By Woody Leonhard

With Windows 7 Service Pack 1 generally available, Win7 users need to know what SP1 brings — and doesn't bring — to the game.

In short, this service pack adds surprisingly little to Windows 7. You'll want to install it — eventually.

And for those of you who followed the conventional wisdom and are waiting for the first service pack before installing Microsoft's newest OS, you waited without good cause. Win 7 SP1 sports a little nip here and a roll-up tuck there — but there's not a single significant enhancement to Win7.

And that's good news. It seems, for once, Microsoft turned out a major new product that was relatively problem-free, right from the start.

Service Pack 1's most significant improvements

Uh, there really aren't any. At least not for the average PC user. (SP1 does have a few nifty new features for Windows Server 2008 R2.) No need to take my word for it. Download Microsoft's official description, "Notable changes in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1," available on a Microsoft Download Center page, and see for yourself. "The impact of SP1 on the Windows 7 client operating system is considered to be minimal. Included changes address minor usability issues in specific scenarios," according to the unusually sedate Microsoft manifesto.

To save you a bit of time and effort, here's a summary:§  Higher-definition connections with Remote Desktop: If you use Remote Desktop (I prefer the third-party service LogMeIn), installing SP1 on both PCs sets up high-definition connection via a new technology Microsoft calls RemoteFX. Snappy name. Based on virtualization technology (info page) Microsoft acquired two years ago when it bought Calista Technologies, RemoteFX makes it possible for full graphics to show through on remote sessions. Someday, we're promised, you'll be able to use RemoteFX with your phone. I'm not holding my breath — I'm not even sure I'd want it.§  More Windows Live ID support: A technology Microsoft calls "Microsoft Federation Gateway" will give SP1-enhanced PCs improved Windows Live ID authentication to non-Microsoft sites, using a long-established Web services protocol known as the WS-Federation Passive Requestor Profile. I thought Win7 already had WS-Federation profiles (detailed in an MSDN article) nailed, but apparently some fix is necessary.§  An HDMI patch: I have no idea why MS emphasizes this as one of the noteworthy changes in Win7 SP1. It's a bug fix to keep HDMI working when a PC is rebooted.§  An XML Paper Specification fix: The 10 of you who actually use XPS instead of PDF will be pleased that SP1 fixes a print bug affecting mixed portrait and landscape documents.§  Even more-obscure fixes: These include restoring previous folders at sign-in, IKEv2 protocol improvements (used in VPN connections), and a hotfix rollup from November (KB 982018) for Advanced Format disks. Little stuff.This is a case where "SP" stands for "slim pickings."

Odd circumstances leading to SP1's release

If you follow the trade press, you may have picked up on some, uh, anomalous circumstances surrounding the release of SP1. (We'll probably see a similar series of leaks, half-leaks, and teasers leading up to Windows 8 — or whatever the next version of Windows is called.)

It appears that the code for SP1 was frozen as far back as mid-to-late-November. The files are digitally signed 11/22/2010. The official build identification string, 7601.17514.win7sp1_rtm.101119-1850, refers to November 19 ("101119"). The installer executable is dated November 23. That's a long, long time ago.

On October 27, 2010, Microsoft posted update KB 976902, which ended up crashing a significant number of machines. Soon dubbed the "Black Hole Update" by industry observers, the patch was pulled quickly and didn't reappear until January. We now know KB 976902 is a precursor to installing Windows 7 SP1 — and it's automatically installed for you when you install SP1.

As noted in a winrumors.com story, Microsoft updated its Service Pack Blocker Tool Kit (download page) in November. The updated kit lets corporate sites prevent Windows Update from automatically installing SP1. In retrospect, it looks like MS released these tools right around the time SP1 was finalized. That makes sense: the Windows development team needs to have things nearly locked down before ancillary tools can be distributed.

