Closing windows

As a long-term Windows user, I’m currently still on Windows 7 and am feeling the squeeze to upgrade, so I’ve decided on Linux.

It seems like Cinnamon and MATE are good options. According to its website, Cinnamon has a few more features and is more actively developed, but is not as fast or as stable as MATE. As a Windows power user, which do I choose? And why can’t there be one distro that is the best of both of these worlds?

What should I expect with this move? I am going to have to find replacements for Microsoft Office (I currently use Office 2007 and LibreOffice), Outlook, Photoshop CS and a few others. I am sure I’ll probably also run into difficulty finding drivers for my 10-yearold hardware (mobo, peripherals and so on). I also play video games. What should I expect with regard to game availability on Linux? I plan on dual booting with my current Windows 7 installation for now.

Liam Chandler

Neil says…

Go with Cinnamon – it’ll provide an excellent Windows 7-like experience and will offer the features you’d expect. You can always test them out from live media beforehand, too.

Open source application development has been transformative over the last decade. If you’ve used LibreOffice, you should know where you stand, as it’s an MS Office replacement. Thunderbird will replace Outlook beautifully. I’m a long-term Photoshop user and GIMP took me a while to transition to – you don’t realise how reliant you are on keyboard shortcuts and muscle memory for icons – but now I can run GIMP

from scratch, make basic edits and export almost in the time it takes Mac Photoshop CS to start up. It’s looking like GIMP 3.0 (out soon) is a great step forward.

Again, drivers shouldn’t be a huge issue. USB peripherals can cause problems, though most use

generic interfaces and thus drivers. You might have to search for Wi-Fi drivers, but generally Intel and AMD motherboards ‘just work’. Nvidia boards can be troublesome but even they aren’t too bad these days.

Games are the only sticking point but the Windows compatibility system Wine via Valve’s Proton implementation and Steam platform have vastly improved compatibility on Linux. You can look up specific games here: www.protondb.com.