adanedhel728 wrote:Okay, admittedly, I've read hardly any of this thread, but I'm afraid I don't really have the time right now, and I did have a few thoughts about this. Maybe some of this has already been said, and maybe some people would disagree with some of the things that I think.
First of all, Mint is a very good selection for a first time user. It's generally pretty stable and smooth, and very easy to use. Not to mention very customizable (which is the main reason why I use it). Also, a lot of stuff comes with it by default (like codecs, Flash, Java, etc.) that you have to spend time trying to figure out how to activate if you're using a different distro.
Secondly, and I think a lot of people would disagree with this, I say avoid Wine as much as possible. I must give the developers credit for doing something that I imagine must have been very difficult, but that doesn't really change the fact that Wine just, in general, doesn't really work very well. And it can be very aggravating. Better to keep VirtualBox with a Windows VM installed instead, I think, but even better than that is to find an open-source alternative, even if it takes some getting used to. But there are some exceptions; I use the [url=http://www.iheartubuntu.com/2012/11/ppa-for-netflix-desktop-app.html]Netflix hack[/url] all the time, which uses Wine, and it works surprisingly well.
Thirdly, be aware that, more often than not, if it works in Ubuntu then it works in Mint. Say, for example, if you want to install Dropbox from the website instead of through Synaptic. You can get the .deb file that's designed for Ubuntu and it will work fine. And the previous link I just gave is meant for Ubuntu, but it works fine in Mint. But there are still some differences, especially in the interface, since Mint doesn't use Unity.
Fourthly (almost done), I'm guessing that the OP has already started using Mint, but in case someone else comes along and sees this, I would suggest first trying it out in VirtualBox rather than through a LiveCD. LiveCDs are pretty slow, and I think give a bad experience overall when compared to the way the OS will work after it's installed. So, if you really want to know how the OS will operate, you'll get more out of a virtual machine, and you'll even be able to see how the install process works, as well as customizing the desktop and installing software.
Fifthly and finally, this is less true with Mint than other distros, but I've learned that I need to be very patient with Linux troubleshooting sometimes. Honestly, I think that Linux's general downfall is that it's pretty rare that something goes right on the first try. Many, many programs that I install require some kind of troubleshooting before I can get them working, including the OS itself. Weird, cryptic error messages come up, video players go black, and may God show grace upon you if you need a program that can only be installed by compiling from source, because I've almost never been able to get that to work. [url=http://xkcd.com/963/]Troubleshooting in Linux can be a nightmare[/url]. Thankfully, this is one reason why I like Mint and Ubuntu; this happens a lot less often when I'm using them. This also seems, in my experience, to get better through the passage of time. But it does happen.
Oh, one more thing that I thought of. Some people might not be too happy about me saying this last thing, but one terminal command that I find myself using quite a bit lately is "sudo caja." (Caja is the default file manager for MATE, but you can replace it with any file manager you want. When I was using Ubuntu with Gnome 2, for example, it was "sudo nautilus.") Be very careful when you're doing this, though, because what it does is open a graphical file explorer in superuser mode, so you can change anything on your system. Meaning you could potentially destroy anything on your system. I imagine that might seem very off-the-wall, but it's very handy for changing settings that can only be changed with superuser mode.
Thank you for taking the time.
The last thing though;
If you cant change the files in the terminal you should probably NOT try to change them through superuser GUI file manager.