An interview with Clem from Linux Mint

A few days ago I reviewed what is in my opinion the easiest Linux distribution for Windows switchers: Linux Mint 7.0 The small group of talented people that manage this distribution is led by Clem, the "founder" of Linux Mint. Today he was kind enough to grant me an email interview as a follow up to my review.

Erlik: How did you get started on Linux Mint?

Clem: I've been passionate about Linux since the early days. I started using it as my main operating system in 1996. In the following years I did a lot of distro-hopping and I spent a lot of time helping other users. In 2006 I started selling reviews and tutorials to linuxforums.org (my articles are still available here: http://www.linuxforums.org/bio/author/Clement+Lefebvre/) and I eventually decided to publish them myself, and so the name of my website at the time was linuxmint.com. The more distributions I reviewed the more I felt something was missing and I started to develop a very precise idea of what I would personally like to see in a desktop operating system. I'm a developer myself so I wasn't afraid to develop the missing parts and I started taking what was already there in the Open Source world to build upon it. I chose not to develop my own package base and so I opted to base my little project on top of a Debian distribution. Ubuntu was popular, I would have ported most of their innovations anyway and being compatible with them was a huge advantage, so I chose the Ubuntu package base. At first it was probably just an experiment but after the release of version 2.0 "Barbara" people started to gather around it and to show interest. At the time it wasn't much more than Ubuntu with codecs but because this corresponded to something people wanted it created a following, and when the time came for me to really start improving the desktop and to implement a new vision (that started with the release of Linux Mint 2.2 "Bianca"), there was already and audience and a user base eager to see how Mint would develop and interested in the innovations.

Erlik: Linux Mint is very successful (3rd on distrowatch), what do you think is the reason behind such a success?

Clem: Well, as I said, it was probably a bit of luck at the start. The luck to fill a niche market with the codecs on top of a popular Ubuntu base but also the luck to find talented people in the very early days of Linux Mint, who helped the project and formed the core and a wonderful ambiance within the community. After that it was the fast pace and the amount of development done on Linux Mint. We pushed a lot of innovations and offered features no other operating systems had at the time. Some are still unique to Linux Mint and with each new release we try to push harder on the development and to offer new use cases and simplify the most common ones. An other element, at first due to the small size of our community and nowadays due to our light structures and the way we work, is the quality of the feedback we get from our community and the dialogue we have with its members. We try to listen to our users as much as possible and to communicate and justify our decisions and what lead to them. I'm personally easily reachable and I like to stay close to the user base, that's very important I think and although it gets harder as the community gets bigger this is what makes all the difference. So we're constantly trying to improve the communication between the team and the community.

Erlik: I see that a lot of work is done on the 64 bits edition of Linux Mint. Do you thing that 64 bits is ready for the average user?

Clem: Yes. There were a few incompatibilities but it's getting to a stage now where our x64 edition is almost as stable as the main one.

Erlik: One of the disadvantage of Linux Mint versus Ubuntu is the lack of an easy "push button" way to upgrade to the next Mint release, what is the status of the work on that?

It's funny you say that. I commented on your review of Linux Mint 7 and talked about this: http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=900

It's a valid point though. The upgrade is as risky on Mint as it is on Ubuntu, but Ubuntu made it much easier than we did. They need to work on making it safer and so do we. As for the ease of use, I'm adding this to the Linux Mint 8 roadmap, I think we can merge the features of the upgrader within mintUpdate and offer something similar than Ubuntu. That's easily achievable and you should see improvements in the next release. My worry when it comes to upgrading isn't how easy it is though, it's to be able to guarantee a safe result ... and this is where both Ubuntu and Linux Mint need to work really hard.

Erlik: Unlike a lot of other big distributions Mint does not have a big company offering behind it and is more of a community effort. Do you intend to keep it that way or do you want to develop a professional support structure for Linux Mint?

Clem: Ideally I would like Linux Mint to be financed by the community and through advertising so that we, developers, don't have to spend time on anything else than improving it. Most distributions provide a free desktop and rely on professional support to finance their activity. The problem with that model is that some of them get extremely focused on the support activity, that this takes most of their resources and that they're left with very little time to innovate.

Having said that, I would also like Linux Mint to represent a viable alternative for companies and so for this I will try to develop a structure that will allow us to offer adequate support. The main thing of course is not to rely on it too much financially and not to let it become our main point of focus.

Linux is a hobby to many of us and we're driven by passion. We need money of course to be able to work on it full time but it's pushing the development and the innovation that makes it interesting. If tomorrow our activity is solely devoted to maintaining an income then our work won't be very interesting. Professional support needs to become available, we need to work on this and get to the point where we can offer a solution, we will definitely generate an income out of it but it needs to remain something extra, the main thing here being the distribution itself.

So far we got here with 5 or 6 people working a few hours every day. If we get enough support within the community to start making people quit and to hire them full time, just for us, fully focused on improving Linux Mint, guess how far we can go. With the support I got from the sponsors and donors I already managed to free up 3 months of my time this year and I hope I'll be able to demonstrate how much of a difference this can make on the upcoming release.

Erlik: Thank you very much for this interview Clem, and continue the good work.