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I tried to be careful in what I said, and yet you misunderstood me. Let me try again.

I said that GNU/Linux is not a drop-in replacement to Windows. It totally is an alternative. I, like many others, have lived in GNU/Linux land for many, many years, and don't miss Windows one bit. We also feel more productive.

I mentioned React OS as a drop-in replacement to Windows, but I also alluded that it was not ready yet. However, React OS is neither an experiment nor a test. It is an ongoing development project.

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triple_l: people have lives besides technology, and nowadays no end user should be forced in reading manuals just to operate a computer
What are you talking about? Who is forcing people here? But do you know there are manuals for Windows too? GNU/Linux can be just as easy to use as Windows is. It is true! You may not know it in part because you are trying to operate it the way you use Windows. Kids can learn to operate the penguin OS, so why can't grown-ups?

I understand that people are busy and have other interests. Why do people study and learn how to drive? Why do they decide to get an education when they are no longer forced to? Because a) they enjoy it; and/or b) they see it as an investment that hopefully will pay itself later on. From your post I imagine you fail in both conditions, so I suppose that GNU/Linux is not for you.

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triple_l: I again say, someone from outside the linux community has to step up and break the current linux distro model and finally do the linux for windows users we are all waiting for
And he should be paid for his effort, right? Hiring other people, testing, hosting and so on. I mean, Mark Shuttleworth invested at least 10M dollars into Ubuntu, and that was not enough. How much money are you willing to chip in with for that endeavour to materialize?
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triple_l: I again say, someone from outside the Linux community has to step up and break the current Linux distro model and finally do the Linux for windows users we are all waiting for
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manero666: you wrote something like that some posts ago and i skipped a reply, but now i need to

i think that window$ totally win with you; you may not be happy with your OS but you're stuck with it, actually IMHO this was something wanted from micro$oft, they alienated the OS users, by simplifying the interactions through a GUI and taking away the consumer from understanding what's going on and why.

do you ever tried some Linux OS?

as i wrote before I'm not a Linux missionary and I don't care if you use it or not, anyway don't take it personal, I'm not trying to provoking you.

There will never be a Linux distro for window$ users like you, you need to step up and learn how to use Linux (or try Linux i guess)

Linux didn't failed at you, you failed at Linux

ps. it's funny because I'm imagining you reading all these post with the same face as your avatar 8)
I failed at Linux (as in: compiling programs myself) and use it gladly nonetheless. ;)
As a GNU/Linux user, I only have a few problems with it:
1. Still too many programs without a GUI
2. Although people are often very helpful, they'll rather let you drop than compile something for you if you didn't manage to do it yourself and end up in a situation where nobody knows what went wrong, wanna see an example? Look at my plight with Blake Stone.

The lack of native Linux ports when it comes to games isn't nearly as bad anymore as it was a few years ago and improving all the time, so I hesitate to even mention this point anymore.
Post edited January 13, 2016 by Klumpen0815
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manero666: you wrote something like that some posts ago and i skipped a reply, but now i need to

i think that window$ totally win with you; you may not be happy with your OS but you're stuck with it, actually IMHO this was something wanted from micro$oft, they alienated the OS users, by simplifying the interactions through a GUI and taking away the consumer from understanding what's going on and why.

do you ever tried some Linux OS?

as i wrote before I'm not a Linux missionary and I don't care if you use it or not, anyway don't take it personal, I'm not trying to provoking you.

There will never be a Linux distro for window$ users like you, you need to step up and learn how to use Linux (or try Linux i guess)

Linux didn't failed at you, you failed at Linux

ps. it's funny because I'm imagining you reading all these post with the same face as your avatar 8)
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Klumpen0815: I failed at Linux (as in: compiling programs myself) and use it gladly nonetheless. ;)
As a GNU/Linux user, I only have a few problems with it:
1. Still too many programs without a GUI
2. Although people are often very helpful, they'll rather let you drop than compile something for you if you didn't manage to do it yourself and end up in a situation where nobody knows what went wrong, wanna see an example? Look at my plight with Blake Stone.

