I had a windows vista home basic box, in which I installed an SSD. It ran much faster than it had with a spinning drive, so great!
Then I found a windows 7 laptop in the trash (had a bad driver - once that was fixed, it "worked," as well as windows 7 ever "works.")
I hate windows 7 even more than I hate vista, so I figured, "what the hell?" and decided to install Linux.
I had used openSUSE in the past, on an older machine, but I found it slow and unreliable. When I tried it on this one, I never could get it to use the internal wireless card.
I tried puppy linux, and found that it worked okay, but it felt more like a toy than a serious system. (I do use puppy on an ancient thinkpad, but that's about all that machine can handle, anyway, and it's better than the stock windows ME that was on it.)
I tried Ubuntu, but I hate unity. I had great difficulty installing Fedora, and it felt like it was written for school children. Not nearly as configurable as Mint.
I tried Arch, Debian, antiX, Slackware, and a number of others, but none of them were what I wanted.
I had tried Mint in the past, but I'd had so many problems with it on my old machine that it took a while for me to get back to trying it.
Well, I got the newest distro, Olivia, and tried it on this discarded laptop... WOW what a difference! It installed almost automatically, and everything "Just Worked" right out of the box. Even the things that I never could get openSUSE to
find, much less configure.
After playing around with it (and breaking the system a couple times
) I found it to be the most user-friendly and configurable system I have EVER used, and I used to be heavily into tweaking windows. (Up until about XP, it did pretty much everything I wanted it to do, the way I wanted it to do it.)
Pretty soon, this became my primary system, and when I compared it to my vista machine, it was faster in nearly every way. (I still have to use windows because the army is in love with microsoft, and our email server requires internet explorer.)
Since it was so much faster, I used it to clone the vista SSD onto a regular drive, and after that was working in the vista box (which now runs about as fast as an arthritic tortoise) I stuck the SSD into this one and installed Qiana.
HO - LEE -
COW, is it FAST!
Power button to browsing the internet in about 15 seconds, and shutdown is less than 2. (And never makes me wait while it installs things.) Programs are open almost as soon as my finger comes off the mouse button.
I just had to use my windows box this morning, for army stuff, and it was excruciating. First, updated the anti-virus, which took about 10 minutes, because I haven't used it in weeks, then had to update windows, which failed. Then had to fix that problem. Then the update, which required no fewer than three restarts. An hour later, I started it up and timed it: four minutes from power button to browser. I did my thing, which went about as fast as the Linux box, once everything was open, and shut down. It is still installing yet ANOTHER update, five minutes after I clicked "shut down." (Well, when I started writing this post. It finally turned off. When I turned it on again, it "configured" for over a minute before going into its regular startup sequence. Total startup time: 6 minutes.)
I do have a couple of VirtualBox windows installations, and they run under Linux almost as fast as the vista box, but they have no anti-virus or other software. Just IE, and I only ever use them to get email and run the occasional program from an army disc. (I usually delete the virtual machine after use, in case it has somehow managed to pick up a virus, and get a new copy from my external drive. Faster and easier than all the endless updating.)
As long as mint doesn't do something stupid (like going to unity and not even offering an easy alternative) I'm going to be using it for a long time to come.
Thanks, guys, and keep up the good work!
