sometimes) I didn't like it using all that power when it wasn't being used. I've since bought a Gigabyte Brix for my HTPC, but that's another story.

With the Dell not being used, I decided I would see what it would be like for my desktop development PC. It had an old version of Ubuntu on it, but I decided I would scrap that. Mint has recently released a LTS (long term support) edition (17.1), so I thought I would try that.

Installation was fairly straightforward, except for my video card. I had an ASUS EAH5450. Drivers were an issue for it, I couldn't get anything to work, despite spending considerable time trying different solutions suggested on the Linux Mint forums and elsewhere. In the end I removed the video card and used the onboard video. Whilst it's nothing amazing, considering this was going to be a development machine (no games or movies) I didn't care. Also, the onboard video went up to 1920x1080 which is all I needed for my monitor.