LinuxMint Question

[Steve Litt]

On Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:22:02 -0700
Nathan England <nathan at nmecs.com> wrote:

> 
> My Pastor told me tonight he's had enough of Windows and wants to go
> to Linux.

[snip]

> LinuxMint Cinnamon or LinuxMint Mate

[snip]

> So my question is, which is better for a complete noob to linux?
> He really is only interested in LibreOffice, Chrome and maybe Firefox.

LXDE.

IIRC, those Mint front ends had those warm and fuzzy "we're gonna guess
what you want next" interfaces. Some people like that, but my take is
that logical thinking people just want a static menu that always
navigates the same and gives them what they want without upselling. In
other words, a Windows 9x start menu.

KDE, Xfce and LXDE have those. KDE's a glitchy pig. Xfce is nice, but
it's kind of resource expensive and my 4+ year experience with Xfce is
that it sometimes does bizarre, glitchy stuff. My (maybe a year, all
told) experience with LXDE is it's completely reliable, low resource,
and works perfectly alongside an intelligent person. As a huge added
plus, it's trivial to add dmenu to LXDE so that to run most programs,
one's fingers don't even have to leave the keyboard.

By the way, I use Openbox, but I think that's not discoverable enough
for the average user.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
October 2015 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/thrive