What made you switch to Linux Mint?

[Spearmint2]

I know clem said that KDE 5 will be the default DE in Linux Mint 18 Sarah KDE version, but I hope KDE 4 will be available in the repos.

When you see it will be phased out, you can order the repos on disc and have it available. Not sure if you'd only go for Mint repos or also include Ubuntu repos. OSdisc.com site sells them, but I'd wait for the most up to date version just before the ending of the current LTS.



Mint 32 bit for 17.3

Mint 64 bit for 17.3

Unbuntu repo for 32 bit version of 14.04

Ubuntu repo 64 bit version for 14.04 version

I think just the Mint repo would be enough, since it's probably the Ubuntu repo with the added stuff for mint, being 3-4 GB larger in size.

[SOCRATE_MMXII]

@Spearmint2: Thanks a lot.

[sphyrth]

Switching OUT of Windows:
To sum up, XP was the reason I was sticking to Windows.
Microsoft (And April 2014) was the primary reason I had to abandon ship.

Switching to MINT (Yeah, picking one distro isn't that easy, but not that difficult either):
1. Having a balance Stability and Bleeding Edge. (Debian-based releases)
2. Windows Familiar UI (Ubuntu's UI is Mac-like, and the Unity Desktop was already the default).
3. Distrowatch Popularity (Yeah, it's a flawed standard. Go ahead and call me subjective).

[Dngrsone]

Distrowatch is a good way to shop, IMPO... popularity is a pretty decent indicator in the Linux world of what works and what doesn't since there's little to no advertising to skew the data.

[mukmaster]

I was interested in Linux for a long time, and tinkered with it in the past several times, though not always with success.
Then some 6 year ago I tried Mint for the first time, and instantly was convinced by how 'correct' and unbloated the system was. It stayed out of the way and for me it was very productive. At that time I dual booted with winXP, and it seemed I was using winXP less and less, because for me there was a decreasing need to use winXP (in the end it was just for one particular application). At that time a very annoying phenomenon started to appear every time I used winXP:
Before I could use the application which I booted winXP for, I had to wait until LOTS of updates were installed. This could take up to half an hour. Then at last I could start to work. Typically I would then work on a file which I would later work even more under Linux, so then had to reboot before I could resume the work. As you probably might suspect then the following happened: New updates were donloaded in the time I was working and before rebooting these were going to be installed.. again a lot of waiting. Of course this would mean the next time I would use winXP aigain I would have to wait 'forever' before I could start working.
Of course this was the result of using winXP so sparsely that on every boot there were lots of updates available. Now I could of course switched off the updates entirely, but that would not be a wise thing to do (especially with Windows..).
So what I did was put some extra afford in it and made the application work under WINE. After that I never booted windows again. This is now 4 years ago

Also I have tried a lot of other distros just as a hobby, most notably Debian, Suse, Ubuntu and Arch. They all have good sides, but for every day use LinuxMint is IMHO the best. At home I use two machines, this one (sending this message) runs Mint 17.3 KDE and the other runs Arch. My wife uses LinuxMint 17.3 cinnamon.

[CuriousChameleon]

My significant other was working on an important paper for graduate school. This paper was due in an hour. Windows got pushy about an update. She missed her deadline.
Once the dust had settled, I suggested Mint since the cinnamon interface is intuitive for someone coming from Windows, and set her up with a Mint dual-boot.
Well, it's now two months later, and the Windows partition is yet to see any more action.

[buzz73]

We've experienced difficulties of late using Windows XP Pro on our home desktop, with websites and e-mail not working smoothly. Win7 Pro wouldn't install due to an incompatible motherboard issue. I found Ubuntu 14.04 too unstable and slow for my old system. I read up on MINT 17.3 Xfce, tried it on LiveCD, and have now set it up on two older systems. For me, it has been the most stable OS I've used since my old Apple //e.

[Jonnyboy]

I switched to linux Mint because I was getting fed up with Windows 8.1. Not so much of Microsoft policies, but it does contribute a lot to my decision, my main problem was that every time I booted up Windows 8.1 the hard drive would go crazy. Every time the activity was up at 100% after a cold boot. I have no idea what was causing it. And it was only during 5-8 minutes after a cold boot. And every single time. So I figured if it's gonna do that every time I boot my computer the hard drive will probably die after a very short time. Constant disk access. What is it doing when it needs full disk access? And because my computer is on a wooden desk the drive noise is very loud.

