I was looking for a distro to put on my girlfriend’s parents desktop. They’re not very tech-savy and have had their fair share of malware and virus issues using windows for years. My first choice was Ubuntu since it’s what I’ve used in situations like this in the past. However, their computer was a fairly old eMachines that Ubuntu couldn’t live boot with for some reason. Now, I’m sure I could’ve gotten Ubuntu to install, but given the users of the computer, I really wanted something that I was sure would work with minimal modifications for a long time. So, I took a shot and made a Linux Mint 17.1 (Rebecca) disc.

Linux Mint booted with no complaints and installed painlessly. Everyone found Cinnamon intuitive, simple, and easy. However, Firefox was freezing, not on the live boot, only after the install. I looked around and found this forum which said to switch to gdm. This worked.

The package manager and software center was also really straight forward. Since my goal was for this to relieve the endless headaches of windows without too much of a learning curve, I was happy. I installed it as a dual boot on my dad’s lenovo laptop he mostly uses for web browsing and it’s running smoothly there too.

When I need to install an easy-to-use linux distro, I’ll be reaching for Linux Mint pending some disaster.

P.S. Unity confuses new users too much to be worth their trouble most of the time.