The lack of native Linux ports when it comes to games isn't nearly as bad anymore as it was a few years ago and improving all the time, so I hesitate to even mention this point anymore.
I think a good 90% of today's window$ users will never need to compile something, probably they also will never need a program that has no GUI.
For most of humanity's needs (internet, music, movies, video-photo editing, writing and drawing) Linux is just fine..

I fail myself too almost every time but i never give up, in Italian there is a very wise idiom: sbagliando s'impara (meaning: you still learn something from a failure).
So i still learn a shitload of stuff from failures, especially with Linux; but I also understand that most of the people want something that never fail, someone may have also a lot of problems with job and family etc and see the PC as a way to release stress and problems, not to take even more..

So I totally understand if someone is not interested in it and will never change, i just can't stand all the people talking shit on it without even give it a try (or always comparing it with w$)

Also i want to remember to all that M$ could have created directX as a cross-platforming API, but they didn't and the result was the almost complete M$ monopoly in the video-game sphere.
The fact that someone is able to play directX video game with Wine (a lot actually) is a miracle in my opinion, and everything is free waiting for you.

ps. I'm no Linux guru but this link might help you (probably not anyway), that was the only time that i had something to set with gcc, cxx etc
https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Building_Dolphin_on_Linux#Step_3_-_Building_Dolphin
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Klumpen0815: I failed at Linux (as in: compiling programs myself) and use it gladly nonetheless. ;)
If I remember right, most packages if they provide source code are suppose to also include scripts for compiling them, so you just have to 'install' them via the manager, and the manager will compile, optimize, and then put it in the system for use.

Course for a lot of people, just downloading the binaries work 99% of the time. Still I'm reminded downloading and using the Atari800 emulator where the configuration scans your headers and libraries, and then includes options for if you wanted an XWindows version, text only BASIC version, a SDL version, if it should include PNG screenshots, compression, what audio mixer to be compatible with, etc.

edit:
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Klumpen0815: 1. Still too many programs without a GUI
Why is a GUI needed at all? 99% of the programs include a help function. You do program --help and it lists off all the flags and options it has avaliable.

Not only that, it's more flexible. Let's consider you buy an editor which includes a few wonderful features, but won't save in format xyz, or won't compress the output as txt.gz, or won't forward your completed project via email.

Realize that a GUI program usually has to have ALL of it's features compiled and written for it when it's made, so say 7zip won't have SSL tunneling, and your backup client probably won't email you telling you it's completed. Or perhaps you wanted the backup program to recompress certain files before backing them up, which is unlikely to be a feature of ANY program; or to check and ensure that conditions XYZ from a program or checker is done. Or perhaps during the backup to use a preferred encryption algorithm that was made recently or years after the backup program was since distributed.

On the otherhand, the commandline tools have a nifty feature called piping (and/or shell scripting), which lets you take the output of one program and feed it as the input of another program and expand on the program's abilities.

Although old, I enjoyed watching this archived video. I suggest watching it, it's still relevant :P Perhaps more so how they string commands together to do spell checking using just a handful of tools since most of the programs are part of a larger whole for the entire OS.

AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System
Post edited January 14, 2016 by rtcvb32
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Klumpen0815: 1. Still too many programs without a GUI
That's where I disagree. There never can be too many programs without a GUI. :P One of the biggest strengths of Linux/GNU (and the "GNU" part is essential in this case as it provides most of the tools) is that it does not require a GUI and that you can do so many things without having a GUI. You might complain that there are too few programs available which have a GUI. That's something completely different and I may even agree with you there.

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Klumpen0815: 2. Although people are often very helpful, they'll rather let you drop than compile something for you if you didn't manage to do it yourself and end up in a situation where nobody knows what went wrong, wanna see an example? Look at my plight with Blake Stone.
Would you really want to run something on your system which a random user on the Internet has compiled for you? Better not. And a program which has been compiled on a different system may not even run on your system because of missing dependencies.
When something is not available from your distribution better compile it yourself. When you have problems and look for help, provide as much information as you can (that's nothing special for Linux, that's valid on all platforms). Telling what distribution you use already would have made it easier to help you. Your Linux installation was rather old, even older than Debian stable, and that's already old. But the main problem seemed to be a missing SDL development library. The Blake Stone engine from that repository compiles without problems on my Debian stable system, at least the current version.