On January 13, Microsoft's Russian Windows Virtualization team posted the Win7 SP1 RTM (release to manufacture) build identification string on its MS TechNet site. Subsequently, the final build number was removed from the site and someone at Microsoft posted a notice stating, "Microsoft has not released SP1 to OEMs at this time, though we are on track for a Q1 release, as we previously announced. The comments made in this blog entry included some inaccuracies." As best I can tell, all of the pertinent details on the Russian TechNet site were correct. Those of you who watched the Windows 7 rollout will remember that Russian-language sites leaked many details about Win7 that were later confirmed. (The Russian sites just might provide accurate prerelease details for Window 8.)

On January 14, a copy of 7601.17514.win7sp1_rtm.101119-1850 hit the torrents, and Microsoft immediately and repeatedly denied that the leaked build was final. On January 14, Paul Thurrott reported, "A bit of rumor-busting. Some sites have claimed that SP1 is complete and that Microsoft will release it to its OEM — i.e., PC-maker — partners as soon as tomorrow. That is not the case. SP1 is imminent, but it's not quite done as I write this." No doubt that's what MS's handlers told Paul, but by all appearances, it wasn't true.

SP1's official announcement came three weeks later in a Feb. 9 Microsoft Windows blog. At that point, MS said that OEMs had already received the bits on February 9, that MSDN and TechNet subscribers would get them on February 16 (they did), and that the rest of us will have SP1 on February 22 via the MS Download Center and Windows Update.

That's an amazingly fast rollout, if indeed MS waited until February 9 for OEMs — blindingly fast if you're selling new PCs and want to ship them with the latest build of Windows 7. Perhaps it was smoke and mirrors; OEMs have often been fingered as the source of torrent-based leaks of new Microsoft software. Maybe the February 9 OEM announcement was simply damage control.

As I noted at the outset, this first service pack says much about Windows 7. It's surprisingly free of the growing pains that afflicted earlier versions of Windows. Unless you are completely attached to Windows XP, the wait to upgrade is over.

By Becky Waring

One of the best ways to increase your computing productivity doesn't cost a cent: learn the keyboard shortcuts for your most-used commands.

To help you stop mousing around and become a keyboard maestro, I rounded up the best resources for finding, using, and creating shortcuts.

Lincoln Spector struck a nerve with his Jan. 13 column, "Twenty-six ways to work faster in Windows 7." Many of those tips involved keyboard shortcuts. After all, almost any time you can use the keyboard instead of the mouse, you work faster. But there are lots more shortcuts where those came from. This article aims to show you where to find the ones that can speed up your workflow. In case you can't find the shortcuts you need, I'll show you how to create your own.

You probably already know that you can invoke many menu and dialog-box items via the keyboard by pressing the Control or Alt key plus an underlined letter. For example, pressing Alt + F in most apps opens the File menu; then pressing the underlined letter N opens a new document. You might also know that when you press Alt + A, you apply dialog-box changes.

Direct keyboard shortcuts to menu commands (such as Ctrl + C for Copy) are typically shown next to the command in the menu itself. For a great introduction to using keyboard shortcuts, check out Gizmo's Dec. 3, 2009, column. For general strategies and more tips, see Scott Dunn's Feb. 25, 2010, column.

But hundreds of keyboard shortcuts for commands in Windows and widely used apps such as Internet Explorer and Office are not explicitly hinted at in menus and dialog boxes. In other words, you need to actually learn them.

I can hear you groaning. Yes, learning a whole bunch of keyboard commands is not my idea of a fun way to spend a weekend, either, but if you judiciously pick a few, list them in a cheat sheet that you stick on your monitor, and practice them for a week or two, they'll become second nature.

Top 20 shortcuts for taming your windows

Managing windows is probably one of the most fertile areas for keyboard shortcuts because otherwise, you manipulate them solely with the mouse. Here's my top-20 list of must-know shortcuts for taming your windows; you'll never have to move your hands from the keyboard. For completeness, I've included many keyboard shortcuts you might already be familiar with; skip down the list to see the ones you don't know.

