I'm the kind of guy who has had an on-and-off relationship with Linux. My last successful trial, or experiment, or whatever term you'd prefer to use, was when I had Ubuntu installed on my main desktop rig (dual-booting with Vista).
But just recently I cleaned up an old computer of mine, a box with a 1.0 GHz AMD CPU and 512 MB of RAM. I wiped the hard drive, put XP on it, and thought, "Hey, this is a great opportunity to try Linux again, and to see how well it runs on old hardware."
So I installed Mint. How did it run? Well, not all that bad, believe it or not. It was pretty close to being actually usable. Of course, it sure wasn't screaming, but then again you can't expect much nowadays from a PC that was originally built in the Windows 98 era.
Nevertheless, Mint seemed so nice that I thought it would be an injustice to not run it on more modern hardware. The GeForce 5200 graphics card in my old machine would barely let me use desktop effects and play games at the same time. Long story short, I now have it installed on my HP dual-core laptop, alongside Windows 7. This is much better!
So, I just wanted to say that I'm really having a fun time using Mint. Its quality is right up there with Ubuntu -- easy to install, easy to use, and nice to look at. In a word: refreshing. I look forward to broadening my Linux/Unix horizons even further. (By the way, my brother teaches a class in Linux at the local community college where I work. It's in our family blood, so we're trying to spread the word!)
And thank you all for letting me join your community here. It's great for an OS to have that kind of support.
Peace.
