Linux Mint: Positive first impression

Today, my Arch Linux died on a PC at work. Since I had not time to play with it, I decided to install something new. First I wanted to install Ubuntu 9.10, but usually after the installation of Ubuntu I have to spent time installing audio/video codes, flash player etc. I've heard that in Linux Mint all this stuff is pre-installed. I've also heard positive comments about this Ubuntu-base distro, so today I decided to give it a try.

I downloaded Mint 7 Gloria, made backup of my home folder form Arch and I did a fresh installation on my dual-screen PC.

In short: installation was very smooth and quite fast. After the installation, I could play my video and audio files, DVDs without any tweaking or installing any packages. The one thing that required installation was nvidia driver, but there were no problems with it. As a gnome user, the only thing that I found strange was the mintMenu at the bottom panel, no top panel and very dark default Mint theme. So I had to manually adjust these things. It just took few minutes.

Some screens:

In conclusion, my first impression of Linux Mint is very positive. Now I look forward to Mint 8!