Ubuntu 13 on my Gateway laptop was always flakey, so when Canonical announced the 13 had reached its end of life, I decided I’d try the upgrade to 14, which has long term support (LTS). Unfortunately, the upgrade went horribly wrong. It ended up stuck in the laptop’s lock screen, which no longer worked. A reboot, and after the Ubuntu three dots, the laptop went to a black text screen. Recovery mode booted up, but only to the root prompt.
I decided it was time to try something different. Since I don’t like Unity (Ubuntu’s Windows 8 like UI) or Gnome 3, and was already using Cinnamon (the Mint window manager) on Ubuntu, Mint was an obvious choice. I decided to get away from Ubuntu altogether, and go with Mint’s Debian version. The install was simple. The only tricky part was convincing it to install on the hard drive. So far, so good.