And thanks for that URL. I did not know that there's a native Linux engine for the Blake Stone games. I may have to buy them now. :)
Post edited January 14, 2016 by eiii
saw this on reddit today:

Over the last three months there were 242 new Linux titles on Steam, 301 new Mac titles and 726 new Windows titles.

Or to put it another way, for every 12 Windows games added to Steam today, 5 will be on Mac and 4 will be on Linux.

We have made huge gains on Mac recently. I think Linux has a chance of grabbing the #2 platform by the end of the year.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/41gcod/one_third_of_new_games_are_on_linux/?sort=new
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Klumpen0815: 2. Although people are often very helpful, they'll rather let you drop than compile something for you if you didn't manage to do it yourself and end up in a situation where nobody knows what went wrong
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eiii: Would you really want to run something on your system which a random user on the Internet has compiled for you? Better not. And a program which has been compiled on a different system may not even run on your system because of missing dependencies.
Blindly trusting binary code is where most of the viruses, worms, malware and ransomware comes from. If you're given the source you can compare a hash against the sources to see if they were tampered with, or even check it yourself to ensure it's safe. How much do you trust Microsoft? They don't share their code :P (at least the base system of Apple's OS is FreeBSD)

And dependencies, yes that's definitely an issue. Be an annoyance if i compiled code for you and it required you to have the Ogg library and the SDL library when all you needed was the XWindows with basic audio enabled. See, the configure script scans your local computer and determines what it can/can't compile with (based on what's there and behavior of the compiler), so manually disabling a bunch of settings after configure does it's job is a total pain. The only time that makes sense you would is if there's a standard install that everyone is guaranteed to have. Although more than likely the program will just have dependencies attached and you look it over and go "Why do i NEED Perl 4.5.7 and SDL? This is an audio codec!" type of stuff.

Of course you can always install it and ignore the dependencies problem. I've done that before with the ogg codec before and used it for pipe-line encoding and it worked just fine... Had i been doing any other features i'm not sure if it would have even loaded.

But seriously, if you have trusted sources, it's not really THAT hard to type ./configure and make all, which installs the program specifically for your computer setup.

Although... I do love Slax... Slax as i recall has an interesting modular design where you mount a module and the program/features are present as though they were installed, and unmount it and all traces of it vanish. Only downside is since it uses LZMA compression, the modules and entire thing is a lot slower than it probably should be... :( Probably look to see if there's a zlib version of Slax.
Post edited January 19, 2016 by rtcvb32
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rtcvb32: But seriously, if you have trusted sources, it's not really THAT hard to type ./configure and make all, which installs the program specifically for your computer setup.
the problem is not typing the command, but understanding (and solving) any potential errors that pop up :)
and looking at the Blake Stone link posted above, I dare say that without pre-existing linux packaging/development knowledge you won't have a clue what this error is trying to tell you.

with some persistant googling you can usually figure what's going on there, but that needs time and dedication which simply may not be available.

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Klumpen0815: 2. Although people are often very helpful, they'll rather let you drop than compile something for you if you didn't manage to do it yourself and end up in a situation where nobody knows what went wrong, wanna see an example? Look at my plight with Blake Stone.
keep in mind that a lot of these projects are done by (and supported by) people in their spare time. and fixing problems on other people's computers can be hard, takes time and is really not much fun. There is just a limited amount of time that people will spend for this.
If you try to help everybody on the internet who has a problem you will never have time for anything else ;)
Gotta learn to ignore help requests from time to time.

( if you are still trying to solve that error: seems you are missing the package libc6-dev. or just install build-essential. That should solve the pthread.h error )
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immi101: the problem is not typing the command, but understanding (and solving) any potential errors that pop up :)
Assuming there are problems. I remember compiling some of my first packages and quitting because i couldn't understand the output of the compiler, when generally they were warnings about signed, unsigned numbers and conversions that C handled internally. Once i understood that and saw the executable which then played my music just fine, i was good :P

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immi101: keep in mind that a lot of these projects are done by (and supported by) people in their spare time. and fixing problems on other people's computers can be hard, takes time and is really not much fun.
I'll agree to that. I remember in Korea when there was a VLC patch (or another media player), and my friend was making changes with the notes of 'i shouldn't have to do this' which was mostly redirect the includes folders to point them to the right place. I think he got it up and running fairly shortly, which does make you think the binaries are a better choice simply because you don't have to do the extra work or overhead of minor errors.

