Wife and I are being nerdy this morning. She's teaching me how to program the DirecTV Genie (also nice search and other features like built-in CC) while I'm teaching her how to use Linux Mint and showing her the newer LibreOffice (we've used OpenOffice in XP and Win7 for years).

I've tried all four desktop flavors of Mint (Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce and KDE) and I think now I like KDE best, a very thought out and elegant design, IMO. But really, after so many installs [rather, live CD runs] of the same distro with a different desktop, they're all pretty much the same. Also playing with DSL (Damn Small Linux), BunsenLabs, TinyCore, etc. with varying degrees of success. Downloaded FreeBSD last night, will check that one out as well.

Mint (like Ubuntu) is one of the more user friendly versions of Linux, so I'll stick with it for now. The plan is to retire our Win7 laptop (use it only for testing) and to get a new laptop and a new desktop, both for Linux. My new desktop will not have online capability (I'll remove whatever I need to) so I'll need to learn how to transfer downloads (updates and programs) from the laptop to the desktop. Right now I'm working on Linux/XP dual-booting as I also plan to keep a 32-bit version of whatever Linux I'm using on my older desktops. I still use WinXP heavily (Win2k for CAD work, XP for iTunes, external drive management, etc.) so I have some time to make the full transition from XP/7 to Linux (while always keeping a Win2k workstation).

There's a very old-school Unix GUI called "Motif" that I've always loved, since MicroStation V4 and 5 ported to MS-DOS, and I'll be looking for it once I get use to the standard GUI.