I recently switched to Linux Mint MATE from Ubuntu. I like it, but don't love it. Thinking about switching back to Ubuntu and throwing Gnome 3 on it.
I would love to be a Windows-free household, but the lack of a user-friendly video editor prevents that and while GIMP is great, it's no Photoshop.
Which distro do you use?

I kinda forgot they released Steam for Linux. Yeah, the games are pretty limited, but it's still pretty nice to be able to play some of the Half-Life mods on my Linux machines.

Never used Linux, but i'm thinking of putting DSL or another small distro on my Windows 98 64 MB Ram Pentium 2. Seems like fun, and I might even be able to use it. Also considering putting some Linux on my mom's little netbook that runs slow as hell with Windows 7 (It's only got 1GB of RAM I think). Any advice for something very user friendly, that wouldn't seem like too much of a departure and at the same time would improve performance? Improving performance is more important; I'm sure she could adapt to a new OS (not because she's real tech-savvy, but because she's an average browsing, video watching, internet and not much else user), and we could try out a few before putting one on to find one she likes..

Damn Small should run fine on a Pentium 2. I use Puppy Linux as my USB drive distro and it would work as well.
For your mom's machine, I'd use the xfce desktop environment. Linux Mint has an xfce version here. Crazy light weight, but because it's based on Ubuntu, you get a full array of programs to choose from. Lubuntu is another one that's based on Ubuntu, but it uses the LXDE desktop environment, which is also super light weight. I think those 2 would be good places to start.

running linux mint kde on my main machine. noticeably quicker than windows 7 (i'm sure windows 8 would be too, but i don't have to deal with windows 8 metro and no start menu to get the speed boost here)

There's an application you can run to get the start menu back on windows 8.

Fuck Windows.

yes, there is.

well, there are a few.

true

good talk. also, windows 8 has a monetary cost, while Linux doesn't (unless one chooses to donate). And you know, I'm into all that hippy open-source, free software bullshit (in the way Debian means it here http://www.debian.org/intro/free ).

You're a good person, dk.

I'm all about open source.

well thank you. it's already going to my head.

also, never replied about my old/low resource pc linux projects, mostly because i never got around to trying it until recently. Ended up just replacing the 1GB stick in my mom's laptop with a 2GB stick from my brother's old, non-working laptop and keeping her on w7 since i don't think she wanted to use a new OS. as for my P2, for some reason I cannot get the desktop to load correctly. Tried a few different low resource distros, DSL, Puppy, TinyCore, and not one of them would give me a good GUI. With Puppy, X refuses to load at all, so it was all command line, while DSL and TinyCore both loaded, but the entire screen was a transparent green (though visible and usable), with an opaque, thick green line running near the top of the screen. So I'm at a loss on that.

It seems, based on a PCWorld review of the PC, that the graphics card is an STB Velocity 128 Accelerated Graphics Port. So now I've just gotta hunt down a driver or something for that, I guess.

switched from KDE to Cinnamon for various reasons (my KDE installation had issues from the beginning, and Cinnamon looked nice, primarily). Love it. Start menu is just about perfect. The minimize to the middle animation is cool. Overall minimalist look is really nice.

Ran CCleaner on my Windows 8 machine for the first time in 3 months.



That's right, over 60 gigs of useless system files. I fucking hate Windows so much.