Laptop advice

[Suff]

I wish you joy. I don't like the whole mess.

Gnome or KDE. Well I hate Gnome because I hate the Mac interface. But apps are written for interfaces and there are more Gnome apps than KDE. Then the package managers. RPM, for redhat clones, apt-get for Debian. Great until you find that the creators of that piece of software you want only created it in RPM and now you have to get a rpm installer for your apt-get system. Then you find that the version you want is lower than the current one and (in my case), the squashfs tool isn't backward compatible and you have to find the old one, which is not there. So you start to lose the will to live.

All of that being total and complete Swahili to a non computer geek but you can't live with Linux without understanding these things....

So I stick to windows where the chances of my hardware driver being supplied in source code I have to compile is less than 0.

Sorry for the side discussion. Kaz, the biggest gain for me with 8.1 over 8 was that I could boot into the desktop and avoid that truly horrible and shoddy start screen.....