Since installing Mint it no longer does that. Even the processor is quiet with Mint, as it was much louder with 8.1. Now you barely hear the computer.

And I have to say Mint has been very nice to me since installing it on the weekend. Very user-freindly, and it has everything you ever need. With Ubuntu you need much more configuring, I haven't done anything since installing it, except change the theme and apply all updates, and of course change the mirror to the closest one.

[thobin]

Two years ago after the XP decline, I had to do a nuke and reload, and for the life of me I couldn't get it to update I knew it was going to happen I just figured that I could get past it. Well after a week of fighting XP was up and running, thoroughly frustrated, I started to think there has to be a better way. I knew a few guys that have used, or use Linux so I started to ask around and most recommended Ubuntu or Fedora but told me I should check out the distros for my self. A few days on google I decided to give Mint a try and here I am. My two boys now use it and I have deleted Winsuck from off my drive. I never though it could be this easy, hardest thing was to get out of the Windows way of thinking once you get that it is smooth sailing.


TA

[thom_A]

The switch to Linux is out of necessity for most people.

Old computers need new OSes that don't cost a cent. There are millions of them with XP's and Vistas that are no longer supported. It's amazing that these so-called old computers are still very much usable. And that is where Linux Mint shines. It's plug and play and most drivers are available.

[samriggs]

I been with mint since I think 2011, I only left when they got rid of the tablet support for wacom or was working on it as I need that for my work, it's back and working good so I am back. (well the graphical part needs some work compared to gnome 3 but it works good enough for my purpose.)
I tried a bunch of distros, hate unity an not a fan of gnome 3 tablet look.
I absolutely love arch though as much as mint, but for a workstation I have to go with mint, it allows me to mess up my desktop and if it isn't cinnamon then it has to be xfce for me because of that one reason.
But the difference between arch and mint for me is everything works out of the box for me with mint, arch flies but there is some things I can't use or have to fork certain things to force them to work, such as intel xdk which I use for my html5 stuff they have a aur version but I had to change a dependency for a lib and create a fake gtk2 dummy package to get it to even load (can't be bothered I just need it to work), my scanner I need to load in gimpers it doesn't in arch but I am sure I can find a way if I had time as it doesn't use sane (which I don't) plus a few other issues, BUT I love arch, the speed and the ability to make it what I want with no bloat, so for surfing its arch, for working it's mint because it just works without spending hours figuring out how to get certain programs to work correctly that I need.
Clem and the team actually listen to users and do a great job with a small team and now they have tablet support again I'm be back to stay.
Plus I have fun making mdm themes in my spare time, it's a fun distraction.
and I wouldn't use windows if you paid me to, I just hate it period.

[JChristensen]

In a word: Windows. I'm a long-time Windows user, for work and at home, and am pretty good with it. I currently have Windows 8.1 and it's become nearly unbearable. It's so inefficient and quirky, and updates seem to take forever. The typical time to update my system (and it's no slouch, a reasonably current i7 machine) is 15-20 minutes until it's usable again, including the almost unavoidable reboot. I currently have Mint on an older XP-era machine and updates might take two minutes and never a reboot. My Mint machine does certain things several times faster than I can do them on the much newer Windows machine.

Add to this all the data collection that Microsoft is doing now and it's very difficult to feel good about Windows or Microsoft. And let's not forget that terrible "Get Windows 10" adware/malware from Microsoft that I had to rip out by the roots. People come to me frequently for computer advice and I'm telling them not to upgrade to Windows 10. Also I may have lost a couple friends because I keep telling them how great Linux is

More than anything, I like the Linux philosophy and that it's open-source. William E. Shotts, Jr. said it very well in the introduction to his book, The Linux Command Line, http://www.linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php.

[Thaeri]

I had been using Ubuntu for quite a long time, but when they made the switch to Unity I absolutely hated it, and even if it got more polished after a while I still didn't like it. It didn't exactly help that my laptop was a MacBook Pro and that I had a similar but much less cluttered desktop environment there, making Unity's shortcomings stand out even more.