Note that both Sticky Keys and Mouse Keys display a warning message when you turn them on and off. You can disable the warning boxes in the Control Panel's Ease of Access Center by choosing Set up Mouse Keys or Set up Sticky Keys. This list is just a sample of the dozens of shortcuts available. For a full accounting of Windows 7 interface shortcuts, see Microsoft's Windows 7 Help & How-to site.

Other programs and lots more shortcuts

Although the global Windows 7 shortcuts are the headliners, you will probably save the most time by getting to know the keyboard shortcuts in frequently used applications such as your Web browser, e-mail program, and word processor.

Here are links to handy keyboard shortcut reference guides for many popular apps, along with my favorite shortcut discoveries made researching this article:§  Internet Explorer. (shortcuts) Try Control+Shift+P to open an InPrivate browsing window; try Control + E to go to the Search box.§  Firefox. (shortcuts) Select the exact tab you want with Command + 1 to 8. Command + 9 chooses the last tab.§  Chrome. (shortcuts) Press Alt and click a link to download its target, such as a picture or PDF file.§  Office 2010. (shortcuts) Use the keyboard to work the ribbon interface in all Office programs. This is a huge timesaver. Also, create your own shortcuts by first clicking the File tab to open Backstage view. Then choose Options/Customize Ribbon/Keyboard, then Shortcuts/Customize to enter your own key combinations or to change existing ones, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The keyboard customization tool in Office 2010.§  Word 2010. (shortcuts) Press Shift + F7 to open the Thesaurus. My new favorite function key! Lots of great formatting, selection, and navigation shortcuts here, too.§  Excel 2010. (shortcuts) Control + Shift + : enters the current time. Control + Shift + & adds a border around the selected cells.§  OneNote 2010. (shortcuts) I've fallen in love with the ability to move the current paragraph or selected paragraphs up or down in a document by pressing Alt + Shift + up- or down-arrow.§  Outlook 2010. (shortcuts) Enter Control + Shift + I to switch to your Inbox (or Control + Shift + O to move to your Outbox).§  Thunderbird. (shortcuts) Press F8 to toggle the message pane on and off; press T to jump to the next unread thread.§  Windows Media Player 12. (shortcuts) Alt + Enter toggles full-screen video.§  Adobe Photoshop CS5. (shortcuts) Adobe is kind enough to let you use theirs or build your own shortcuts right in the program.With a little Googling, you can find more lists of shortcuts for most any program you use regularly.

Better than shortcuts: Windows Aero tricks

First introduced in Windows Vista, the Windows Aero interface comes of age in Windows 7 and is part of all editions except Starter and Home Basic. Critically, most Windows 7 PCs actually have the horsepower to run Aero smoothly (many Vista users were chagrined to learn their computer either wouldn't support Aero or ran sluggishly), and new usability features make Aero much more than a pretty face.

You're probably already familiar with many of the Windows 7 interface effects, especially Aero Peek, but others, like Shake, are relatively obscure. If you haven't discovered these tricks, you're really missing out.

Yes, they're mouse shortcuts rather than keyboard shortcuts (and most have keyboard equivalents), but give them a try. Sometimes you have your hand on the mouse or trackpad already, which makes these mouse tricks faster than keyboard combinations to access. And they're much more fun.§  Peek. Hovering over a program icon in the taskbar gives you a thumbnail preview of open windows for that program.§  Shake. Click and hold your main window on the screen, and then "shake" it with your mouse to minimize or restore all other windows. This shortcut lets you focus on the task at hand. It works like the Windows key + Home combination.§  Flip 3D. This trick is way cooler than Alt+Tab: holding down the Windows key while repeatedly pressing Tab visually flips you through your open windows. (See Figure 2.) To flip backward, hold down the Shift key, too.§  Snap. Drag the title bar of a window to the top of the screen to maximize, or drag it to the right or left edge of the screen until an outline of the window appears to make it fill the right or left half of the screen. The latter maneuver makes it a snap to arrange two windows side by side. This is the mouse equivalent of Windows key + left- or right-arrow.
Figure 2. Windows Aero Flip 3D lets you visually sift through open windows.

