I am new to MINT and have many question. I'll keep it short and to the point. I have a Dell8700 and will be putting a 2tb hard drive in. I will not be dual booting as Windows has gone to the birds. It came with 12Gig memory. I am not sure what Mint version I should use. It comes with UEFI and I understand that I should disable secure boot. I don't know what the most current stable version is so your help will be appreciated. Then how do I go about updating to the newest vs when it comes around. Do I need to use the entire 2 tb or is this better used for something else?

All recent Mint versions are based on Ubuntu LTS (long-term support) versions, so you should be fine with the most recent version of Mint.

Of the default Mint versions, I prefer the MATE desktop, but that's me. Cinnamon works nicely also, but is a bit heavier than MATE. And, of course, you are free to install and use a different desktop environment or window manager if you wish.

There is nothing wrong with having multiple DE/WMs installed to a system and switching among them as you please. Slackware comes with multiple DE/WMs out of the box and now Debian gives you the option of selecting multiple DEs at time of install.

Oh, and welcome to LQ!

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I like Mint 17.1 Mate, mostly free of systemd, stable, and easy to pick up for the newbie...

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If someone already has 17.1, that's fine. But don't recommend it for a new install!

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Thanks fellows,
Seems I will need to do some more reading to see if I can find a Cinnamon ISO to download. Seems that I saw at least 2 different versions of Cinnamon and one of those had an old version number. Any ideas on that? Should i try and set up more than 4 partitions or just let Mint do it's default install. So is Ubuntu really spyware?

Thanks to all who gave their input and I appreciate all of the help the group has to offer. thanks to everyone for even the least amount of information as I will try to remember this and put it to good use.

Is there a ink to all of the commands/shortcuts or is this just something I will pickup with the learning curve.

Thanks again for everyone's input!

Mint has graphical tools for everything, so you don't have to use commands if you don't want to. But the command line interface is fast and elegant and wonderful for troubleshooting problems, so well worth learning. I can recommend the man command and its little brothers apropos and whatis.

apropos subject will give you a list of commands relevant to subject.
whatis command will tell you what any given command does.
man command will give you detailed instructions on how to use the command.

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The latest version of Mint based on the most recent LTS version of Ubuntu is 18.2, and you can grab the ISO for the Cinnamon edition here (get the 64-bit version, which seems to be the right one for your computer). You can get a user guide from here - some of the documentation may appear to be outdated, but often the information contained within is still pertinent, and you can always ask about things it doesn't answer for you.

The website does tell you of another Cinnamon version you can get, which is LMDE 2 (Linux Mint Debian Edition). It's not recommended for beginners as you are more likely to need to use the command line. The main edition (18.2) is solid and should serve your needs just fine.

As for partitioning, I usually go with three: root (/), swap and home (/home), but you can go with what the Mint installer gives you. If you want to have some control over partitioning, this guide seems to be good and will help you get started.

Regarding the spyware in Ubuntu, it no longer exists since 16.04. It had to do with the search bar in the main Ubuntu edition sending your search results to Amazon unless you opt out. You can read more about it here.

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Disagree about LMDE2 !!

It's based on Debian packages, whilst Mint is based on Ubuntu packages.
So LMDE is (probably) more stable, especially since Ubuntu can't seem to make up their minds about the Desktop.

LMDE has never revealed any bugs or difficulties to me, so I would recommend it.

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Mint is based on a Ubuntu LTS, which is supposedly stable (as stable as a distro based on Debian unstable could be I suppose).

Not that I've ever really had problems with Testing, but IIRC Testing is what LMDE is based on, and it's intended to be rolling release.

So, I guess you could call this one a toss up as far as theoretical stability.

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My only comment here is that LMDE is not more likely to require one to use the command line, it is a full desktop distribution and everything in the desktop works fine. Certain actions for any distribution may require the use of a command line, however there's nothing special in LMDE for a user which would require command line any more than any other typical desktop distribution.

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You should also examine, for instance, this page when considering whether or not to use UEFI. Linux is compatible with UEFI if you wish.

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Try out a live distro, booting from USB - it will run slower, but you can check out the user interface and more importantly,
whether sound & internet connections work properly.

If so, you could proceed to installing to disk, using either UEFI or Legacy type BIOS modes.

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I recommend having the majority of that drive be a data partition. That way, if you need to reinstall or upgrade you don't risk your data.

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http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/u...ows-users.html has some tips and advices.

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I don't disagree, I just made some poor word choices. I used SolydX (LMDE fork) for a while, and I found it easy to use and rarely had to use the command line any more than I do on Mint.

LMDE is no longer a rolling release and is now based on Stable, but you can still switch repos to get it rolling. SolydXK followed suit not too long after.

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