To the knowledge of some of my teammates here at eGroup, I decided to take a challenge of running nothing but Linux Mint 14 on my MacBook Air for the entire month of February. The goal was to have it be non-disruptive or have impact on my ability to do my job, deliver service for our customers, and continue any in the field work, as is usually the case.

After (now almost 40 days), I'm proud to say that I have succeeded, and it wasn't nearly as hard as I was originally expecting it to be. To start with, Linux Mint is based off of Ubuntu, which I've used on and off for a few years now. It's kind of the new "hot and trendy" Linux distro for its ease of use, wide device support, and the options it provides for its desktop environment.

While some strongly dislike the Unity interface on Ubuntu, I have no issues with it. But I will say the Cinnamon experience on Linux Mint 14 was much more enjoyable-- from the smoothness of the "Start menu" to the hot corners I now find myself addicted to, it was a pleasurable computing experience.

To avoid impact on my ability to do my job, I leveraged the Citrix Receiver to hit our internal Citrix XenApp deployment for all Office application needs, including and especially Outlook, as well as some of our other Windows-native applications. I've used my own device for work for almost 2 years now (I really live the BYOD dream), and having applications and desktops delivered to my preference of device is very liberating.

On the client side, offline and accessible locally, I found that almost every one of the "really nice to have" applications was available for debian-based Linux distributions (of which Ubuntu and Mint are), including Skype and Spotify. For anything else, the use of the free "Wine" Windows app emulation layer did the trick.

While onsite with customers, simply connecting to their servers via RDP provided me access to any systems that did not have tools available for Linux clients.

Most of those I told asked me "why are you trying that?", and the answer is simple: I believe it will become a valuable skill set to have. I believe, and have shared this belief with my teammates, that Linux, in all of its distributions, will continue to grow in popularity, riding on the back of "cloud computing". Would