Finally posting an intro as requested, I'm a former DEC VAX / HP 1000 / Windows programmer (20+ years in the software industry) who has had to (probably) retire due to ill-health, and I got tired of paying for software.
Currently using Mandriva 2008, though I have a friend who tells me that Mint is the best distro he's seen, so I might take a look at that at some point. I do wish Borland/Codegear/Embarcadero had continued to support Kylix, at the moment I have to use QEMU to run Win 98 to run Delphi to use the Kylix cross-compiler, and as you can imagine, all that lot CRAWLS along. Yes, I know about FreePascal and Lazarus, and I'm slowly switching over to that, but I have a lot of packages to try to rebuild.
I still have one foot in the Windows world unless and until the people who made the "Grabster" video capture kit write Linux software and the people who wrote MPEG Video Wizard DVD (the only software I've seen which can sort timing problems when doing VHS -> DVD conversions) do similar. I'm not holding my breath - but until it happens, or I manage to get all of my VHS tapes converted, I'm still running one XP box.
Brian.
