I want to dabble with Linux again, but I'm unsure of which distro I should install.  

I've used Ubuntu in the past, but I thought I might want to try Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon .

I have a removable hard drive bay, so I plan on installing this on spare drive.

So the question is which one should I install?  Any input would be appreciated.

Personally I like Debian


in the end it is a lil more work but cleaner

I just resurrected my old Acer netbook with Linux Mint 17 Xfce.  Linux rookie here with the Raspberry Pi being my first taste.

I've dabbled with many distros over the years and never really did much with them because they were always such a PITA.  I recently installed mint 17 in a  virtual machine. What a joy it is to use..easy, stable, it basically has an app store/library that allows super easy in tall of new programs. It's the first distro that could legitimately replace a windows desktop for daily tasks.




 

High school kids run gentoo because it makes text scroll down the screen constantly (which they don't understand).

College kids use ubuntu because it's reasonably nice and lets them do homework without getting bogged down in how the OS actually works.

Professionals use RHEL/Fedora/CentOS because they finally understand the virtues of a commercially supported OS.

But white people who know the difference¹ use FreeBSD.




¹ Pulp Fiction reference, for you uncultured swine.

I've installed Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Puppy and Mint but wound up with LXLE Link on an older HP laptop.  Skinny Linux build that's based on Lubuntu which is based on Ubuntu but it runs much faster than any of the other distros I've tried. No issues with video or WiFi driver which can be an issue with some laptops.   It comes with LibreOffice and Firefox.  I installed DropBox and Thunderbird and have been loving it.

Of the 2 you asked about, Mint.

ETA:

It's not a "version" it's a Distro, short for Distribution.  Each distro has it's own version tree.  Mint is 13 or something, not sure what Ubuntu is.

Neither. Fedora or Centos.

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/

I would use Lili to make a bootable flash drive before installing a new distro.

mint 17 is great, try bodhi if you think *buntu is too mainstream

http://www.bodhilinux.com/

Philistine.

The best thing about linux is there's so many to choose from...

If I had to choose, I'd go with Mint.

I'm a glutton for punishment, so I personally use Slackware. Someday I'll get JT65 to work, I'm sure.

That chart is hilariously inaccurate. Mentions mkLinux but not LFS?

I was running Mint 17 live off the disk for a few days last week and it was working great just like previous versions of Mint.  And it's the long term support version.

Installed Mint 17 on a Toshiba Netbook a  short time ago because it was a slug with Windows 7 Starter. Love the way it's working now.

I'd go with Mint, and I have it running on two PCs.  The only issue is that Mint requires a complete re-install to upgrade, whereas Ubuntu has in-place upgrades.

I like to recommend Mint to people. I am a fan of XFCE because it has come so far, however it doesn't really matter because you can install all of them and choose between them at startup.

A couple others I like are Crunchbang and puppy. Distrowatch has a pretty good selection to choose from. As long as it is Debian based it stays pretty easy.

I've a couple of considerations for you.  But first decide your hardware constraints.  If trying to get more life out of an older netbook or laptop you'll want one of the 'less filling, great taste" distros.
If you want an "interesting" distro I'll recommend trying Kali.  It's Debian based, meaning very mainstream.  According to this link now has GNU radio already included.
If you're going to load it on a chromebook you'll want one of the distros specific to that hardware.

Phurba has it right about who uses what.  But I break it down this way:
Running lite: get a debian based distro for the hardware you've got.
Running for ham: look at the ham apps you want and get a distro that they give examples for.
Running for professional reasons: get a RHEL derived distro.
For example I'm looking at getting a couple of older NUCs like boxes to load OEL.
Why? Because everyday at work I'm working with lots of Solaris/RHEL/OEL systems.  And a couple of SUSE's that slipped in the backdoor.  And I'm interested in developing an expertise in Puppet
BTW: my home PC runs Ubuntu.  Still at 12.04 LTS.  I need to decide to move to the next long term release.
I3-2100/4GB ram/GT250 nvidia video.  Currently 3 Firefox windows each with 4-12 tabs open and I could still fire up World of Warcraft via wine though if I was going into an action heavy sequence I'd probably shutdown a few tabs.