One of the things I used to love about Ubuntu was the old GNOME 2 desktop, so when the desktop version of the last LTS release with it wasn't to be supported much longer, I begun shopping around for a distro that had at least something similar, and hit the jackpot with Mint and MATE


Edit: I still dualboot with Windows, mostly because I want to stay in touch with it in case I have to use it somewhere else, and I have a couple of games that won't run smoothly using Wine or similar. But since I don't play much, I boot it up maybe once or twice a month, and that's plenty enough considering how frustrating it is to use...

My current laptop also runs Mint, but since it's an old Vista-era thing it had to be Xfce, which is quite nice too.

[Wremote]

Hi haven't really changed to Mint 17.3 yet. I have installed on my Windows 10 PC and use dual boot.
This version is getting much better. What I am looking for a Windows replacement, therefore a Windows look and feel is important. (I know long time Linux users will be disappointed with this statement, however I am not looking for a hobby).
I purchased my first computer in 1981 and I am a retired IT professional.

[xiph]

In a word - microsoft.

[Spearmint2]

Hi haven't really changed to Mint 17.3 yet. I have installed on my Windows 10 PC and use dual boot.
This version is getting much better. What I am looking for a Windows replacement, therefore a Windows look and feel is important. (I know long time Linux users will be disappointed with this statement, however I am not looking for a hobby).
I purchased my first computer in 1981 and I am a retired IT professional.

Zorin

[Mr.October]

Hi haven't really changed to Mint 17.3 yet. I have installed on my Windows 10 PC and use dual boot.
This version is getting much better. What I am looking for a Windows replacement, therefore a Windows look and feel is important. (I know long time Linux users will be disappointed with this statement, however I am not looking for a hobby).
I purchased my first computer in 1981 and I am a retired IT professional.

Maybe this is something for you then: http://zorinos.com/
You can choose which Windows version it resembles.


Edit: Oops, just saw Spearmint2 beat me to it. Great minds think alike.

[Portreve]

What made you switch to Linux Mint?

"It's the desktop environment, stupid."

I have had a fairly long history with Debian and Debian-based distros. While I've played with many others, at the end of the day, I just want to get my computing work done, and none of the others have really held up for me for very long.

Then, there was the Great Gnome 2 / 3 Schism, which largely decided things for me.

See, I've been a long-time Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X user, and while they've arguably made a lot of moves in Apple's UI direction, Microsoft has never really gotten it right. A desktop environment like KDE, which to my eyes has always been a kind of F/OSS community rip-off of the Windows UI, is not particularly elegant. It also really does not render fonts all that well, no matter how much tweaking with it you do. On the other hand, Gnome 1.x and 2.x have "ripped off" the Mac OS UI, and they've gotten the spirit of it right.

Well, that is up until Gnome 3, at which point they just went off the rails. There's a reason for the schism and for everyone trying to one-up each other within that space.

LM has always liked Gnome 2.x, so they held onto it as long as they could, then started developing their own thing so they could use current code and components. And at this point, Cinnamon is very respectable. There are some things I don't like about it that kind of keep it from being *as* polished as Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X's UIs, but it's still far-and-away the nicest looking and most intuitive UI in the GNU+Linux space.

[royphotog]

I just recently went to Linux Mint because I was not happy with the direction Microsoft was going with Windows 10. I don't like the file Windows system. In fact, I was perfectly happy with XP, but with all the issues of incompatibility with new software (Photoshop and Lightroom in my business) and it's security issues, I was looking for something different. Something I didn't need to spend money every couple of years just to run my software, I had tried Ubuntu but did not like the interface; Mint Cinnamon was much more to my liking.

I will still need to keep at least two windows machines to run the Adobe software* but I will move more and more to Linux in the coming year.

* I know there are alternatives, but I have used Adobe for many years and know it's workflow, and there are som many resources to find answers to Photoshop questions.

[MartyMint]

I switched when Ubuntu focused development primarily on Unity...and Gnome bloomed into Gnome 3.

Linux Mint had the most polished implementation of the MATE desktop at the time, so it immediately attracted me.