Mint is somewhat of a flagship to win over Windows users. This is the distro that will give you all the software and all the features you need and you will have no trouble with installing it. |
When it comes to using it, you can chose a desktop environment that will look pretty much like Windows 7 so you will feel more at home than with Windows 8. Mint 15 has all the goodies like Libreoffice - Yes you can use your Excel spreadsheets directly in calc and you will not notice much of a difference. The Libreoffice suite is very compatible with MS-Office files. Gimp is there and I prefer it over photoshop. A first-timer coming from Windows will want to install the Cinnamon desktop environment while many Linux users prefer the Mate environment that has set out to look more like Gnome2. You can install over 60000 apps so you can have all you want - and set it up according to your needs. And Java and Flash works out of the box. | For experienced Linux users Mint is an equally good alternative and it comes with many DE's that gives them the options to set it up according to their preferences. Mint is a fork of Ubuntu without the Unity DE which was unpopular enough to put Ubuntu two places down on the Distrowatch popularity list. MintSources is an improved way of handling personal packages archives (PPA) compared to Ubuntu's "Software Sources" tool. Mint 15 also lets you easily set up your repos and conducts quick speed tests for you so that you can pick the fastest. Mint 15 also introduces a driver manager for proprietary drivers from NVIDIA and AMD - the gamers will love it. .. And the others won't need it. It looks like Mint 15 is consolidating it's position as the distro to recommend at least to newcomers. Experienced Linux people might want even newer software and could consider the quite user friendly Arch fork; Manjaro which uses the Mint installer. |