May I ask why it is so important to you that you get a GUI that looks like Windows?
You are going to a different operating system, including differrent GUIs. You will have to learn your way in the new operating system anyways, so why not simply learning a new GUI? It isn't so hard, and may be you will find one that even fits you better than any of the Windows GUIs.
May be as first start you should have a look at the Linux is not Windows article, I think you should read it.

I think to start with it should be basic and easy to use .I think Unity and new GNOME like some other GUI out there people are saying not use use is too much eye candy no will like windows. A more basic but crude GUI should do .Ya windows 98 ,EDE ,trinity and older KDE is what a company would use .The eye candy new GUI will confuse me and not look any where like windows.

Anyways I think at this point is picking the right GUI.I think KDE and trinity may be good , not sure about going about it has some members here say it can be hard has no distributions have it.

And the new GNOME will be a problem same with Ubuntu now using unity . The members saying I could find a older Ubuntu not using unity ,older GNOME than the new one coming out , older KDE but saying I will run into problems.

Not to sure what more I can say in this thread and what to do as it looks like I'm out of luck .

Looks like troll topic..if not then best thing to do would be simply get for example Ubuntu desktop with Gnome, install it then install additional Desktop Environments with apt(from terminal) or synaptic or software center and just see for yourself. You won't learn without experimenting yourself and don't worry you won't damage system if you will have many of them just install correctly.
Btw: I disagree that Windows has better GUI..not anymore..simply Linux isn't Windows. Same for Mac. They're different systems with different style. All get job done.

I was talking about both Windows and Konqueror.

Konqueror is one of the things I really like about KDE3.5. It is a pretty good file browser and a really good help browser. Konqueror is also a web browser. I so dislike having the web browser and file browser integrated that I refuse to use Konqueror as a web browser, even though it looks like it might be a fairly good one.

At least you have moderate control over that distinction with Konqueror. If you're using it as a file browser and slightly mistype a file path into the address bar, it usually doesn't switch to web mode and grossly misinterpret your local fille path as some web URL. Windows explorer seems to take any tiny typo in a local file path as a reason to send your file path out to some online service that misinterprets it for you and hits you back with ads and malware.

On the subject of Linux documentation and Konqueror, I think the info package has one of the most user vicious UI's ever invented. So much Linux documentation is in info format and you need that information at moments when you are least able to deal with that vicious UI. One of the really great things about Konqueror is that it makes info formatted documentation trivial to read and navigate with a mouse. (I expect there are other Linux browsers that can do similar, but Konqueror is the only one I know about).

That is another thing typically better in Windows than in Linux. But I specifically meant the context menus in the file browser.

A typical application GUI ought to have context menus well thought out by the original engineers. Then user custom context menus would just be a nice extra, not a basic requirement.

But a file browser must be better at things the original engineer couldn't anticipate. If you can't customize the context menus, it is a lame file browser. I still haven't figured out whether you can customize konqueror context menus. I have read online claims that you can, but the instructions are so abstract I have no clue where to begin.

I agree about info, I don't like it and don't use it. It's really hate it when the man page for something just says "go read the info page". But I didn't know that Konqueror can view info pages, I might try that sometime.

EDIT: I tried it, and it's OK. I still don't like the way it's split into so many pages (even the command line options are split into several pages based on category).

Also, I don't really understand why using Konqueror as a browser is a "security risk".

What I meant was that accidentally being in a web browser when you think you're in a file browser can be a security risk. It certainly is in Windows.

The actual security risk is still in its usual place (between the keyboard and the chair). But given that giant security risk, you should be aware of secondary factors affecting the size of that risk.

On my home system, I don't see too much difference in security risk between what I do with my main user ID (with access to all the files important to me) vs. what I do with the root account (with access to system files as well). I see little enough difference in those risks that I use GUI and a file browser as root (against the majority advise of experts). But I see large enough difference in risk that I don't use a web browser nor read email as root.

If Konqueror had ever accidentally acted as a web browser when I tried to use it as a file browser (the way Windows Explorer frequently does), I might have to rethink ever using it as root. That would make system maintenance tasks a lot harder for me. But even when I'm not using it as root, I would feel far less safe using my file browser as a web browser.

