Thinking of dual booting windows 7 and Linux on my laptop. Have had very little experience with linux but which distro should I go with?
mint linux 13 - cinnamon
Been looking at cinnamon... was thinking about it for one of the laptops. What do you like about it better than ubuntu? The ui?
well, mint comes with pre installed codecs and programs like flash, so it works with everything out of the box... no need to install anything else. so it is very good for beginners.
i just downloaded 13 and was trying it out before i upgraded my parents workstation (they are still on mint 10 at the moment). cinnamon is based off of gnome 2 (which from a productivity standpoint is much better than 3). with all the nice bells and whisles added back on, to make it look nice and shiny.
the ONLY thing that is annoying me about cinnamon, is i can not find how to change the folder hilight colors... there is no option in a gui menu right now, and i can not find the line in the theme.css file. other than that, i love it.
oh, and why i like it better than ubuntu: comes with everything you need, much more "drag n' drop" customizable than unity, it doesnt use unity (god i hate unity), large support base on the irc, and has a better login manager imo.
Fedora, much more stable.
I don't think you should use cinnamon, they basically forked Gnome 3.2 so there is really no future in cinnamon. Everything they did could have been done in Gnome 3, I just think they are on a powertrip due to the fact they shot up in distro usage so fast.
It really depends. First off, ask yourself. Are you satisfied with your current operating system? Next, ask yourself, is your current OS doing everything you want it to? Then you don't really have any reason to use it other than novelty.
I recommend Lubuntu/Xubuntu over default Ubuntu. Unity is a shit-awful DE, and has been hurting the Ubuntu experience hard. Literally, it's so bad I'd say it's a direct competitor to Win8's Metro UI. Also, consider Mint. Honestly, though. Consider the first half of my post.