I've tried other Linux distros: Open Suse 12.2, Xubuntu, and Kubuntu. Linux Mint Mate is just twenty-four flavors of awesome and that's all there is to it. I like the Linux Mint Menu and don't want to give it up, not for Xubuntu and certainly not for Kubuntu. I like the simplicity and easiness of Mate, where things tend to just work, although there are a few quirks, such as the buggy and limited screensaver. But I plan to stick with Mate until such time that I start hearing about the maturity and stability of Linux Mint Cinnamon. Based on the comments I've read in forums, I'm not sure Cinnamon is ready yet to be my desktop. Mate is ready. But I'm going to wait a year or two, maybe for the next LTS release, for Cinnamon.
Xubuntu annoyed me greatly because the file manager, Thunar, does not allow me to open config files with Admin privileges, unlike Linux Mint Mate's Nautilus. It is also slow, especially moving files to different directories on a single partition, which should be fast, as it is in Windows XP. Thunar has some odd default behavior which was anti-intuitive, such as not opening a directory when I clicked on it. Xubuntu did not auto-detect my display resolution either, but put me at 1680 x 1024 on a monitor with a maximum 800x600 display, which meant I was having to guess what the text messages read until I finally figured out how to correct the resolution. I spent hours trying to configure Xubuntu before I gave up. The look of Xubuntu is simply inferior to Mate, and there's no easy way around that. I felt that Xfce overall was sacrificing a lot of conveniences and elegance to preserve a negligible amount of memory. At no time did Xubuntu seem faster. In fact, after creating Samba shares on my Xubuntu drive, Xubuntu booted about 5-10 seconds slower than Linux Mint Mate. In addition, everytime I clicked on Firefox or VLC the response seemed to be much slower than Linux Mint Mate, about three to five seconds of waiting before the application opened. Often I clicked on Firefox two or three times before two or three instances opened. Thus, there was no advantage to Xubuntu, but it was more difficult to use, while being considerably slower. I was also missing my wonderful Linux Mint menu, which I never want to be without, ever again. The menu alone is worth installing Linux Mint. Other distros simply do not understand how human beings work. Linux Mint really gets it.
The thing about an OS is I do not want to learn how to use one. I want the OS to know how to handle me, not the other way around.
I do wish I could find a Linux distro that displayed a modicum of intelligence during the installation process. For instance, if a computer has > 2 gigs of RAM, then swappiness should be dialed down at the get-go. I should not have to go in and modify vm.swappiness to equal 5 or 10. The temp directories in fstab should all be tmpfs. "Noatime" should be the default for all partitions. Why do I have to modify ten freaking configuration files every time I install a new Linux distro? But then again Windows is not much different. Every Windows install I ever made, I had to tweak about ten settings after install.
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