Saw on the Linux Mint site - a desktop that looked like KDE. I thought LM was only Gnome. Is this a new distro to come out later? Did I see correctly that it is in beta right now?

Mint is based on Ubuntu. The Ubuntu default is Gnome, but you can install either Gnome or KDE. For example, I use Mepis (also based on Ubuntu) and it comes with KDE by default.

To my knowledge, Linux is not dependant on any GUI at all, thus why if you have the knowledge, you can run the whole OS and all options from a command line interface. If you don't like Gnome, I'd do as suggested above, Install Linux Mint, then install the KDE interface from the repositories, boot it to make sure thats what you want, then use Synaptic to uninstall Gnome. This has been suggested in some other threads, that it should be no problem.

Just curious, why not just install Kubuntu? Everything I've saw of the two OS's, is identical, except Linux Mint installs almost all multimedia codecs "out of the box". That however, is no huge issue, as a search here or on Google, will tell you how to do that in Kubuntu.

Good luck

IGF

Thanks for the good info, I'll look into all this.