I've been running Linux Mint 12 for the past three months (since December). I wasn't really happy with Unity, and Mint was getting nice reviews so... I decided to jump in and tried it myself.
Being based on Ubuntu, it was nice to see that it felt faster in my machine than Ubuntu 11.10.
I went with the gnome 3 route, but since then I change to openbox. Yes, openbox.
I'm leaving the openbox part to another post, so here's the Mint installation part.
Installing
- Backup your data!
- Download Linux Mint. In my case was the 64bit DVD version (linuxmint-12-gnome-dvd-64bit.iso).
- Check the hash of the downloaded file (see the download site for the correct hash):
$ 548f0ac303fea840ef138e5669880a74 linuxmint-12-gnome-dvd-64bit.iso
- Create a CD or a bootable USB stick. I used the "Startup Disk Creator" in Ubuntu. Other alternatives here.
- Reboot into your CD or bootable USB stick.
- Install!