Quoting Justin Krejci <jus at krytosvirus.com>:

> I've been using Linux Mint since I was forced off of Ubuntu by having no
> interest in using Unity or Gnome3 for my desktop experience. For a
> release or two on Ubunutu I was able to use "fallback mode" on the
> desktop environment and it would give me Gnome2 but they eventually
> pulled that out entirely so I tried a bunch of distros (including
> Kubuntu) and settled on Mint with Mate to keep the same general
> look/feel as gnome2 and since it is Ubuntu based I have the same tools
> and packages generally available. So I've been trucking along for a
> while and things generally just work. I am long past the time of wanting
> to play around and tinker with every little thing so there is not much
> excitement for me there anymore to explore a distro. So when things just
> work, that is one of my major measures of success. When things don't
> work and it takes very little time/effort to fix, that is also pretty
> fantastic in my eyes.
>
> I just recently upgraded my workstation from Linux Mint 15 (MATE 64-bit)
> to Linux Mint 17 (MATE 64-bit) so I can be on the LTS release. The
> upgrade went pretty smooth, having multiple hard drives and partitions I
> was able to maintain access to my previous Mint 15 install while keeping
> /home identical across both. Turns out I did not need bother with that
> as everything worked out well. I only really needed to re-install the
> apps that I use, for which the main ones I keep a list on a wiki page as
> well as notes and other useful hints to remind myself on certain /etc/
> config file settings, iptables rules, etc.
>
> After running for a couple of weeks or maybe it's been a month I decided
> to do a similar upgrade for my laptop but I did not intend to maintain
> the original Mint 15 "/" partition and just overwrite it due to disk
> space constraints. I also keep /home on a separate partition so I did
> not have to worry about that data or the multitude of user-specific
> settings. I can't believe how smooth the upgrade process was. Absolutely
> no glitches or issues. When I booted up my desktop screen looked exactly
> the same as before (thanks to /home being untouched); I just needed to
> go through the same re-install apps process and re-work a few /etc
> config files again. Now when I say "upgrade" I mean a fresh install in
> both cases of my $dayjob workstation and my laptop.
>
> I don't know what else to say but for normal desktop power-user use, I
> have basically nothing to complain about when it comes to Mint. Also a
> few months back I decided to give back and setup a public Mint mirror at
> $dayjob. So now I have even have local LAN access to packages, updates,
> ISOs, etc for Mint (as well as Ubuntu and CentOS).
>
> In any case I give a +1 for Mint all the way.

Thanks, Justin.

It kinda sucks for me that to this day I have not been able to get  
over Gentoo since this is what I learned on.

I've had good success with Fedora as a desktop, but it doesn't have  
the newest packages that I read people are using to play video games  
with or certain packages for audio/video playback.

I know a lot of people have switched to Arch from Gentoo, and it may  
be a pretty cool distro, but I could never warm up to it and stopped  
using it.

For the time being I guess I will continue using Fedora as a desktop  
and FreeBSD for certain server applications.

But I should at least consider looking Mint.

SDA-