Sorta reminds me of the recent PCSX2 emulator which doesn't want to work without the new VB2015 runtimes, and eventually copying all the dll's from the installer (which fails for some reason) makes it work. Annoying and messy...
Post edited January 19, 2016 by rtcvb32
I just completed my switch to Linux... I'm happy! And free! :)

Why I did it? Well, I've been close to the edge for a long time but not brave enough to finally do it. Not until now. The final straw for me was after Adobe Premiere Pro failed to render a movie, only giving me a useless error ("unexpected error" or something), upon further investigating I found out that C: only had ~900 MB left and couldn't figure out why...
Turns out I downloaded and installed the latest batch of Windows updates the day before, and then realized Microsoft's (secretly) pushing Windows 10 out on everyone. I did some searching around and un-installed the Windows 10 updates meant for Windows 7 users, rebooted and what do you know? Suddenly C: had around 10 gig again.

Now, I don't know if that was the case but it doesn't seem unlikely.

I guess I should mention that Adobe Premiere had its settings set (cache, project drive and whatever) set to other drives.... whatever the reason, I finally gave up on Windows.

For me, the future didn't look bright either: I didn't like Windows 8's metro UI, Microsoft's aggressive stance to get people on to Windows 10, nor Windows 10 itself really: automatic updates, Microsoft spying and what not. Also, smaller things contributed to my switch, like my anti-virus license was going to expire in March. If I had stayed with Windows I would have continued to use Windows 7 until the end of its day and then switch. I figured, why not do it now?

So, what distro then?
Years ago I was an Ubuntu user (virtual machine) before the dreadful Unity GUI came out and ruined everything. I roamed around endlessly for many years after that before finally settling on for Linux Mint. It's been a nice distro. It's... normal. Who knows, in due time I might switch once I'm used to Linux, but remember I'm a Windows guy originally.

I didn't prepare much (only copied every file but the Windows folder on C: to another drive) and then I jumped into the sea. I started off by downloading Mint on to a USB and then made it bootable, afterwards I wiped my SSD drive (also known as C:) and installed my new OS. It was so easy. So invigorating.

I'm now coping my files from my Windows drives to my Linux ones, formatting the Windows drives and then copying them back. It's taking a while: I've a lot of data.

...although, there are always troubles when dealing with computers:
* Drivers (using an AMD video card: "gaming R9 380" or whatever) Mint said it couldn't use hardware acceleration at start so I figured the drivers were off. I changed Open Source to Proprietary but they aren't optimal either. It feels a bit slow at times, especially when dealing with YouTube.
* The Cinnamon interface isn't that great. I think the panel is a bit unintuitive, like to open up certain applets you have to click on them and then select "show"
* It's not super optimal when it comes to updates and what not. I got this HEVC (video coded) file and thought to myself "Hey, VLC can play it!" but it's not up-to-date. It's using version 2.1.7 and the latest version is 2.2.2. In version 2.2.0 this was added "Improves support for new HD codecs, VP9, opus and H.265/HEVC, for decoding and for encoding." *senseless muttering*
* Wine is outdated as well (1.6.2) and version 1.8.1 (stable) is mentioned on their website.

I suspect Linux Mint 18 will solve many of these issues when packages are updated but it's tough when you're dealing with old packages. I think it's not coming until May-ish (I hope?)
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Tpiom: I just completed my switch to Linux... I'm happy! And free! :)

Why I did it? Well, I've been close to the edge for a long time but not brave enough to finally do it. Not until now. The final straw for me was after Adobe Premiere Pro failed to render a movie, only giving me a useless error ("unexpected error" or something), upon further investigating I found out that C: only had ~900 MB left and couldn't figure out why...
Turns out I downloaded and installed the latest batch of Windows updates the day before, and then realized Microsoft's (secretly) pushing Windows 10 out on everyone. I did some searching around and un-installed the Windows 10 updates meant for Windows 7 users, rebooted and what do you know? Suddenly C: had around 10 gig again.

