zeogold: In all seriousness though, it's way too complicated and inconvenient for me to ever even try bothering to use.
And before you protest and give me a list of reasons why I should try, let me point out that there are a number of people here who can attest to the fact that I am utterly, absolutely, completely tech-illiterate to levels which most folks have never even seen before or knew was possible. Heck, a couple days ago, I accidentally managed to turn off my mouse (touchpad, actually). I didn't even know you COULD do that and everybody I talked to couldn't figure out what on earth I had to have done to get to that point. I almost was ready to send the laptop back to the tech company before I accidentally pressed escape and somehow that made it work again.
If you can use Windows, it should be no problem learning to use Mint :p My mother is probably even more tech illiterate than you and she uses it just fine... she actually has fewer problems than when we used Windows :)
(she's also managed to disable the touchpad multiple times, as well as other minor mishaps - e.g. she regularly manages to drag her wrist over the touchpad while typing things causing it to select and then overwrite what she's already written...)
Treasure: I personally bought in July a laptop with the explicit purpose of installing Linux Mint on it (after trying said distro in a VM for a while), as I figured dual-booting would be too complicated. In the first couple of months, I had some serious problems with the wifi, as it dropped on and off (a part in this also seemed to play its Broadcom wifi card), but since a month or so ago, the wifi has been much smoother -no idea what happened, maybe an update fixed some issues.
Most likely - some hardware manufacturers such as Broadcom do very little to support Linux (not even providing technical documentation to allow community developers to write drivers, even though it would cost them practically nothing), but this is changing as its userbase grows and demand for Linux support rises.
I like LM Mate very much, and the main reason I haven't fully switched is basically because of MS Office, since some uni professors of mine want papers in .doc format (most want print and/or pdf though, which is fine), but a document edited in LibreOffice doesn't always show up correctly in MSO (e.g.footnotes might be all over the place) -while the inverse shows up fine- ,which convinced me that LO is compatible with MSO, but MSO is not compatible with LO, and thus the fault lies with MS. But since MSO is what everybody uses, people tend to assume it's LO's fault, and MS isn't ofc going to fix its compatibility with LO, as it's to its interests to keep people shackled to its own office suite. I've read WPS Office fares better in having its documents show up fine in MSO (correct me if I'm wrong), but its Linux version is still in alpha, so...
Microsoft has trouble adhering to specifications, even with "open" standards that they themselves had a hand in creating (and for their own stuff their public documentation often isn't entirely complete). See: "
Embrace, extend and extinguish".
