Coming from a university background and having worked at Sun (now Oracle), I've never been a Windows or Mac user but have been running various Solaris and Linux desktops since "forever". My primary desktop at home was a bit old and needed replacement so I got a new one. This retailer builds their own PCs from components, and I could select more memory and a bigger disk, and to my surprise I could even unselect Windows
to avoid paying Micro$oft.Then it was time to select OS. The old one was running OpenSolaris and I could upgrade to Solaris 11 but I knew that would be somewhat limiting, e.g. I would not be able to upgrade Opera. My second desktop runs Fedora 13 and I have also been through earlier Fedora's so I decided to go for Fedora 18 beta. I wanted 18, not 17 since 18 includes MATE and I don't want to break with my Gnome 2 habits
But, installation was very buggy (manual partitioning of the SSD failed in 3 different ways), and when I finally got though and logged in, there was no desktop!
Just a gray background and a minimalistic menu which was also partly broken. So, next choice was Mint 14.1 MATE and that installed like a charm. 
I made one change post-install, and that was to move /tmp to tmpfs, makes sense when you have 16 Gb of RAM but you're not sure what to use it all for.... Installation was done Jan 1, and on Jan 5 I had moved stuff over and my new box took over as primary desktop.Looking at some of the forum posts here, I'm a bit surprised how many use the desktop tool for managing files and such, I guess many come from a Windows background. I know how to chmod a file in my terminal window to make it executable, I have no idea what GUI tool to use.
I even installed tcsh and made that my login shell, been using it since even before bash was available....
