Linux Mint Cinnamon 18.2 here.

Thanks to Adam, I started tinkering with Linux mint about a year ago, getting frustrated often at the beginning. Today, I am using Windows 7 only like 2-3 hours a week and I use my laptop 15 hours every day. I no longer need windows.

Mint is simple and starting with 18.1 it gets much much better. I installed mint to lots of my friends alongside their windows incase their windows crashes. One of them is around 60s and other is 14. They never had trouble using mint. They would call me for sure if they did :)

Now to get rid of the remaining 2~3 hours a week ;)
I know from experience it isn’t the easiest part of the switch (took me a couple years, but Linux was a beast more difficult to tame at the time than it is now), but it’s by far the most satisfying!

----- There might be an alternative ;)

It is actually legal to sell Linux; the GPL (most common copyleft license) does not prohibit it. The only catch is that the seller needs to provide the source code for GPL software on request. Note that there's also software released under permissive licenses such as the BSD license, which don't have that same rule about sharing source code.

One site that sells Linux (and BSD) CDs is OSDisc.com. This can be useful if, for example, you don't have the means to make the CDs or USB yourself, or if bandwidth is slow and/or expensive (you could end up in a situation where buying the disks and having them shipped is cheaper than downloading them and burning them yourself). Prices seem to be about $3 for a CD or $6 for a DVD. Edit: Link for convenience:

Edit 2: Link isn't showing up for some reason.

If you want to help :))

There are only 2 reasons I use 7. MS Office and a tiny program called MZ Manager.

I am actively using Libreoffice on linux and Open Office on windows but there are some documents I need to update regularly which libre or Open office both deteriorate when opened. I tried to run office on wine but results were... weird.

Second is MZ Manager, a very simple program that collects data from an online management game MANAGERZONE. I can make the program work and see the data I already collected but I can not collect new data. It gives error messages which you can see in the attachment.

I know that it is a SOAP connection. If you want to try it yourself, you can download the program from my dropbox link. You will also need to create account on the game and then use the SECURITY CODE, which you can find by clicking your name on top right, myprofile --> edit my profile. Security is below MZ Tools. Those were for managerzone web site.

I have been trying to make that work over a year. :)

Looks like WINE is not a solution for you if you get weird results.

But if both applications do not need 3D acceleration, you might want to give a try to a virtual machine like VirtualBox or VMWare.
This way you would still run Windows, but in a virtual machine on top of your Linux system. A good way to get rid of the need to reboot when you nedd to use these applications ;)

Tnx.

I already use VB. I mostly used it on windows to test linux. Now it turned the other way around. However, that does not help me in those 2 cases because I have to make them smaller and write to them while checking other files in the background. Like 2-3 pages opened at the same time. That seems impossible on VB so I need to make them work on WINE..somehow.

If you dislike what Linux Mint does with "mintsystem" package, you might like KDE Neon, Gentoo, Calculate Linux or Manjaro. Every system has some "nuances" though.

So I got Mint running and it's cool, although with my hardware massively over clocked I had to downclock my CPU quite a bit. I wanted to install Ubuntu but there were some incompatibility issues within Ubuntu releases themselves.
So. I do like it I see huge potential; but I will have to wait until I can purchase or download complete release without GPU driver hiccups.

In order for devs to get more involved in Linux game releases; there needs to be: unified Linux distribution and flafors are just cosmetic UI type of a thing.

That is only my opinion since I've been using windows from the begining.

What exactly were the problems you're having (having an overclocked CPU shouldn't be an issue at all)? Also what hardware do you have? We should be able to help :)

I'm guessing that you're using an Nvidia GPU and it was unstable? If so then you simply need to install the proprietary drivers; the default open source drivers aren't very good because Nvidia does basically nothing to help the open source driver developers. Instructions for doing this are in my guide. If the system isn't stable enough to let you do that then I know a workaround for it it so you can install the proprietary drivers - just let me know.

The Ubuntu "family" of distros (*Ubuntu, Mint, etc) basically is the "standard" desktop Linux distro.

Wait, what?!
Such a claim will not be accepted as is, without some serious backup ;)

Well there's no such thing as an official standard desktop distro, but Ubuntu along with its derivatives is the de-facto standard since it's the most popular and has the widest support.

I'm using a motherboard from my old xps 730x with I7 980x, 24 gb ddr3 Kingston fury x, custom Area 51 bios ver. A11. For gpu I use MSI 1080ti gaming X.

I've downloaded Linux gpu drivers but was unable to figure out how to install it. That's the issue most new people wanting to switch to Linux OS will have I'm thinking. As of now I'm optimizing dreaded windows because I need to play my Witcher 3.

As always; thank you so much for your help!

Driver installation is a bit different than on Windows and is covered in my guide. In the case of Nvidia graphics drivers, don't use the drivers from their site; they're a total pain to install (and Nvidia themselves don't recommend them, as you should be using the releases provided with/for your distro).

You simply need to open the driver manager, then select the latest driver and click "install". It'll then download and install the drivers from the system repositories - after that just reboot & it's ready to go.

You'll likely want more recent drivers though, and for that you'll need to add a PPA. This is also very easy to do & the details regarding this are provided in my guide as well.

When I started using Mint over 4 years ago I hadn't used Linux before, just 20+ years of DOS/Windows. I wrote my guide based on that experience :)