OS Advice

[Tetge]

Ubuntu and Mint are both similar no matter what desktop shell you use, so, what you have should work. You might also look at Ubuntu with the Unity desktop to compare.

[SonicVenum]

It took some fiddling, but my bootable drive is working. I had to go into the c: prompt to erase the first attempt, and start all over again with a fresh format. I fired up Mint, and I like how it looks. The problem I found was no fault of Mint, but rather from running it from a thumb drive. Even though it was connected to a USB 3.0 port, it ran a lot slower than running my regular OS from a snappy SSD. I opened a few of my work files to see how the bundled "office" software, LibreOffice, would handle the task. Everything looked/functioned great for each individual file. Where I think I'd have a problem is cross-format saving. I regularly create a form in an Excel file, then save it as a .pdf to distribute it to clients. I couldn't locate that function in LibreOffice. I only spent about 10-15 minutes in Mint because I had to log back into W8 for work, but it's an interesting experiment that I'll have to get back to.

[jhwalker]

Keep us updated. Annually I poke around and end up staying on Windows. I actually enjoy Windows 8.1 on my Surface Pro II -- but I don't do anything but documents, spreadsheets and email. Life is pretty simple for me