Re: Mint is great but ...
I switched from Windows 7, and after much researching choose Mint 12 Cinnamon. When Mint 13 came out, I upgraded to that. My biggest complaints pre Mint 14 is twofold. It is a b*tch installing a printer. For some reason, the Add Printer function is broken in Ubuntu, therefore it is also broken in Mint 12. It is also broken in Mint 13, and I found out in Mint 14. In order to install a printer, you have to do a search for how to use CUPS, and install the printer via the CUPS html interface.
My other complaint pre Mint 14, is the lack of simulated 5.1 surround sound using 5.1 surround speakrs and a on board sound card. In Windows 7, when I play Dark Side of the Moon, it sounds like a different instrument from each speaker with the voice coming from the middle speaker. In Mint, using the same setup, the sound is all combined and comes from all surround sound speakers.
Another big issue that has come up in Mint 14, and a lot of the newer Linux distros, including Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Mageia etc., is that they have all gone to X.Org 1.13 or greater, which does not work with an AMD/ATI HD Radeon graphics card 4XXX or earlier, which both my laptop (which is just a couple of years old) and my desktop both have. The proprietry AMD drivers for that chipset only work with X.Org 1.12 or earlier, and has AMD has made those legacy drivers, there is little chance of there being an update. Yes, there are solutions to roll back X.Org to 1.12, but they do not always work (didn't for me). I need the proprietry drivers on my laptop in order to get sound to work over HDMI to my sound system and HDTV which I have connected to it.
However, contrary to what I said above regarding 5.1 surround sound, when I play a 2 channel song from my laptop to my sound system over HDMI, it does play in simulated 5.1 surround sound, which I like.