One of the really wonderful things about Linux is the variety one gets.  While this might seem confusing for a few, it's pretty much like the menu options in a gourmet's dream-come-true restaurant: you can get exactly what you want, and Linux users ask for a lot of different things!  For me, I've always loved stability and reliability more than cutting edge and bleeding edge tech.  I've only ever wanted an operating system that just works as expected, without throwing nasty surprises.  Unlike many other Linuxers, I'm also not overly fond of undoing and redoing my installs.  Given a choice, I'd want to install something and never ever have to reinstall it.  Debian hit a lot of these checkmarks: Debian was stable and had a very conservative release schedule (one release per year or more).  Even after a new release came out, the older release still got updates and packages for a fairly longish time, something that scored bonus points in my rating system and I stuck to Debian

After more than six years of using Debian Stable, I ran into my first bit of trouble: I needed a 3.x kernel for something I wanted to build.  Hmm. Well, that shouldn't be too much of a problem. I just pulled down a kernel backport, from wheezy and things went pretty well for a while. Trouble started brewing however, with Google.  I've been using Chrome for a while now and I like it best among the browsers.  Chrome stopped updating.  That's not just it: it started complaining loudly, each time I started it up.  I got fed up and decided to upgrade the OS on my laptop.  I'd been hearing good things about Linux Mint and the best part was Linux Mint had a Debian-based edition but that alone was not enough for me to switch from Debian Stable: LMDE made me an offer I couldn't refuse: the promise that it only needed to be installed once.  This was made possible by the mechanism of rolling updates for LMDE.  It would bring to me all the goodies of the latest packages from Debian Testing, while still staying reliable.  I installed it!  Oh, and LMDE offers me the plain open source Chromium-Browser, which is Chrome without the Google branding and control. It's

Was it all smooth sailing with LMDE? Not quite.  My laptop which had been running Gnome2 under Debian Squeeze didn't seem to play well with the fancier Cinnamon desktop interface native to Mint.  The display would suddenly freeze up and go into a complete lockup requiring a power cycle.  I tried switching to gnome2, but it still didn't seem to make the problem go away.  I then changed to XFCE and that seems to have done the trick for me.  It's minimalist while still providing necessary features and it's vastly lighter than either Cinnamon or Gnome.  I'm now using XFCE and things seem just perfect. All's well in the jungle again!