About Us

Linux Mint's purpose is to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution.

Linux Mint is one of the surprise packages of the past year. Originally launched as a variant of Ubuntu with integrated media codecs, it has now developed into one of the most user-friendly distributions on the market - complete with a custom desktop and menus, several unique configuration tools, a web-based package installation interface, and a number of different editions. Perhaps most importantly, this is one project where the developers and users are in constant interaction, resulting in dramatic, user-driven improvements with every new release. DistroWatch has spoken to the founder and lead developer of Linux Mint, Clement Lefebvre, about the history of the distribution.

Some of the reasons for the success of Linux Mint are:

It's one of the most community driven distributions. You could literally post an idea in the forums today and see it implemented the week after in the "current" release. Of course this has pros and cons and compared to distributions with roadmaps, feature boards and fixed release cycles we miss a lot of structure and potentially a lot of quality, but it allows us to react quickly, implement more innovations and make the whole experience for us and for the users extremely exciting.
It is a Debian-based distribution and as such it is very solid and it comes with one of the greatest package managers.
It is compatible with and uses Ubuntu repositories. This gives Linux Mint users access to a huge collection of packages and software.
It comes with a lot of desktop improvements which make it easier for the user to do common things.
There is a strong focus on making things work out of the box (WiFi cards drivers in the file system, multimedia support, screen resolution, etc).

Meet the Team

{clem} Clement Lefebvre

Founder and team leader

Ireland

I started using Linux in 1996. It was Slackware and I was quite happy with it. I learnt a lot about the internals of the system thanks to that distribution. A few years later more and more distributions became available and at the same time people started to get fast Internet at home with faster and faster download speeds. So I started distro-hopping... a lot :) I enjoyed many different distributions and for different reasons.

As I became more experienced with Linux I started asking myself how I could contribute back. I spent a lot of time helping out on different IRC channels and writing tutorials and reviews on the web. Eventually I even got paid for it and started writing for LinuxForums.com (you can still read some of my contributions here). I specialized more and more on distribution reviews and after a while I became expert (or so I thought anyway :)) at seeing pros and cons in each one of them.

Looking at all the other distributions, I got a very precise idea of how I would make the perfect desktop if I was to do it myself. And because everything is easy when you're having fun, it wasn't long until I was producing my first ISO files.

{husse} Mats Geier

Forum administrator and moderator. Maintainer of the Weekly newsletter.

Sweden

You know me as forum moderator. My story with computers begun in the mid seventies. I took a one year universitiy course in "computer science" so I have programmed and run the programs from punch cards on an IBM 360 or 370 I eventually graduated with political economy as the other main subject. Some of the programming I learnt is still useful (matrix). I never followed the route of computer then.

In the mid eighties I took some courses to become a social worker, but that was not my cup of tea. In the late eighties I had a small catering firm but that only lasted for a couple of years.

I got a computer as a gift for my fiftieth birthday and I was hooked on computers. Shortly after I started a small mail order company to sell computers and computer parts together with my stepson who gave me the computer. It lasted between February 1998 and Oktober 2005. Then over night sales completely vanished - a site that lots of visitors came through changed it's ways and we lost almost all sales that way.

I learned lots about hardware, but also software as I had to sort out software failure from hardware failure, so I became quite good at Windows.

Now and then I checked in on Linux but found it to geeky even for a geek. When Vista arrived and I realized that XP would not be maintained for ever I checked out Linux again. I found Ubuntu and Mint and saw that it was not some geeky command line only story any more. And now I'm here

{Exploder} Don Cosner: Release manager, tester; USA

{Boo} Jamie "Boo" Birse

Maintainer of the KDE edition

Australia

Unix/Linux Administrator.

{Merlwiz79}: Maintainer of the XFCE edition; Earth; Interested in Science & Technology.

Shane Joe Lazar: Maintainer of the Fluxbox edition; Earth

{Mc Lovin}: Maintainer of the LXDE edition; Earth

{emorrp1} Philip Morrell: Developer; Earth

Chris Hodapp: Technical writer; Earth

{carlos} Carlos Porto

Web Designer and Artist

USA

http://www.designdrifter.com

I'm a Web Designer by trade and designer by hobby (well at least nowadays). I got my start with linux when randomly finding the Linux Action Show Podcast. I was one of their early listeners (episode 2, to be exact), they were funny and quite witty. I figured I would learn something from them just by osmosis. Someone on the Linux Action Show forum recommended Mint as friendly distro that was great for linux beginners. Well a couple of weeks later I got an franken dell (a dell laptop hobbled together with spare parts from different laptop models). I installed mint and was really impressed. It looked nice had all the applications that I needed and it was fast. Later on I was able to install beryl and had desktop candy nirvana

I was so impressed with Mint, I wanted to contribute the only way I knew how, by designing something. I made a couple of wallpapers that I submitted in the forum. I received alot of great feedback and support for more, so I created a couple of others that where included in the Bianca release.

Shortly after that I felt that Linux Mint needed to step up and come out. The logo at the time while very nice, was a spin off of Ubuntu's logo. Mint was growing and changing so much that it needed to differentiate itself. After a long month of research and experimentation, I created a new logo and website design. Alot of the forum members liked it, but initially Clem wasn't completely sold. After some time the Logo War (a shoot out of various logos) was started and the community eventually chose the logo you see now, I am forever grateful to the community for having chosen it (also, I think it grew on Clem and of course, he loves it now). With a new logo in hand, the official symbol for Linux Mint was created.

Now I've been spending time improving the Linux Mint website. Every so often I hope to contribute more artwork and help the talented artist's of Linux Mint. I plan on being here for the long haul, so I can help make the future of Mint look bright and green.

{d00p} Michael Kaufmann

Server Admin, Host

Germany

http://www.nutime.de/

I'm a software-developer.

Running my own hosting-corporation: http://www.nutime.de/ and http://www.mint-space.com/.

{Az Van} Wes: Supporter

{AlsaPhil} Philippe Lotz: Supporter

{Adler} John Macey

Supporter

http://www.jjmacey.net/

I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Just typing that sounds Cool! Then, raised in New Jersey, but grew up in Europe. Then went to Asia, and ended up in Arizona. Let me explain.

I then went to a University in Philadelphia, Saint Joseph's. I graduated with a degree in Biology.Had my counselor told me to take another course -- Physical Chemistry -- I could have graduated in both Biology and Chemistry. Dual Degrees! Cool! As it stands -- I am a Bio-Chemist. I've a few degrees in nothing really useful, so I took my show on the road. LOL!

First stop Germany, then Holland back to Germany, then a short while in Sweden. All of this was to make my degree useful. So far so good. Meanwhile, my travels have taken me to over 80+ counties around the Globe, and I did grow up Internationally.

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