As regular regulars know, Linux Mint is my abso-frickin’-lute favorite of the *nix distributions out there. Why? I call it “The Ubuntu that should have been.” Linux people who deem themselves “power users” absolutely hate it because it’s too easy. But everyone else trying *nix for the first time loves it.

Linux Mint 5 is out of beta and is available now for download. Yes, you can still get it as a CD-sized distro (i.e. it doesn’t take as long to download as DVD-sized chunky distros.)

Some of the new features include menu improvements (like the ability to uninstall an app directly from the menu - very cool), updater improvements, app-installing improvements and more. You can check out all the release notes here.

One of my favorite things about the Linux Mint dev team is that they make it very easy to see what DOESN’T work yet. No Linux distro is perfect and certain things won’t work. At least with Mint you can see this information easily.

An example: “The color of the window borders doesn’t always refresh when you select or customize a Gnome theme.” Even things as little as border colors are mentioned. Seemingly insignificant to most (as it is just visual and doesn’t pertain to functionality) but yes, it’s listed.

I have not had the opportunity to test out v5 just yet but have already downloaded it and will soon do so.