| Mint Is The New Revelation For Newbies
(Secretly I am learning line commands in the terminal and reading through an online Linux course, so, on a technical level, my actual newbieness could be question.)
However, I like to be called The Eternal Newbie because, even after working a few summers as a PC/Mac multiplatform QA guy, I still make it a point to stubbornly not-get-it, just to keep myself honest. No fair judging an operating system for new users when one is using all of one's skills already acquired in that system or distro.
Mint is almost as simple as the live CDs. Not only does it handle all the internet networking issues and partitioning issues, but it just doesn't make that any of the user's problem unless they want it to be.
As you can see, I'm totally biased in my judgment of a distro, since I judge it only by beginnerism ideas.
And then they have the only fully-functioning MPlayer on there, (and it even works
in the XFCE interface. (Like who ever recommends an XFCE interface for newbies?) But I'm on it right now because it's so fast and so sleek and has the most accessibly cool file system, brilliantly named "File System." (Here's my newbie logic: They named it File System so folks would know where to go to look for files. Hey, I like Nautilus, but long ago I was looking for my file system or my hard drive, and simply skipped over a box named for a sea creature - - don't get me wrong, I love Seamonkey.)
But now they really did pull together, through some miracle of the gods, a pre-loaded MPlayer that not only handles MP4, meaning no Quicktime is needed. (Shame on you Apple for being bad sports and not making Quicktime for Linux.) And that same player will handle internet radio streams if you choose the Windows Media stream. That means no need for any Windows anything. (Bill, as always, gods love you, but tell your folks to get a religion or a philosophy or something.)
So, it's MINT, XFCE. (Plus, if you're not a newbie, you can feel all non-newbie by being in XFCE. They played off the fact that we had gotten so convoluted that the idea of an obvious interface seemed like mystic voodoo, hence XFCE.)
Anyway, most all the multimedia I need, plus Open Office, per usual, which I'm liking more all the time. (But do download it fast, since rumors keep flying that Bill and Steve don't dig Mint because it actually works and might make ordinary people like Linux, which means they could come under legal attack for doing the obvious and sensible thing, which, given our culture, by definition, must be illegal. | 
. The Ebuilds remind me of the 
)
Thanks anyhow.
Linear Mode