If Aero effects are not presently working on your Windows 7 installation (or only partially working), you may not have the horsepower to run the full Aero interface. Or you may need to enable Aero effects because they depend on your Windows Experience Index.

To enable Aero (or check your ability to run it), go to Control Panel/System & Security/System and run or refresh the Experience Index. Then choose Advanced system settings/Advanced/Performance settings to see what Aero effects are enabled for your system.

If not all effects are enabled, click Custom and check the additional effects you want to use. If these effects perform poorly, you can always go to the same settings to disable them.

How to play God and create program shortcuts

If you spend any time following Windows news, you've probably read one or more of the recent stories on the Web about the so-called GodMode, the Windows 7 tweak du jour. This is nothing more than a searchable/clickable list (see Figure 3) of all system and Control Panel tasks, produced when you create a special folder. (Ed Bott describes similar shortcuts in one of his blogs.)

GodMode has no extra powers or capabilities. But it does let you easily assign keyboard shortcuts to any task in the list, which is undeniably cool.

Figure 3. The God Mode folder contains a searchable list of system tasks.

So you could create keyboard commands for tasks such as adjusting your monitor resolution, showing hidden files and folders, blocking or allowing Internet Explorer pop-ups, or viewing network connections.

To do so, simply create a folder on your desktop with a name and a globally unique identifier (GUID) number, such as GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}. (Warning: Creating a God Mode folder reportedly crashes 64-bit Vista systems. Use at your own risk in any OS but Windows 7.)

Next, open the folder and right-click the setting for which you want to make a shortcut. Finally, right-click the newly created shortcut, choose Properties/Shortcut, and enter your choice of key sequences to invoke it. Press Apply and close the dialog box.

When you create your own sequences, try to stay away from anything already used by Windows or by your main programs. The Control + Shift + Function key territory is relatively uncharted.

Note that you can use this last trick to create keyboard shortcuts for any programs or documents you use frequently, not just the GodMode tasks. Simply right-click the program name in the Start menu and choose Properties/Shortcut/Shortcut key. Do the same for documents by first creating a clickable shortcut and then a keyboard shortcut.

Using KeyText and AutoHotKey for shortcuts

Want even more shortcuts? Start rolling your own with a keyboard macro utility. These apps let you create standard shortcuts not only for menu items but also for sequences of actions, including tasks such as entering text and clicking buttons in a dialog box.

Macro utilities for Windows 7 are not as plentiful as they used to be for XP. (And my all-time favorite, QuicKeys, has not been updated for Vista or Windows 7.) But I found a couple that do the job for little or no money.

The first is MJMSoft's KeyText 3 (U.S. $29.95, info page). KeyText (see Figure 4) is an amazingly versatile program that can automate tasks such as opening your e-mail program and creating a new message using an e-mail address you've selected in another program.

It even supports regular expressions and if/then/else logic, so you can conduct search-and-replace operations or batch-file renaming, as well as perform different actions that depend on the result of a search.

Figure 4. KeyText 3's macro menu can be invoked from the system tray or via a hotkey. You can also assign direct hotkeys to any item.

Learning how to harness all this power requires a little work, but you can use both the contextual help and a very good PDF manual (albeit one not updated since Vista). You'll have no trouble learning simple tasks such as assigning trigger text to an action. A trial version of this software is available.

AutoHotKey (info page) is another versatile option for creating your own shortcuts. This free and open-source utility requires significantly more effort to learn and use than KeyText, but it has a very active community forum where you can get help quickly; it also has good documentation.

AutoHotKey is basically a macro scripting language that requires you to write simple programs for your shortcuts using a text editor like NotePad. After saving your shortcuts with the .ahk extension, you can then run them in the background by double-clicking them, or you can set them as startup items.

AutoHotKey's command list (page) is quite versatile, and programmers are likely take to it in a flash. The rest of us can get by with the included AutoScriptWriter macro recording utility, which — as advertised — "watches where you type and what you click, and keeps track of which window is active."

