This is the final distribution that is part of my live USB. I realized that I never really wrote a thorough review of it. Given that I already use Mint 7 (GNOME) every day, my review of this will be less thorough and much shorter. Follow the jump to see the full review.
The look is very familiar, despite being Xfce instead of GNOME. Usually, distributions that include Xfce use the stock theme, which is kind of ugly. Thankfully, the Mint team knows better. This implementation of Xfce is the best I've seen yet.
YouTube, Facebook, and other popular sites work fine with Firefox. No surprises there.
Surprisingly, for a distribution with a lighter-weight desktop environment (Xfce), a full-fledged installation OpenOffice.org is included (as opposed to the lighter-weight AbiWord and Gnumeric). There are no surprises here either.
Just as in my installation of Linux Mint 7 GNOME, compositing doesn't quite work. That said, some things do work, especially transparency. It is nice that I can individually set the transparencies
of the panel (both when active and inactive) and windows (when active, inactive, dragged, resized, or whatever). Here's a nice screenshot of that. You can even see this very post being written in the background (here, Firefox is an inactive window, so it is almost completely transparent).Overall, I would say that Linux Mint 7 Xfce is on par (or even slightly better than, due to the ability to do a little compositing) with its GNOME counterpart, which is to say that I absolutely recommend it. With GNOME going into the dumps with the introduction of GNOME Shell (which is so tightly integrated with GNOME that using Compiz or another window manager will break GNOME), Xfce is definitely something to consider.
