First off I'd like to say a massive thank you to the people involved in developing Mint. It is a fantastic OS. I have always admired the Linux community and had attempted to get into using Ubuntu a couple of years ago, in honesty I found it rather frustrating and it seemed to get worse with updates. I ditched it and returned to windoze once they introduced the Unity desktop. I am quite big on aesthetics as well as functionality, and I found Unity neither aesthetically pleasing nor what I wanted in terms of functionality. Not a slight on the Ubuntu community, they do amazing work but I preferred windows 7 to my old Ubuntu setup. Anyways about a week ago I stumbled across Mint and after reading a bit about it I decided to give dual boot another try. Installed it easily, virtually perfect out of the box (couple of minor sound/video problems but they were easily solved). Wifi card worked without any fuss. The packages that are pre-installed are a brilliant selection, everything needed for everyday PC use is included. And aesthetically, after some messing around trying to understand themes and eventually learning about Cinnamon and installing that, it looks brilliant. I haven't booted into windows at all since I installed Mint and I don't see any reason why I ever will again (apart from perhaps to use a couple of specialist programs, but the main one that I use is about to have a linux version released anyway).
There is something very pleasing to me about the Linux/FOSS mentality. It's about something other than making money, it is about people just getting together and doing things, then sharing the things for the sake of sharing as opposed to corporate greed. That's not to say that I disagree with all software developers who charge for their products, many of them are fantastic and well worth the money... but I love the whole "here have this, do what you want with it... no money required, I hope you enjoy it and feel free to ask for help" way of doing things. No secrets, no closed source (which I assume has backdoors built into it), just great software for the sake of great software.
My only problem (or is it opportunity) is that most of the time when I try to read about linux I eventually run into what at this stage looks like gibberish, lol... but no doubt that will change as I become more fluent in Linuxese
So yeah, bit of a rant about how awesome Mint is, lol. Thanks again to the developers and hello from sunny Scotland
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