Now, I don't know if that was the case but it doesn't seem unlikely.

I guess I should mention that Adobe Premiere had its settings set (cache, project drive and whatever) set to other drives.... whatever the reason, I finally gave up on Windows.

For me, the future didn't look bright either: I didn't like Windows 8's metro UI, Microsoft's aggressive stance to get people on to Windows 10, nor Windows 10 itself really: automatic updates, Microsoft spying and what not. Also, smaller things contributed to my switch, like my anti-virus license was going to expire in March. If I had stayed with Windows I would have continued to use Windows 7 until the end of its day and then switch. I figured, why not do it now?

So, what distro then?
Years ago I was an Ubuntu user (virtual machine) before the dreadful Unity GUI came out and ruined everything. I roamed around endlessly for many years after that before finally settling on for Linux Mint. It's been a nice distro. It's... normal. Who knows, in due time I might switch once I'm used to Linux, but remember I'm a Windows guy originally.

I didn't prepare much (only copied every file but the Windows folder on C: to another drive) and then I jumped into the sea. I started off by downloading Mint on to a USB and then made it bootable, afterwards I wiped my SSD drive (also known as C:) and installed my new OS. It was so easy. So invigorating.

I'm now coping my files from my Windows drives to my Linux ones, formatting the Windows drives and then copying them back. It's taking a while: I've a lot of data.

...although, there are always troubles when dealing with computers:
* Drivers (using an AMD video card: "gaming R9 380" or whatever) Mint said it couldn't use hardware acceleration at start so I figured the drivers were off. I changed Open Source to Proprietary but they aren't optimal either. It feels a bit slow at times, especially when dealing with YouTube.
* The Cinnamon interface isn't that great. I think the panel is a bit unintuitive, like to open up certain applets you have to click on them and then select "show"
* It's not super optimal when it comes to updates and what not. I got this HEVC (video coded) file and thought to myself "Hey, VLC can play it!" but it's not up-to-date. It's using version 2.1.7 and the latest version is 2.2.2. In version 2.2.0 this was added "Improves support for new HD codecs, VP9, opus and H.265/HEVC, for decoding and for encoding." *senseless muttering*
* Wine is outdated as well (1.6.2) and version 1.8.1 (stable) is mentioned on their website.

I suspect Linux Mint 18 will solve many of these issues when packages are updated but it's tough when you're dealing with old packages. I think it's not coming until May-ish (I hope?)
Mint 18 should address many things and as you guessed, it should come around May. For the Linux newcomer, Mint is probably the best, although as you become more experienced you might want to try Debian.

Regarding the forced Windows 10 Upgrade you could solve all that with GWX Control Panel. It allows you to remove the icon, stop Win10 downloading files in the background and avoid Win10 entirely without being forced to turn off the Windows Update service entirely.

VLC (and other programs in general): In Linux things work a bit differently and a distro may not always be able to run the latest version of software, this because it would require a newer version of some other system components. Some features tend to come late in Linux but they make it eventually.

Modern Wine versions: You may want to add this PPA to your package manager which contains the very latest builds of wine - [url=https://launchpad.net/~wine/+archive/ubuntu/wine-builds]https://launchpad.net/~wine/+archive/ubuntu/wine-builds[/url]

I couldn't see a bright future either since the Win8 touch oriented UI, the last laptop I bought came with Win10 and it was dead slow for a new system. I removed it and installed Mint since the first day, the system became a breeze now.
Post edited February 15, 2016 by Ganni1987
If you really *need* the newest software, you can try an unstable distribution. I hear Arch Linux is good for that, but you could also try Debian Sid (though it may lag a bit during the freeze), Fedora Rawhide, Gentoo with the appropriate ~ keyword, and possibly others.

The downside is that an update may break your system. (If you choose Debian Sid, for example, make sure you install apt-listbugs.)

