Yep, I seem to spend an awfully long time downloading each .iso.

Be interesting to hear how you get on, oxie.

I've yet to try VB in Windows - not sure my ancient XP equipment could handle the excitement, to be honest.

What's nice about Mint is that if your virtual machine's not up to Cinnamon, it simply resorts to the Gnome 2-like "fallback."

I have great difficulty with VB now, as a result of my very poor graphics capability.

And W8 simply won't install in VB unless the host computer's CPU is capable of virtualisation. Which none of mine seems to be.

The MATE version is nice on older machines, and I think is what I will have to replace - 9 with on this old warhorse if it's still running next year. It simply can't handle Cinnamon.

Posting earlier than usual, as I see we're to blessed with changes later on. (I assume "going live"means "becoming effective." Wish I could overcome my aversion to jargonistic managment duck-speak. "Roll out"? You roll a new aeroplane out of the hangar. You roll out the barrel. You introduce everything else. 24/7 appears to mean "full time." "Input" as a verb might be technically correct for the entry of data into a computer, but applied to entering passwords and such is pushing it. Although I realise there is now no noun that can't be verbed. And so on...)

Let's hope for real improvements. There's been a lot of fiddling going on over the last couple of weeks, and it would be great if it all culminated in a pleasanter and more usable site. (And if pages would actually finish loading on my blessed computers.)

Back on-topic - let us know how you get on, Oxie. I have -13/Maya on a laptop, and generally really like what I see. Impressively low resource use, at least as quick as -9 and although mine is slow to boot, it shuts down in no time.