after one year on Linux Mint 19.2 Xfce I decided to finally register. Not because I have any problems, but becaus I hope I perhaps can help some others who so far have not been quite that lucky as me
However, I'm not an IT guy in any way, shape or form, just some ordinary dude who has managed his way into Linux.
Here my experiences as short as possible:
I started in late 2018 by testing out several live ISOs on my Windows 7 PC. Since it has only 4 GB of ram and a dual-core CPU, I decided to go with the Xfce desktop right away. Linux Mint was my first choice, followed by Xubuntu and MX Linux. Then I went a bigger round along the block, trying out Flagship Ubuntu and Linux Mint Cinnamon among some other Distros. On this journey with dozens of live sessions, I found out that my old Asus mobo wouldn't accept any kind of Linux with Kernel version above 4.15 with systemd involved. MX Linux, which boots without systemd, ran even with Kernel 4.19, but later MX versions with that same Kernel soon would refuse to boot in a regular way.
So when the time came to finally settle on a distro in February 2020, it was Linux Mint 19.2, the last version still featuring the 4.15 Kernel - and so far it hasn't let me down.
However, before I installed Linux Mint Xfce on my trusty old machine, I bought a brand new Windows 10 Laptop with slightly better specs for mainstream compatibility. Good enough for some basic virtualization (it runs Windows 10 Pro), so I added virtualbox and the very first Linux distro I ever installed - albeit in a vritual machine - was Fedora Cinnamon. I always wanted to try out that one, too, and finally was able to. The usual Fedora shenannigans with RPM Fusion and Codecs were realyy no big deal, but I had informed myself beforehand. Since that time I have been installing several other distros, and I boot my Laptop about once a week for running VMs and doing some other stuff, leaving my now Linux Mint machine as my daily driver.
Attached you will find a scaled-down screenshot of my current layout and theming. I change the wallpaper quite a lot, and when I feel it looks better, I change themes and icons as well to match - including custom-colorized menu icons.
Greetings from Germany!