KeyText is considerably easier to use than AutoHotKey, and both powerfully fulfill almost every Windows 7 automation need. Even so, there's room for a simpler utility with a great graphical user interface, such as the old QuicKeys. If you know of one, please tell us in the Lounge. In the meantime, try out some of the preprogrammed suggestions above.

Fedora Linux not for everyone. If you’re an experienced Linux user who wants an easy-to-use desktop Linux, I recommend Mint 11. If you’re new to Linux and just want something that’s easy to pick up and use, I think you should give Ubuntu 11.04 a try. But, if you’re a Linux expert, and want to explore the outer limits of what’s possible with Linux, then Red Hat’s new Fedora 15 Linux is the distribution for you.

Why? Well, here are my five favorite reasons to use Fedora 15. I’m going to start though with one reason I don’t care for this release of Fedora. Let’s call this one: Feature 0.

0) The GNOME 3 desktop environment

GNOME 3 claims to be the “the next generation of GNOME with a brand new user interface. It provides a completely new and modern desktop that has been designed for today’s users and technologies.” It’s not.

First, did we really need a “completely new desktop?” I don’t think so. I quite liked GNOME the 2.x series. It worked well for me and I didn’t need to learn anything new to use it. I get the point of Ubuntu’s Unity, which is a radically different shell that rides on top of GNOME. Unity is meant for Windows and Mac users who’ve never used Linux It’s also clearly designed to eventually become a tablet interface. When I look at GNOME though what I see is change just for the sake of change not change for greater end-user usability.

The idea of GNOME 3 was to get rid of clutter OK, I can see that, but in doing it GNOME’s designers had made GNOME less usable For example, in shifting from one project to another in your workspace you need to use the dashboard as a window management interface For me, this is like having to stop my car to shift gears That by itself is so annoying that I quickly stopped using GNOME 3.0.

I also found miss each windows’ minimize and maximize buttons. You can still minimize and maximize application windows, but what used to be an automatic action now wastes time. Finally, GNOME makes it very hard indeed to tweak your desktop. There’s no easy way to even set up a screen saver! I mean seriously, I have to do something like:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme 'Clearlooks‘

from a shell just to change my desktop theme?

 

 

It also doesn’t help any that GNOME 3 won’t run on basic graphics hardware. You need just the right mix of graphics and graphic drivers to get it to work. On my systems, I was only able to get one to work by using the Radeon driver for an older ATI graphics card.

In short, GNOME 3.0 is new but for users it’s a step backward. Fedora 15 is the first major distribution to include GNOME 3 by default. That was a mistake. Like Fedora 4 in its first not ready for prime time versions, GNOME 3 is not what most users want from a desktop. As for me, I’m sticking with GNOME 2.32, with occasional visits to KDE 4.6.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, here’s what I like about Fedora 15.

5 Good Things about Fedora 15

1) Better power management

Desktop Linux has never done a great job of laptop battery management. Fortunately, Linux doesn’t drink up that much power so it usually ends up with decent battery life anyway. But, Fedora 15 redesigned power management utilities give it better battery life than other Linuxes.

I checked this by running Intec Battery Mark 1.1 on Windows XP in a VirtualBox virtual machine on my Lenovo ThinkPad R61 with its 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7500 and 2GBs of RAM. With Mint 11, my six-cell battery lasted an hour and fifty-seven minutes. That’s pretty darn good for a three-year old battery.

With Fedora 15, though, it made it to 2 hours and ten minutes, which is pretty darn close to what it used to do when it was brand new. Anything that gives me 10% better battery life is a major win in my book.

2) Better End-User Software

Like most up-to-the-minute Linux distributions, Fedora uses LibreOffice in place of OpenOffice, as its office suite. LibreOffice, while an OpenOffice fork is better thought of as an improved version of OpenOffice. It looks the same, works the same, but it’s also faster, has many minor bug fixes and has far better Microsoft Office file format compatibility. Last, but not least, since Oracle will no longer be putting any resources into OpenOffice, LibreOffice is the most significant open-source office suite yet that’s still being actively developed.

