I'm becoming a technology curmudgeon. For as long as I can remember I've used a [traditional window manager][1] on Linux. Maybe I'm just stuck in my ways but I'm convinced that the combination of Focus Follows Mouse (with a 450ms auto-raise delay), the [ThinkPad TrackPoint][2], and middle-click scrolling is the most efficient way to navigate windows. So Ubuntu's neglect of that paradigm in favor of [something that feels too much like my wife's Mac][3] has caused me to seek greener pastures.

It seems that all of the cool kids are switching from Ubuntu to Linux Mint. So I decided to give [Linux Mint 16 with Cinnamon][4] a try. It took some tweaking but now I'm pretty happy with the setup. I've switched from the "[can't let go of the past][5]" desktop environment to the "[I'm not dead yet][6]" one. Besides some minor UI annoyances the only big downside seems to be worse battery life.

As with all Linux distributions I had to make some changes to the default system. For my future reference and possibly for others, here are the changes I made:

  * To install Chrome I created `/etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list` containing: ```bash
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main
```
    
    And then installed the key:
    
    ```bash
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys A040830F7FAC5991
```

  * Out-of-the-box dnsmasq completely breaks things when connecting to Wifi networks that muck with DNS so I [disabled dnsmasq][7] and now networking works great. 
  * There is a bunch of unneeded cruft which I removed: ```bash
sudo apt-get remove banshee brasero tomboy vlc xchat casper modemmanager simple-scan mintnanny mintbackup mintupdate sox
```

  * I had to install some other stuff: ```bash
sudo apt-get install xcursor-themes powertop vim skype git trash-cli
```

  * Also I [setup git to use the Gnome Keyring][8] so things are copacetic with GitHub's 2-factor auth.

Now I can happily continue with my old-school ways.

 [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacity
 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick
 [3]: http://unity.ubuntu.com/
 [4]: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2477
 [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Fallback
 [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_(user_interface)
 [7]: http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-disable-dnsmasq-in-ubuntu-12-04precise.html
 [8]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13385690/how-to-use-git-with-gnome-keyring-integration