I would mention I’m running Gentoo somewhere below here, but something tells me most people wouldn’t know what that is. Well, technically, I guess it would be more correct to say that I’m running Portage with the Gentoo repository as my main one.

Some of my earlier posts documented issues like poor media playback, hardware incompatibility, and instability. Getting my monitor to work correctly has been a chore, especially in KDE.

Sounds like a problem with old software, which might be true depending on which version of Mint you’re running.
The fact that you have problems with poor(?) media playback sounds strange, given that most players use gstreamer or ffmpeg, which means you should be able to play just about anything.
Hardware compatibility are in most cases due to missing kernel modules (which, IMO, should be compiled in when not testing).

Getting Flash to work is a total crapshoot

www-plugins/adobe-flash-10.0.32.18 works pretty nice here. Though I prefer to not mess with Flash whenever I can, no matter the operating system.

I still get the occasional catastrophic system failure that forces me to restart X or to outright reboot.

In my experience, the only time’s I’ve had this happen to me is when I’ve executed some command that were malformed and sucked upp all of my RAM or CPU% (such as entering “raw text input mode” in Gnome Do and entering a . [dot]), but even then I could most of the time switch to another “session” and kill the process from there.

Probably not interesting, but might be worth mentioning. I’m on amd64 with a non-hardened multilib system without selinux and mostly “unstable” packages which are actually, surprisingly enough, very reliable.

sys-apps/portage-2.1.7.10 “-build -epydoc -python3″
sys-devel/binutils-2.20 “nls -gold -multislot -multitarget -vanilla”
sys-apps/coreutils-7.6 “acl gmp nls xattr -caps -static -vanilla”
x11-libs/gtk+-2.18.3 “cups jpeg jpeg2k tiff -vim-syntax -xinerama”
media-libs/mesa-7.7_rc1 “gallium nptl xcb -motif -pic”
gnome-base/gnome-desktop-2.28.1-r1
gnome-base/gnome-session-2.28.0 “branding ipv6 splash”
sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.31-r3 “symlink -build”
sys-libs/glibc-2.11-r1 “nls -gd -glibc-omitfp -profile -vanilla”
sys-fs/udev-149 “devfs-compat extras”
sys-devel/gcc-4.4.2 “fortran graphite gtk mudflap nls nptl openmp -bootstrap -build -gcj -ip28 -ip32r10k -multislot -nocxx -objc -objc++ -objc-gc -vanilla”
sys-apps/openrc-0.5.3 “ncurses pam unicode”
sys-apps/hal-0.5.13-r2 “X acpi consolekit crypt policykit -apm -dell -disk-partition -laptop”
x11-base/xorg-server-1.7.3 “hal ipv6 kdrive nptl sdl xorg -dmx -minimal -tslib”
x11-wm/compiz-0.8.4-r9000 “cairo dbus emerald gnome gtk plugins svg unsupported -fuse -kde -kde3″

Thanks for your review of Do. I’m not familiar with Do but have solved most of the issues you describe with the E16 window manager, kicker and a tackpoint. E16 is an excellent, low resource window manager that plays well with GNOME and KDE applications and has wonderful pagers and edge flipping. Kicker is the KDE 3.5 panel, which is modern enough and can be covered up by other applications when used in E16. Trackpoints are the little red joystick that IBM has been putting in the center of your keyboard for 15 years. Most of all, these applications are mature and of the best quality. They don’t do strange things to your data. Do looks interesting and I’ll be looking into it one day when it settles down.

Some other applications you should discover are kbibtex and kile. If you want your thesis or papers to look perfect and like kate, you will love the way kile deals with latex. kbibtex is an excellent reference database that stands on it’s own for any research project. Most handy are it’s search feature, abstract and link fields. When you find the keywords you were looking for, you have a link to where you stored the paper. You can get flash working well in a distribution like Mepis, if you must have flash.

Gnuplot, which is not actually a gnu project, deserves it’s own special mention. Nothing else comes close if you have to generate hundreds of plots. Combine gnuplot with a few simple scripts an you will never use a spreadsheet again for anything but one off graphs. Done right, with eps output, the output rivals fancier graphing programs that murder you with a thousand clicks. I’m sure you have found this wonderful site. It will lead you through gnuplot.

You should not count on Windows 7 to work any better than Vista or any other version of Windows [2]. If and when you buy a new computer, you will be forced to purchase this new blight of an OS. I’m not sure what it can do that can not be done better with free software. Good luck with it, but I doubt you will be able to stick with it for useful work. The most important issues of program incompatibility, poor power management and general performance problems have not been solved as far as I know. These barriers are not compensated for by third rate window management that apes parts of KDE 4 and Mac.

@Wayne
Some of my earlier posts documented issues like poor media playback, hardware incompatibility, and instability. Getting my monitor to work correctly has been a chore, especially in KDE. Even in GNOME it doesn’t work at its optimal resolution. Getting Flash to work is a total crapshoot, and I still get the occasional catastrophic system failure that forces me to restart X or to outright reboot. We have an entire category on our website (“God Damnit Linux”) and podcast (“What the hell Linux???”) dedicated to venting about these issues.

Kate simplifies things by letting me have several text files open in one window at once

I don’t think there are any text editors out there nowadays that don’t have a tabbed interface, are there?

In my opinion, if the word processor can create a decent looking resume – it did, by the way – then it should suffice for any other purpose.

You should try LaTeX (preferably with a plugin for your plaintext editor of choice), it beats any WYSIWYG utility out there.

@ Robert
I could see many people switching if only there were a way to get the ‘systray’ into Docky.

Also, I noticed you use Docky. We are splitting off Docky into its own application (so Do and Docky can both grow without stepping on each other’s feet). Docky 2 (the stand-alone Docky) is currently ‘alpha’ but quite stable and usable. We probably will have a beta release soon. We do not (yet) have integration with GNOME Do, but plan to at some point.

I recommend giving it a try. There is a PPA for Ubuntu Karmic, I am unsure how that works with Mint. There are also instructions for installing from source.