After +10 years of Windows, I say NO MORE!

[DrHu]

After years of agony and expensive upgrades, and "hotfixes" and Knowledge Base Articles about 0x000.....xF Errors, I am glad to have come to Linux Mint...

Welcome to freedom! day
--almost sounds like tax freedom day; and we all know that that means..

If you have been in the trenches with Windows, you know the problems it causes, as you have recognized
--that doesn't stop everyone (well at least the 90++ %) that support, sell and use them, from recommending a continuing up-sell of that product line..
Heh!, that's just good business..; going offshore only proves how good it can be..

[rhY]

Linux Mint is the bomb.com. No doubt about it. And Virtualbox is AWESOME under it. Agreed! Try *edit in virtual box. Then you can have Windows 7 (and fast!) on one side of your compiz cube. I do this all the time. Friends come over, and say, "Woah! You're on Windows 7 already!" And I laugh, and spin the cube to XP (with Zsnes running at full speed), and say, "Nope, I'm on Linux Mint. It's much better than any version of Windows, though I can have them too, obviously..."

At that point I have had no response. Literally, people don't know how to take it.

*Edit by Husse - no references to pirated software please

[DennisMiller]

This is my first post... I am about 72 hours into learning Mint and with the help of a friend, liking more and more of what I see. I do have a minor setup problem I'll post elsewhere, but when I saw the title of this thread, I just knew it was the right place to put my first post.

I was driven to Mint as a solution having suffered such a bad Trojan Horse on my desktop machine that it took a really good computer consultant buddy 12 hours to get rid of it. I don't ever intend to suffer through that again, much less put my friend through having to help me to the extent he did. Thank God for true friends like that, but I now owe him big time.

My laptop is now on Mint. My desktop is still on XP Pro, but will be on Mint as soon as we fix the little internet connection problem with the laptop. As simple a user as I am, I wish I had done this YEARS ago!!!

Now, where's the emoticon for a happy camper?

Windows is the biggest virus on any computer.

[DrHu]

... And if you may kindly suggest books/online tutorials/etc to start learning Linux..

THe best I could suggest is

• Get used to the desktop operations
  --how to install/remove software
• Read some general guides and the distribution specific manual for concepts
  http://www.linuxnewbieguide.org/
  http://www.linux.org/lessons/beginner/index.html
  http://www.justlinux.com/
• FSH (Linux File System Hierarchy )
  http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.pdf
  http://www.garfnet.org.uk/joomla/index. ... &Itemid=58
  http://www.gaudisite.nl/LinuxVisualizationPaper.pdf
• Comparison with windows
  --which Linux applications can be considered equivalents; some will never likely be provided like Adobe Photoshop, but there always options
  http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Lin ... s_software
  http://www.libervis.com/wiki/index.php? ... t_Software
  --a slightly nicer looking list

The Internet is just one big search engine, plenty of areas that can be investigated..
Anything you want to know, you can find out..

So I would suggest this; in order to understand your computer, not just Linux but any OS

• Understand the computer
  --enough to know about some of its parts; mainboard/motherboard, graphic, network, hard drive, BIOS
• Understand Linux FSH (File System Hierarchy)
• Understand file and directory (folder permissions)
  --know why root is not the same as user
  it used to be mixed in under older windows OS (win9x, winXP@home), not so any longer, Vista, win7?
• Know something about the Linux boot process and daemons/services
  --foreground, background tasks
• Know something about the shell (Terminal, console) and the normal bash shell

[rhY]

It's kind of too bad Windows 7 came out so soon. Another couple of months of Vista, and there would be another couple million Mint users. But still Mint is still better than even *edit, which is MUCH better than the stock release. Welcome to freedom!

*Edit by Husse - no references to pirated software please