And I was surprised to see it was a Fedora respin - I tried it when it was still new and I was still a gentoo user. Before the (gentoo) developer wars.
Was a while ago ...

I had all sorts of issues with portage overlays IIRC - shouldn't be an issue with current.

hmm.. a distro thats easy for beginners but good enough for advanced users.. yeah, thats the self proclaimed title of seemingly every distro out there.. in fact isnt that what fedora is supposed to be as well? seems redundant and like one would be better served just going with fedora or opensuse, or even centos or pclinuxos if theyre looking for something that uses RPMs.. though, i believe debian and apt-get stuff to be even easier for about 95 of the time

Mint specifically warns (at least, the last time I read their documentation) that they do not advise LMDE for inexperienced users.

ive used LMDE before, its no different for installing, setting up, or configuring than regular mint the only differences youre getting your packages from debian, not ubuntu

problem is a lot of software you find not in debian repositories but packaged in a .deb will have a ton of ubuntu specific repositories to them, this is why ive said ubuntu has tainted the whole .deb package system, tons of distros are backed by debian, yet canonical being the large corporation it is gets the attention while everyone else using .debs pretty much gets screwed, thats only one of the small reasons i use arch

i just installed a new distro on some computers of my family members and some friends who dont have a clue how linux even operates but theyve been using mint for a while with cinnamon, i removed mint from their computers and installed manjaro (which is 100 archlinux compatible) however like mint, manjaro comes with a desktop environment pre-installed, perfectly configured, has a graphical package manager like synaptic, just click on the network icon to set up your wifi, everythings done and ready to go just as easy to use as mint

difference is with manjaro, its a much lighter weight system, less lag, and instead of being given only a couple choices for a desktop environment you get a ton, kde, gnome, xfce, lxde, lxqt, cinnamon, mate, enlightenment, icewm, pekwm, fluxbox, openbox, so you get more options, my recommendation for its ease of use and being a "complete" desktop environment while being light on the hardware is xfce... so my recommendation to a new user who wants a better system than anything mint offers (which in my opinion they offer a bloated ubuntu wannabe system) would be manjaro with xfce

its not what i use personally, since i just use arch, but i must admit they did a great job making arch easy for beginners, just as mint made debian easy for beginners and AUR>PPA

Go with Peach OSI. It it based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which in turn is based on Debian. By being LTS, you have until 2019 for security updates support. Peach takes the best of Ubuntu and the Xfce desktop. It is very light, crisp and easy to use (the Peach Launcher looks great as well). The developers put in a lot of attention to detail in functionality and ease of use. I have it installed on all of my computers and at work, and does not slow down at all. It does most everything Ubuntu or Mint does, only better. There's a BareBones Edition if you don't like the software bloat and/or prefer to install you own software.

Manjaro is a fine distro as well, if you prefer AUR and pacman, instead of apt. It is light and fast as well. I use it as a secondary OS. It is more cutting edge, but could be more unstable as well. Try both!

Korora is a fine distro but, as with Fedora, its inconvenience is in the fact that you are going to constantly reinstall the OS when a version is no longer supported. It is also prone to be more unstable as well.

As other users suggest, try them all, that's the beauty of Linux!

Hi all,

I have now tested a few distros: Mint (with cinnamon), Ubuntu, openSuse, Korora, elementary

To be honest: All have a poor design compared to MacOS or Windows. When I look at Windows 10 desktop, Linux seems to be far behind unfortunately. Things like window docking, two-windows side be side and so on are not included and I only found very complex ways to get it in Linux. But THIS is ok. I accept to go a few steps back. Unfortunately I had even problems because of multiple monitors in a few cases. This is really a shame. I really hope such things become better in the future.

My review optinion:
Ubuntu: Feels very stable and polished. Nice! Unfortunately I didn't like the left bar on the screen. I don't like the way it works so I skipped ubuntu.
Mint: MATE looks very old so I decided to use Cinnamon. It sometimes looks a bit unprofessional or not polished, but was very nice to me!
openSUSE: Again skipped it very fast. I like yast, but I couldn't figure out to work with this new concept of desktop it has. It seems to be a KDE feature but I couldn't find a way to get a classical desktop here without the grouping feature.
Korora: It IS fedora with some stuff included. In fact: You can say that korora is for fedora, what MINT is for ubuntu. I liked it. However, I had problems with multiple monitors on this distro. Dunno why. Maybe solvable.
Elementary: Looks very nice, I liked it! Unfortunately it was very buggy.

I also see that this is very idiological stuff. This is a reason why Linux desktop is still not so popular. Too much idiology, imho too much distros at all.

It is a pity not to use suse longer because it may be a good distro. Just the desktop sucks for me. So I will probably go for MINT or Korora. Korora is unfortunately with a lower community. I could also get help from fedora community but I think it will be easier with MINT.

Best,
Fresh

just use this and forget the rest:

http://kaosx.us/

http://kaosx.us/gallery/

you asking TOO MUCH for free software !!!

I think you have cause and effect reversed.