In addition, Fedora includes Firefox 4, which is certainly better than the older Firefox 3.x series. On the other hand, I would have been happier if it had used Chrome 11. But, no worries, this is Linux. Installing Chrome and making it my default browser took me less time to do than it did to write this paragraph.

3) Dynamic Firewall

OK, this is a beta feature so you have to manually install it and only network administrators are likely to find it that exciting, but I–who sometimes still wears his network administrator hat–think that it has great potential.

Like its name suggest dynamic firewall enables you to change firewall settings without needing to restart the firewall. So, for example, you can set the firewall to change its rules, as needed for virtual machines or Virtual Private Networks (VPN).

You can also use it to open up the firewall for a specific network request, such as discovering a local printer or a Windows server, and then closing down the port once you’re done with that procedure. This has got real possibilities and I like it already. If all goes well, it will become the default firewall in Fedora 16 and eventually in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

4) Virtual Desktop Support

Slowly, but surely, Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE)virtual desktops are coming to Red Hat. In Fedora 15, SPICE has been integrated into the virtualization manager, virt-manager.

Since Red Hat future desktops plans center on virtual desktops, presumably running on Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), I find this very interesting. I also found that you can finally set up speedy SPICE virtual desktops without tweaking configuration files by hand.

5) RPM 4.9.0 Package Manager

RPM 4.9.0, Fedora and RHEL’s software manager has been given a real tune-up. It’s now easier than ever to install software on Fedora .For more on that see the RPM 4.9.0 release notes. The bottom line is that RPM does a much better job of handling any RPM package that you try to install on your system.

There are many other neat features as well such as security improvements in handling common Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) problems with an easy to use GUI and improved encrypted home directory support. And then there’s the BoxGringer image and virtual machine (VM) creator, and, at long, long last, a built-in consistent and sane network device naming system.

Now if they would only do something with GNOME 3! Or, better still, the GNOME 3 designers brought back some of its more end-user friendly bits and bites I’d be perfectly happy with Fedora.

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During remarks at a developers conference in Japan on May 23, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer referred to the next version of Windows as “Windows 8.” He also said the next generation of Windows systems will be out next year.

To those not following Microsoft’s Windows saga closely, this may seem like a “so what” moment. But Microsoft execs have been studiously avoiding any references to the timing or naming of the next version of Windows to try to keep the specifics of the product as quiet as possible. Microsoft’s top brass has been avoiding calling the next version of Windows “Windows 8″ publicly, preferring instead to call it “Windows Next.” (Internally, a number of  Microsoft job postings and leaked slides have referenced “Windows 8,” however.”

Here’s what Ballmer said today in Tokyo about Windows 8, according to Microsoft’s own transcript:

“We’re obviously hard at work on the next version of Windows. Windows 7 PCs will sell over 350 million units this year. We’ve done a lot in Windows 7 to improve customer satisfaction. We have a brand new user interface. We’ve added touch, and ink, and speech. And yet, as we look forward to the next generation of Windows systems, which will come out next year, there’s a whole lot more coming. As we progress through the year, you ought to expect to hear a lot about Windows 8. Windows 8 slates, tablets, PCs, a variety of different form factors.”

Parsing Ballmer’s words further, it’s interesting he called out Windows 8 slates and tablets as two separate form factors. Last year, Microsoft was pushing Windows Embedded Compact as its slate operating system, designed for devices that were more about consumption than creation….

It’s also interesting that Ballmer did not say specifically that “the next generation of Windows systems” due out next year were Windows 8 systems. (There’s been some speculation that Microsoft might deliver ARM-based tablets separately from Windows 8 laptops, PCs and notebooks — with some company watchers predicting that Win8 tablets would ship before the other SKUs, and others predicting they’d ship afterwards. I’ve heard from my contacts that Microsoft is planning to deliver all Windows 8 SKUs simultaneously, however.)

