Hi all, back on after a couple days off to try a fresher... let me just say MINTIER variety of Linux... and the verdict is in... LinuxMint 11 is the best!

Fed-up with Fedora, I say "LONG LIVE MINT!"

Everything just works, out of the box, without having to FIGHT with it, and remember the list of things you have to do just to play a phu ken MP 3!!!

YES!

So Mint with Gnome can be made to work like Fedora did, (WHEN it did,) although the menu system is much cooler and prettier in Mint, and has the advantage that by default it lets me do a number of things Fedora (with which I was getting FEDup!) wouldn't!

Just to be clear, I do of course, understand why the people behind Fedora HAD to do what they did, (at least in the case with the MP 3's and most vid's, NOT that Gnome 3/Shell... garbage! Is it Gnome Shell or Gnome's Hell?) but I was getting tired of it anyway, so I tried LinuxMint and found, like anything else that's mint, it's GREAT! There was a slight learning curve switching from RPM's Package Manager to apt-get.

It turns out there's a GUI package manager here in LinuxMint-land too, but I had one package I had to get the .deb version of, b/c the .rpm one wouldn't work initially, until I got online, which I couldn't do until I got that package to work, which I couldn't do until I got online... you see how it goes?

But then again, knowing how to do things, and not expecting (and needing) someone else to do them for you is occasionally a good thing.

I'm still not sure how I feel about Mint's peculiarity about the root password. By default, it doesn't ask you for a root password during installation, just to set up a user account, and password, and then sets the root password to be the same as the user. It was confusing at first, though it makes sense if the person who installed it, (usually the computer's owner,) the system administrator, and it's primary user, are all the same person, and the ONLY person who will log onto the system 99+% of the time.

It can be changed while su'ed to root, so it's not a big deal, I just prefer limiting the scope of damage possible in the unlikely event anyone ever sees me type my user password logging on, that person then accesses my computer. If my primary user account password is different from my root password, (as I feel they should be,) I think that that limits the damage an attacker can do.

But I do go on, don't I?

I think this will be my last post this thread, since I think I've more than introduced myself, and my gripes are gone, with the power of Mint!