TuxRadar elects Linux Mint as the best distro in 2012

[nachoig]

And Sabayon in semi-final
http://tuxradar.com/content/best-linux-distro-2012

[wolfden]

Mint is tough to beat and are very active in development. I tried out Mint a while back and had it installed, but found it to be slow and I saw a few other complaints on the web about that. It makes for a great beginner and advanced user distro. If someone was looking for easy transition into linux world, Mint would be at the top of the list. Rigo has had many great improvements since Sabayon 9 so it would of nice to see it compared with Sabayon X instead of 9. Like I say tho, Mint is tough to beat.

I think it is great that we can be compared with Mint and if we had more manpower we could even be better.

I guess I'm not familiar with Mageia 2 at all. I'm surprised it so popular and I haven't heard of it. That is another problem, so many distros out there and keep popping up daily it's hard to get noticed and easily forgotten.

[nachoig]

In general lines, I think Sabayon is a distro for intermediate users. It's not enough automatizate the things.

I tried Mageia 2 for a week. It's a fantastic distro, but it has some polish problems. And I used Mint for six months, and it's very easy to use. But in Mint Maya I had some problems with Cinnamon. Cinnamon 1.4 was unstable. 1.6 works fine for me (I tested it on Arch later).

And I don't see any future for MATE. It's the Trinity for GNOME 2 (for who doesn't know, Trinity is a fork of KDE 3).

[lupinehorror]

i got my girlfirend into linux a few years ago...mint suits her just fine as she doesn't like to tinker too much.
i, however, find it rather bloated and the community isn't as helpful as i think it could be. i'm new to sabayon (have come from crunchbang recently) and have to say i'm thouroughly enjoying it. playing with razor qt http://razor-qt.org/ at the moment.

[B3rtm3n]

I guess I'm not familiar with Mageia 2 at all. I'm surprised it so popular and I haven't heard of it. That is another problem, so many distros out there and keep popping up daily it's hard to get noticed and easily forgotten.

Half the Mandriva team is/was involved in Mageia, it was started when they got fired because Mandriva was in bad papers.
It is a nice distro, but proprietary drivers have to be installed afterwards.
When they started they went to their userbase and did a poll how they would like Mageia to evolve. The team setup is still very democratic and they involve their users how they would like to see the roadmap of their distro evolve.

I tried almost any distro out there. Tried Mint a few times but it never got me. Liked Kubuntu with some tweaks more..
Do not know what Mint offers more then other distros like SuperOS, Linux Deepin, StartOS and such which are better then Mint in a certain way.
Many distros are good. But most distros are like with French wine. You have tasted one and you have tasted most of them.
Do not understand how and why TuxRadar selects Mint.

I like the ones that are not afraid to be different or offer something new ore be controversial like Pear Linux (OSX clone .)

My favourites next to Sabayon are :
Comfusion (Spanish)
Zorin-OS (because how you can change the start menu with look-changer which Sabayon should have too )
Chakra Linux (Arch)
BlackPantherOS (website not always available)
MoonOS
and let not forget Pardus.

I had these in multiboot, but finally went for Sabayon to avoid all the work with upgrades etc because of being a rolling distro and although out of the box is not out of the box when it is Linux I think Sabayon despite it requires some non automated maintenance is the best Linux solution so far.

[wolfden]

It had been a while since I tried mint linux so I did an install over the weekend of the xfce flavor. It's working better than my last try, not noticing any slow or sluggishness with it. Mint is very active and it shows and that is what gets my attention.

Good for the Mageia devs for working with users, but I have zero interest in mandriva stuff.