Last night, I was investigating some alternative operating systems to the instability I have experienced with Ubuntu 12.10 on my Lenovo ThinkPad X230. Because of virtualization software, I need some form of Linux that works well with Intel HD 4000 graphics and is pretty stable. I installed Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon two days ago on my X230 and I am somewhat impressed. On a forum post, I discovered something even more interesting.

Like Linux Mint 14, quite a few other distros are based on a Ubuntu core. One I had never heard of before is elementary OS.

The above screenshot of a Pantheon desktop sure looks like what I like in Apple's OS X. The dock at the bottom and menubar at the top is great. I'm tired of the Windows-modeled taskbar at the bottom that KDE, Cinnamon, and most other desktop environments employ. I also just discovered that version 4.10 of Xfce appears to have some similarities to OS X as well.

I am put off somewhat by elementary OS Luna's status as Beta 1. There still appears to be some work to do to get to a stable release but once it does, elementary OS looks like it might be a very attractive option. If elementary OS interests you, now is a great time to get involved.