A more advanced approach is to run the unstable distro in a virtual machine or chroot (or other container). It takes a bit more work, but you can run the unstable distro (and hence the newest software) without risking your entire system.

Alternatively, if it's only specific software you need the latest version of, you can compile it yourself, which is not as hard as it sounds (except when you get a compile error). It does take time and CPU power, however (but you can at least go do something else once you start it).
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Tpiom: * Drivers (using an AMD video card: "gaming R9 380" or whatever) Mint said it couldn't use hardware acceleration at start so I figured the drivers were off. I changed Open Source to Proprietary but they aren't optimal either. It feels a bit slow at times, especially when dealing with YouTube.
Open-source driver support for this card is brand new (if we’re talking about the Radeon R9 380), and should improve greatly in the next months, especially with Linux 4.5. You need the amdgpu open-source driver, but I don’t think it’s already available for your version of Mint.

Here I use a similar card (Radeon R9 380X), on my Debian Sid it can run games like The Witcher 2 with the open-source driver without breaking a sweat. But I needed for that to switch to Linux 4.5, and it is not even officially out yet ;)
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Tpiom: * It's not super optimal when it comes to updates and what not. I got this HEVC (video coded) file and thought to myself "Hey, VLC can play it!" but it's not up-to-date. It's using version 2.1.7 and the latest version is 2.2.2. In version 2.2.0 this was added "Improves support for new HD codecs, VP9, opus and H.265/HEVC, for decoding and for encoding." *senseless muttering*
You can solve this by installing an open-source implementation of HEVC.

Add the following [url=https://launchpad.net/~strukturag/+archive/ubuntu/libde265]PPA[/url] with:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:strukturag/libde265

After that update your apt cache and install new libraries:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-libde265 gstreamer1.0-libde265

This will integrate codecs system-wide so you can use pretty much any video player. If you need it to be VLC, install the following plugin additionaly:
sudo apt-get install vlc-libde265

Congrats on your switch and welcome!
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Tpiom: ...although, there are always troubles when dealing with computers:
* Drivers (using an AMD video card: "gaming R9 380" or whatever) Mint said it couldn't use hardware acceleration at start so I figured the drivers were off. I changed Open Source to Proprietary but they aren't optimal either. It feels a bit slow at times, especially when dealing with YouTube.
Unfortunately AMD's graphics drivers are very poor... I got an R7 370 a while ago so I could see what their drivers are like and I'm unimpressed so far. Nvidia's proprietary drivers are *much* better.

For the latest proprietary AMD drivers I'd recommend downloading them from AMD's site - AFAIK there isn't a repository with newer proprietary AMD graphics drivers like there is for Nvidia drivers.


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Tpiom: * The Cinnamon interface isn't that great. I think the panel is a bit unintuitive, like to open up certain applets you have to click on them and then select "show"
Hmm, any examples? I haven't had any real issues with Cinnamon, although I've only been using it for about two months now (used to use KDE before that) & haven't really bothered with any applets so far besides the defaults.

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Tpiom: * It's not super optimal when it comes to updates and what not. I got this HEVC (video coded) file and thought to myself "Hey, VLC can play it!" but it's not up-to-date. It's using version 2.1.7 and the latest version is 2.2.2. In version 2.2.0 this was added "Improves support for new HD codecs, VP9, opus and H.265/HEVC, for decoding and for encoding." *senseless muttering*
* Wine is outdated as well (1.6.2) and version 1.8.1 (stable) is mentioned on their website.

I suspect Linux Mint 18 will solve many of these issues when packages are updated but it's tough when you're dealing with old packages. I think it's not coming until May-ish (I hope?)
If you need more recent versions of certain software there's usually a repository that provides them, e.g. in the case of VLC: [url=https://launchpad.net/~videolan/+archive/ubuntu/stable-daily]https://launchpad.net/~videolan/+archive/ubuntu/stable-daily[/url] or [url=https://launchpad.net/~videolan/+archive/ubuntu/master-daily]https://launchpad.net/~videolan/+archive/ubuntu/master-daily[/url]

For Wine I recommend using PlayOnLinux to manage it