Long time developer of Oracle applications so very much at home with Unix OS.
I have Ubuntu on 3 machines at home and i hardly use Windows.... well, this year I have been using my daughter's laptop a lot and that has windows installed. ... I'll have to do something about it soon.
My daughter's laptop is still running windows 7 she has a Mac now so she left her old laptop for me to use in front of the telly
I'm not a fan of Microsoft at all.... to me, personally, if it's made by Microsoft it's cr4p. I used to like windows more when the user could configure the OS but now Windows takes control of everything..... and I don't feel like I want to find a way to override windows ..... I prefer to use my time in something that I actually enjoy and I've had enough of computers by now lol
When working with windows then a third party solutions is almost guaranteed a better solution.
I had mint on some machines once upon a time. it had some security issues a few months (?) back, as I recall. I've tried a variety of distros. Of newish ones, Ubuntu Mate seems pretty nice - I have it on a couple of machines.I posted here 2012 using mint,,,,,still using it lol
I bought a new/small laptop a few months ago with the intention of putting a clean Win 10 install on and dual booting with a distro. Ran a couple of distros as live systems for a while. Mainly Mint & Ubuntu. Ended up installing Mint 18 and after a few weeks removed the Win 10 partition, reinstalled Mint 18 on it's own and haven't looked back since.
In regard to Ben Hunt's comments about the Mint security issues. Those were with the forums I believe and not the distro itself.
Mint has been working fine for me from day one.
just trying that ubuntu mate....seems to work fine
I did have a curly ginger beard in the early days (my hair isn't ginger!!).