Let me get it simple for you, Try Linux Mint 10 Gnome. Period.

Regards.

Try Thunar with its custom actions, you can put anything you want into the context menu, file-type specific and in general. And much simpler to do than in Windows.

I only use Konqueror as a browser and not as a file manager, so I guess that's not much of a risk for me.

U/Ku/Xubuntu.

Buggy, sometimes, but they seem to work great on even older machines.

http://dynebolic.org/ <-- Truly Free Software distribution focused on multimedia.

Was that reply to me or the other poster above ?

I'm sure that was to you. Sorry my side discussion made that unclear for you.

I had bad luck with Mint myself when I tried it fairly long ago, but others seem to have done well with it and it likely changed a lot since I tried it.

In theory Mint is a lot like Ubuntu (I didn't get far enough to know). If I understand correctly, Mint includes some multimedia stuff installed by default, where licensing/legal issues keep most distributions from including the same stuff. It isn't hard to enable the right extra repository to get extra multimedia stuff after installing Ubuntu or Mepis or any Debian based distribution, but it is an extra step for a beginner setting up a multimedia system. That extra step might not be needed in Mint (sorry about all the "might" qualifications. I never got Mint to work enough to find out).

I still think Ubuntu is more likely to be better for you. But none of us know everything. Mint might be better than my experiences support.

The only Linux system I ever used for video editing was a now obsolete version of Mepis. I missed the detail of enabling an extra repository for multimedia and asked a stupid question here at LQ and got a quick constructive reply. Other than needing to ask one stupid question, everything I tried for capture and editing video on Mepis was so much smoother, faster and easier than similar operations on Windows, it was like stepping into a different century.

Clearly for you, if you still haven't made up your mind.

Regards.

It got to be trolling.

I can only be a matter of taste, therefore familiarity, and it can't be seriously stated otherwise until a bunch of scientists devise a battery of tests confirming that, irrespective of familiarity, windows' GUI is inherently the easier to use. Somehow, MS team dug into the human instincts of what even a caveman would intuitively expect from a OS GUI.

The only sense it can be less arguably arguable is that it has more extensive and cohesive configuration via GUI. Besides that, it's mainly a matter of taste and familiarity, with a perhaps few exceptions where there the thing will not be always with windows on the winner side. For example, using the mouse wheel to switch between tabs, or drag-and-drop not only to move, but to move, copy or link files on the file manager. Tabs and panes on the file manager. A "move to" and "copy to" history on the context menu of a file. Multiple desktops. The list goes on. I can't think of an example on the windows' side, some GUI feature I miss from windows, and I'm not being biased here, I'm not a linux fanboy who says that "if you think that there's something wrong with linux, there's something wrong with you" and things like that.

Actually I just remembered one. Due to having multiple DEs, if you use software from different DEs at the same time, you may have some trouble to get an uniform look and feel, and they may not be entirely compatible in things like dragging and dropping things between different programs. But even then I'd say that perhaps the second best improvements that windows could have by "copying" something from linux, besides higher stability, would be more GUI variety. If there were a fully functional openbox or fluxbox clone shell replacement for windows I could seriously think of ditching linux altogether. If additionally there was a fully functional konqueror for windows I'd have to think very hard to find a reason why not. Perhaps the customizations and do-it-yourself tools we can get on linux with bash and other scripts, but I think one may have something equivalent on windows, I just don't know.

[/rant]

I remember reading that KDE 4 actually managed to be lighter than KDE 3 and Gnome. But perhaps that was only in the beginning or at some stage. I don't use it, the only thing I've noticed is that konqueror actually works as a decent web browser. With KDE 3 it was unbearably slow. Unfortunately it hasn't yet recovered some of its previous functionality, like a image browser (better than current gwenview) and the whole kio slave thing, typing "media:/" athe the address bar and being able to mount and unmount usb sticks and whatever else. Now it seems that it's only dolphin that does that on KDE. Or perhaps one has to be using konqueror on an actual kde session... I've never tried that... but I guess it does not work.



I'm seriously pondering about using trinity. The only "improvement" I think I actually got from KDE 4 was the oxygen theme. Everything else that changed I either don't really use/noticed, or has gotten a bit worse (konqueror as a file manager).