Now that I've had a good long taste of Linux Mint Maya, I'm disappointed in my Windows XP desktop. It takes forever to boot. Also, there are little problems associated with having an antiquated operating system. Windows XP never allowed me to customize the desktop the way I like it. The customization process seemed flawed in many ways, I don't remember all the reasons why, but in the end I always gave up and just accepted the Windows default because all the alternatives were worse. Linux Mint Mate on the other hand was quite simple to customize, and I was able to create a black desktop in accord with my tastes in less than an hour. I did browse some of the black desktops on the Gnome web site, but none of them suited me. Another thing I've always missed in Windows is a simple shutdown utility that would shut the system down with a single click. Linux has a shutdown utility built-in.
The reason I stay with Windows XP is that I have so much legacy software, yet is it not true that Linux can run Windows software using Wine? I have even heard that Linux is faster at running Windows software than Windows is. If so, that is astounding and points the finger at poor old Microsoft. I'm sure there must be more to it than that. One of the advantages Linux has is lack of overhead. Microsoft tries to do everything within the OS, including copy protection and virus protection, whereas Linux does without copy protection and without virus protection. Linux does not fret over whether one's key is genuine or not, as it is free, whereas Microsoft builds in all kinds of checks for the legitimacy of the operating system itself. All of this overhead adds up and slows down a machine.
I'm leaning toward OpenSuse at present, 12.3 when it comes out, because I have read that KDE is fast on that distro, faster than Kubuntu even, and I've often been curious about OpenSuse. I am not so foolish as to prefer OpenSuse for its German connection, or at least I hope I'm not, though my father often told me Germans made great engineers, and a friend's father was a fanatic fan of the Volkswagen Bug, the brainchild, he said seriously, of Hitler. That would be unpleasant news to all the hippies that drove Bugs in the Seventies. On a more rational level, the connection with Novell can't hurt. The name Novell is familiar to me to be sure, going back even to the late 1990's, and I've owned a Novell switchbox in the past. Also, I really liked the fact that OpenSuse 12.2 booted in UEFI mode and partitioned a GPT drive without a sweat. Smoothest install I've ever had, including Windows. I do think that OpenSuse is more advanced technologically than either Ubuntu or Linux Mint, and I think the distro leans more towards cutting edge and performance. For stability one would prefer Linux Mint, because its developers take a more conservative approach at least in distros such as Mate, although Cinnamon is certainly not conservative. Linux Mint accepts Ubuntu releases only several months after they have been released, which allows the developers time to review, analyze, and refine Ubuntu before building their Ubuntu derivative, resulting, in theory, in a more stable and usable product, though not more advanced. In fact, Linux Mint should be technologically backward compared to the latest Ubuntu, but only by a small degree, a matter of six months or so.
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