Last week my oldest, Paige (11), somehow tanked her Koala system to the point that it would not even boot into stage1 GRUB. I was perplexed at what she had done but figured, all right, let’s wipe and re-install. I fired up my System76, dropped in a flash card and wrote Koala netbook remix to the flash and off I went; for about 30 minutes. After repeated reboots and two more unetbootin creations, nothing I would do allowed me to boot the install.

I had a copy of the latest Mint iso on the system having ventured the idea of installing that on Paige’s eeePC last time and figured this time I would give it a go. A few minutes later I was in installing Mint and boy was she happy afterwards. She claimed this was the best distro she has used yet.

The wife’ gnome desktop borked somehow, I suspect Avery’s little fingers somehow did something; but maybe not. This is the second time something went squirrely after she was started using the system pretty heavily. I don’t think it was the configuration or anything because even a new profile would not work. Thus, I settled for installing Mint there.

The wife seems pretty happy so far. While Mint is not light years different from Ubuntu standard, it is a very polished interface and comes with a fantastic set of default packages requiring almost no additional work on my part: And that is a great thing.

Me, I am going to stick with Debian on the Meso, Arch on the Desktop, and Ubuntu on my laptop and work workstation with slackware and centos on the servers. But it is nice to have a varied collection of distros in constant use.