Hello, I've recently changed from my having Windows as my main operating system, to not having windows at all, and I'd like some recommendation for programs that are similar to their windows variants. I.e. What's the best text editor for Linux mint? What's the best video player, currently I'm using VLC but people tend to say, as far as I've read at least, that VLC is crap compared to others. Also, to save from making another thread, is there a way to make Linux mint similarly customizable to ARCH linux? As in is there anything I can write into the terminal to change/make the desktop display certain features like CPU performance and such? Just to clarify as well, I am using the Cinnamon desktop environment, so I'm not sure how much that limits me.
if you are using the gnome interface you can install plugins to show how much cpu and memory and the speed of the connection is
VLC is in no way crap and is miles better than Winblows media player but there are others out there like mplayer and my favorite when it comes to the i3wm desktop mpv. As for text editors a lot of people like VIM I personal like gedit and nano. Plugins work pretty well when displaying cpu usage and things but you could look into Conky its pretty customizable then you just set it to auto start on start up.
If you were looking for a program for creating documents (i.e. something more graphical) you might want to consider Libre Office.
And VLC is amazing, who would call it crap? It's so simple, yet so powerful.
Text editor should be Sublime Text in my opinion as it's pretty close to being an IDE. Have a gander at the features slideshow on the homepage for good examples.
I think Conky is what you're seeking in a lightweight desktop system monitor. I think it's the one that is typically associated with Arch. It's available in Linux Mint also.
VLC is supposed to be pretty good. No matter what you use, someone is going to say that it's crap.
I've been using Mint since version 10 as my main home desktop, mainly because it's totally dependable. You don't say what you are using your text editor for, but in my programmer/sysadmin hat, here are my recommendations.
Vim: Terminal base editor. Very good, but with a steep learning curve. The reason I use it is for editing config files for servers, which is part of my job.
GVim: A sort of graphical version of the above, used for the same reason.
Notepad++: I'm going to be slaughtered for recommending this one as it's for Windows. However, I do have to use and edit Windows programs at work and I'm familiar with it. Nice features for C/C++, but the auto-completion can get annoying. Programmers seem to hate and love it equal measure. Runs OK under Wine, though there are better ones for Linux if your doing a lot of web stuff.
Quote from Wiki:
"Notepad++ is distributed as free software. At first the project was hosted on SourceForge.net, from where it has been downloaded over 28 million times, and twice won the SourceForge Community Choice Award for Best Developer Tool."
Link: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
For video I like SMPlayer. Links in to Youtube and has a Youtube downloader too, very handy if your ISP limits your downloads. My ISP limits me to just 30GB a month, but I can download as much as I like between 1am and 6am; bastards!
Link: http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/
Arch is in a different league to Mint. If you want to do Arch things, get Arch. You can customize Mint, but it's really limited installing software, changing themes, icons and backgrounds. I recommend getting to know Virtualbox and test out your growing Linux skills in there first.
Cinnamon, is what it is. Easy to use, works very well, stable and boring.
is there a way to make Linux mint similarly customizable to ARCH linux
Kind of? I'm on arch right now (and have used mint not too long ago) and Arch only comes with a fully functional terminal and a few essentials. With the expectation that you'll build up from there. However linux is linux you can customize every inch of mint it'll just take a few extra commands to remove your previous stuff.