It's been a relatively long time since the Release Candidate arrived, but the final release of Linux Mint 13 Xfce is now available.

The release on Saturday will be good news to those who are looking for a solid, stable alternative to the Gnome and KDE desktops, but to describe it only in those terms would not do it justice. Xfce is a very good desktop itself, and although it is generally thought of as a 'lightweight and fast' alternative, in this distribution it has been configured as a fully-loaded system, essentially the same as the Mint Gnome and KDE versions.

The distribution ISO image is approximately 800MB, which is too large to fit on a CD, so it would have to be burned to a DVD. A better option, in my opinion, is to install from USB flash media. If you have a running Linux system already, you can simply dd the image to a USB stick, or you can use the unetbootin utility to create a bootable USB stick from it.

Either way, once you boot the live image you can run the mintInstall utility to install to your hard drive. The installation process will take about a quarter of an hour: once that is finished you can reboot, log in via the MDM (Mint Display Manager, which replaces the normal GDM or Ubuntu LightDM) and you will get this desktop (pictured).

This should be a very familiar-looking desktop to most Linux users (and Windows users, for that matter) with desktop icons to access your home directory (folder) and the overall file system, and if you have other partitions on your hard drive, they will have icons on the desktop by default at this point also. Mine looks a bit cluttered here because I have a lot of partitions for a lot of different Linux distributions on my systems.