I've been a Windows Sys Admin for the better part of two decades and repairing PC's for longer than that, and I've always been a bit intimated by Linux. I jumped on the bandwagon because of a lot of security tools I wanted to use, and I haven't looked back since! When away from my desk I only use Linux and I'm loving it. The number of things you can do, and for free!, are amazing and the community is awesome as well. The majority of what I see is extremely helpful.

Besides dedicating a Kali box for the security stuff, I use a Mint laptop running Cinnamon. I like Mint a lot and after trying several flavors including Ubuntu I feel Mint was the best for helping me make the transition and get comfortable.

Do any of you agree that Mint is a great "gateway" Linux distro for us former Windows junkies? If not, what was your first distro when you switched and why did you like it?

Michael

Welcome to LQ.

You will often see LQers recommend Mint for someone new to Linux.

My first distro was Slackware 10.0. It was an accident--the first distro (I forget what it was now) I tried to install didn't. I stumbled over the Slackware website and Slackware did install, so I set about learning it.

Being an old DOSsie, I was quite comfortable with the command line and pretty much never looked back; I learned to use what I had. I self-hosted my website on Slackware for the next five years.

Since then, I've used a number of other distros, either on bare metal or in VMs, but I always drift back to the elegant simplicity of Slackware.

Thanks, downloading Slackware as I type this, I'll throw it up in a vm and see if I like it. It wasn't really the command line that intimidated me, I'm on old DOS user as well, in fact I started programming in 1984 on an Atari 400, then went to college for computer science in 1989. It was just so polar opposite of how I've been using Windows for so long I just forgot that their was another way besides point and click wizardry. So it wasn't really the command line itself, it was not knowing the commands. Put me in a DOS prompt or Windows powershell and I was right at home, but this was foreign. But months later now and I feel very comfortable and better yet an answer to what I don't know (which is volumes of course) is just a google search away.

I started on Xandros, distro-hopped through Fedora, OpenSUSE and some others, went to Ubuntu, then Mint, then LMDE, and finally to the source, Debian. Ubuntu is a fork of Debian, and Mint is a fork of Ubuntu, although LMDE is Debian. That's how I went, but everyone's story is a little different. Mint is fine, for what it is. I never liked it that much, but that's certainly a subjective judgment, and my likes are not everyone's likes. That's why there are so many Linux distros around. There's something for everyone.

One thing about Slackware--it will not offer to partition your hard disk for you. It contains two partitioning tools. I recommend cfdisk; it's enough like DOS fdisk that you will navigate it easily if you ever used DOS fdisk.