Hello Mint Community! I have been dabbling with Linux since High School in the late 90s starting with Red Hat. When I experienced the beauty of KDE, and the customization of Gnome, compared to vanilla Windows 95/98 and early MacOS I'd grown up with, I was always ready to convert. Once I had my own computer, I'd install this distro, or that one, always hoping it would be a functional replacement for Windows. I went through countless distros over the years, SUSE, Lindows/Linspire, Fedora, Gentoo, Crunchbang, DSL, Mandriva, Ubuntu, etc, and while I had fun tinkering with then, I just couldn't justify switching. Either there were hardware support issues, lack of features, too steep a learning curve, or whatever, there was always something preventing me from making the switch. That changed when I got the Linux itch again and found Linux Mint, and I downloaded the latest version, LM 10 RC. I couldn't believe it. No hardware support issues, stability, gentle learning curve, and great community support.
https://youtu.be/ljku54x1GqA (video of my first LM installation)
That was six years ago, and I'm still chugging along with Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon, and loving it. I still try out new distros in VirtualBox and on a spare HDD, but nothing yet has given me any excuse to switch. Besides my own laptop, I installed Mint 18.1 XFCE on what my family considered a garbage computer that nobody used any more, an old Dell XP box with a Pentium D and 1GB of ram, and that once useless machine is zipping along as a YouTube/browser games/educational machine for my 8yo son, and now has many years more of life in it. Many thanks to Clem, the dev team, community contributors and the whole LM community, for the Linux Mint experience!
