Mint is a distro - German of course - that has a wonderful appeal about it, although not a Ferrari it certainly looks as good as one, perhaps a better analogy would be a BMW, a masterpiece of German engineering thats Mint not the car. Most Linux distro's are derivatives and Mint is no exception it is Debian based ie "Ubuntu", one of Ubuntu criticisms is that whilst it works very well, is stable and reliable it just does not have great looks. Mint does have looks and really good one at that, it has a certain wow factor which appeals to many, it also has many of the features from the box that many spend time and effort to install on other flavours.
ubuntustudio-8.04-beta-alternate-amd64.iso
Live DVD and Installation on one 1Gb disk

FlightGear review.
First, I have to say I don't as a general rule play games on computers; it's not my thing, but as I was requested to evaluate FlightGear, I'll do my best to give a fair impression of what I found.