The head of Windows, President Steven Sinofsky, is slated to speak next week at the AllThingsD conference, where many are expecting him to show off an internal build of Windows 8 (whether or not he actually refers to it using the Windows 8 codename).

Microsoft is expected to provide testers with a first tech preview or beta of Windows 8 in mid-September during the company’s developer conference in Anaheim, Calif. The rumored release-to-manufacturing date of Windows 8 is mid-2012, with holiday 2012 retail availability targeted.

Update: OK, believe it or not, the “official” response is Ballmer’s statement isn’t what it seems to be… Sent from a Microsoft spokesman earlier tonight:

““It appears there was a misstatement. We are eagerly awaiting the next generation of Windows 7 hardware that will be available in the coming fiscal year.  To date, we have yet to formally announce any timing or naming for the next version of Windows.”

And, as usual, there are many ways to interpret these remarks. Is the next-generation Windows release nothing but Windows 7 with new paint? Windows 8 not the final name for the next version of Windows? (The final name possibly being something other than Windows 8 is something that I’ve heard from my tipsters…) You be the judge….

I like Ubuntu’s Unity interface, but I wouldn’t use it all the time, and I know many of you don’t like it at all. Like me, you like getting your hands dirty with the operating system and Unity is meant for new Linux users. That’s why for day-in, day-out use I’m now using the Ubuntu Linux-based Mint 11.

Instead of Unity, Mint 11, which is now at the release candidate stage, uses the old Linux Mint desktop layout, mintMenu system, and the same desktop elements featured in previous releases. It also doesn’t use GNOME 3.0. That’s fine by me since I don’t care for GNOME 3 at all, but my reasons for that are a story for another day. Today, I want to tell you why I think Mint 11 is a great desktop Linux for experienced Linux users.

To put Mint 11, Katya, which is based on Ubuntu 11.04, through its paces, I first installed it on one of my main Linux workstations. This is a Dell Inspiron 530S powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. This box has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set.

How well did it work? Well, after a week on it, I also installed the Mint 11 release candidate on my main work laptop. This is a Lenovo ThinkPad R61 with its 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7500 and 2GBs of RAM. In other words, it not only worked well, it had already proved trustworthy enough that I’d switched to using it on a production machine.

I was willing to make this shift so fast for several reasons. First, Mint 11 is fast. Before this, I was running Ubuntu 11.04, openSUSE 11.4, and Mint 10 on these machines, or in the case of the PC, its twin brother. I don’t know what special sauce the Mint team added to Mint 11, all I know is that it’s faster and more responsive than the other Linux distributions I’ve recently used on these machines. As for Windows 7 SP1, please, these machines are barely adequate for today’s version of Windows.

With the GNOME 2.32 interface, Mint looks as good as ever. This desktop, unlike Unity, also makes it easy for me to tinker with the operating system to get it working just the way I want. GNOME 2.32 has some GNOME 3.0 features though that I didn’t like. For example, some GNOME compatible applications have, instead of a permanently displayed right-hand slider for moving up and down a page, they have a slider that only appears when your mouse hovers over a windows right-side interface. I find this more annoying than useful.

There have also been some desktop application changes. One, which I really approve of, is the switch to LibreOffice in place of OpenOffice for the office suite. Again, the new model office suite was faster than OpenOffice. In addition, LibreOffice does much better with Microsoft Office document compatibility. Most, if not all, of the Linux desktop distributions are switching to LibreOffice. It’s a smart move.

I also like the use of Banshee, which has long been one of my favorite media-players over Rhythmbox. I’m neutral about Mint switching out gThumb for F-Spot as the default photo application.

Since this is Linux, if you don’t like the default applications, you can always replace it. Like the Ubuntu Software Manager it’s based on Mint’s Software Manager makes it mindlessly simple to add new programs. This program does have one default I don’t care for though. When you install a new program, it doesn’t give you a message letting you know when the installation is complete. Instead it simply gives you a momentary 100% installed on the bottom “ongoing action” bar and the application installation page still shows the program as not being installed. You’ll only see that the program has indeed been installed after you refresh the page.