[Rockin Robbins]

I hate to burst everyone's bubble, but there is plenty of ground that is not covered by Windows GUI. We'll get to that in a minute.

But first, Linux Mint is not a GUI. Linux Mint can use the entire family of GUIs that any Linux can use. Mint was the first Ubuntu derivative to use the MATE desktop, and MATE is nothing but an implementation of something that resembles the GNOME 2 desktop as faithfully as it can. It is NOT advanced, it is a 2006 GUI. It is built on the precept of organizing an operating system by the use of a menu tree. It works very well, but not better than LXDE or GNOME 2 or Lubuntu or XFCE or Cinnamon, all adaptations of the original GNOME 2 concept: menu based operating systems. They work well. They are not advanced. They are old fashioned and I like 'em that way.

If you want an advanced system you want KDE Plasma. Now THAT's an advanced GUI. It looks incredible. It works well, although there's a little paradigm warp you have to get your brain to conform to. When someone sees you running a computer with KDE Plasma they say WOW! What's that? KDE might be ahead of the curve right now with wow factor actually ahead of its efficiency but who cares?

GNOME 3 is also a beautiful GUI, set up like a smart phone before there ever WERE smart phones. Fabulous looking icons, lots of sorting and filtering options: it is what Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 copied just enough to be barely functional about and twice as much again. GNOME 3 is what Windows wants to be when and if it grows up.

Then there's Canonical's Unity, the GUI that everybody loved to hate. Canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu, and they wanted a GUI all their own, which no Linux distro really has or had. And when it first came out it was an ugly unmitigated disaster. That's where Mint, Peppermint, Elementary OS and a host of other Ubuntu derivatives came from: Unity hate. But you can install any GUI in Ubuntu, so who cares?

Why have a lesser derivative, like Mint, when you can have the much better supported Ubuntu and install the GUI of your choice. Mint without the Ubuntu repositories is trash. What makes the Ubuntu derivatives great is their ability to use the Ubuntu and Debian repositories, the largest, most comprehensive and best policed and maintained software repositories in the world.

So Ubuntu chooses the Nautilus file manager. KDE in any distribution normally uses Dolphin. LXDE uses the PCMan File Manager. OpenBox uses Thunar. I like 'em all. There are lots of them and people define their Linux distribution partly by which file manager they picked. Who cares? I can use any file manager in any distribution!

Same with web browser, text editor, screen compositor, sound system, every aspect of the operating system is just a software choice. You are ALWAYS free to make your own choices. Linux is all about freedom to make choices and that makes arguments about which distribution you run a bit silly.

But let's blow the lid off Windows GUI being all inclusive. It is no more inclusive than Linux GUIs and maybe less so. Lets take something as simple as copying a directory tree. Windows falls down and can't get up. I was copying a directory tree for a Minecraft save from Windows to Ubuntu with Windows Explorer. The tree goes dozens of layers deep and has dozens of files per directory. Windows file manager takes many hours to copy about 40 megabytes because it chokes on the directory tree. The only solution is either to boot up Linux or go the the command window and do an xcopy function from the command line. What takes many hours in Windows happens in fifteen minutes from the command line.

That's only a simple example. Most registration changes are command line operations that can't be done from the GUI. At best you make your script in Notebook and then execute the script on the command line. This fantasy that Windows GUI is all inclusive is just silly. Can you write a GUI shell for anything you want to do on the command line? Sure. For Windows and Linux that is true.

But at least in Linux, there is an underlying process that can be understood and manipulated. You aren't stuck using an opaque GUI that gives you no idea what is going on. Let me illustrate.

A friend of mine at work brought in his laptop with Windows 7 on it. It was slow as can be and he was about to drop it off a cliff but cliffs are illegal in Florida so he brought it to me. I asked him what he did with the computer and when he said browsed the web, listened to music, e-mail and forums I told him he was a perfect candidate for Linux.

So I wiped his system clean, divided it in two and gave him an Ubuntu/Windows dual installation with GRUB bootup to choose between the two operating systems. First boot into Ubuntu. Ubuntu tells you in text on screen every step it does during the boot process and the first line told all: Computer running too hot, throttling CPU. Bingo! His computer didn't run slow because it was full of malware, it was running hot and the CPU was protecting itself! Windows didn't say crap about it. To be fair, we could have installed software that would have sniffed that one out.

But Ubuntu told him before the operating system was even started! It was as simple matter to double the speed of his machine. He was totally sold on Linux in 20 seconds, on the first boot before the operating system was even running.

Why? The command line, which is always underpinning whatever GUI you are running. Windows ran from that and we can trace the atrophy of Windows from the elimination of DOS. When somebody brings a Windows computer to me with problems the first thing I do is plug in a Linux Live CD and find out what the story is. It's that superior.

With Windows you run the aptly named Wizard and it works or not. With Linux you run the diagnostic/repair program and it tells you what is wrong, what it proposes to do and you choose. Windows System Repair disk is a cruel joke that keeps you in the dark and feeds you stuff that comes out the back end of cows. "The system may reboot several times while the repair is in process. If the repair works you can restart your system normally after that." And you'll never know the first thing the repair routine tried to do so you can figure out something else if it doesn't work. That because it is the GUI which is the black box, not the command line. You are afraid of the wrong thing.