You can select from a couple of boring, almost identical themes.

Notice that the Mint menu, the panels, and the Gnome shell menu fail to respect the color scheme and appearance of the selected theme.

Mint 12 retains several of its better attributes such as the unique software manager.

As with previous versions of Mint, Mint 12 can play DVDs right out of the box. That and bundling useful software other Linux distros refused to was helping to grow the popularity of Mint.

A few odd bugs: When I inserted a DVD, there were TWO popup windows that wanted to know what I wanted to do with the DVD. This screen shot is brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.

A number of help files were missing. And the desktop itself doesn't seem to have any help options.

And as usual, even though it bundles LibreOfice, it STILL doesn't put document templates in the template menu.

Another stupid little bug I noticed, is that the screen shot utility now saves screen shots with a time stamp in the default file name. Which would be great if A: It didn't also incorrectly use 24 hour time instead of the normal 12-hour time, and B: Colons are invalid characters to use in filenames on some very common file systems.

Shutting down Mint Linux.

The options to shut down is not in the Mint menu, but rather the user options menu at the top right..

Note that the shutdown menu and other panel menus fail to use the selected theme/color scheme.

So in conclusion, Mint 12 comes across as an incomplete and inconsistent environment, largely due to the changes in Gnome.