I recently brought new life into a small netbook with a linux install.I tried Xubuntu and Mint both. The Mint was my final choice, just seemed a little more comfortable with it. Xubuntu did load a wee bit faster though at startup.

I say Slackware, but then I always say Slackware.  

I prefer it because to me, configuring it with vi is a feature, not a bug.  

My servers at work mostly run CentOS (mostly VMs on VMware vSphere), although fairly soon I'm going to have to setup an OpenStack cluster on Ubuntu Server.  

Thanks for all of the suggestions and tips.

I really want a distro to run FLDIGI with, so Mint seems like one that might work well.  

I have a very capable desktop machine, but I also have a Netbook that my daughter is no longer using that may benefit from converting from XP over to Linux.

Definitely Mint.

Unity is god awful

This thread needs more Fedora.   That's what I have been using for a number of years and it has been no trouble on the laptop or the netbook.    I used to use Gnome but recent versions went a little sideways and it just isn't to my liking any more.   On the 64 bit laptop KDE Plasma Workspace runs like a dream and LXDE is loaded on both of them.

I am am running Core 17 which recently hit EOL so I need to upgrade soon I reckon.   Online upgrade failed on the 64 bit machine, too many version changes and making one arch install over the other is quite an affair and obviously I am not doing something right.   But it has issues on the Windows side anyway (Vista) so I just need to make time to flatten it and start over.   As little as I use Windows, Vista is fine and I'm not in the mood to buy an upgrade - now that Gates and Ballmer have thrown in with Bloomberg on the Washington state UBC ballot measure they can kiss my ass.

Unfortunately, Fedora doesn't have a comprehensive ham package in the repository (at least right now) so some stuff needs to be hunted down.   But the OS just runs.

Dang

Double dang...

(sometimes internet here in the boonies just plain suxx)

Thanks again for all of the help and suggestions.

I installed Linux Mint 17 on my spare drive and I like it very much.

I'd only install Ubuntu if you wanted to deal with Unity. I started the little Asus XCH101 I'm using right now with Mint 13, then tried on a desktop Mint 14 Cinnamon (sadly the graphics drivers for my Asus were not present). After a year or so I got fed up with Unity and purged Unity and installed XFCE (I made a net upgrade over to Xubuntu 12.04). My home server runs on Ubuntu 12.04 (actually just do-dist-upgraded) to 14.04 Server Edition (I access it completely through SSH).

I've played around with Debian in the form of Debain 6 and Debian 7 (the Toughbook I was using had to run off the kernel from 6, so I changed the repositories to Debian 7 and just booted on the 6 kernel). Raspbian, which is a ARM version of Debian 7.

And then there is the distro I've become extremely fond of...Arch. Pacman is by far my favorite package manager (I've never used the GUI managers, always done through the command line). Started playing with it on my Pi's (I feel bad for having 3 of them) and the installed it on my new "work" computer which is really a 2007 IBM Thinkpad with a Centrino Duo processor. The only thing I don't have on it that is on my Asus that I actually use, Matlab. Installed both dwm and xfce and set xfce to boot at login. Chirp is on there, Wine is on there (so I can go ahead and install all of my Icom F-series software), working on getting dosbox on there for some dos based RSS. Splat went on there quite easily...

Now I am trying to set up the latest version of WSJT-X and run it under WINE.

So far no joy due to the Signalink USB aduio issues.

I do have FLDIGI working, so at least I can play digital if I like.

Sounds like you got the com ports transferred alright. Or did you?

Why not use the native Linux version instead of using WINE?



http://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/K1JT/wsjtx-doc/wsjtx-main-toc2.html



(haven't tried it but I do run openSUSE most of the time)



 

The native Linux version is a revision or two behind the current Windows version.

I just don't care for it.