people will tell you lots of things. if you just do basic stuff like web browsing, email, poal, word processing, etc... basically any linux distro will do that for you. its a different way of thinking. for example, you will use a package manager to install most of your software. its like an app store before app stores existed. best browser to use is whatever comes with your distro. the real best browser to use is google chrome. some open source browsers dont have the money to pay for licenses to play specific video codecs on the web. there is probably a work around, its probably technical. i had to use chrome. but you can't just install chrome from your package manager. you will have to add it to your sources.list and use something like dpkg to extract and install it. all this is from the terminal emulator AKA command line. no double click the .exe for you. so there is definitely a learning curve. take all this with a grain of salt because i am by no means a linux pro. this is just the stuff i learned that isn't really intuitive from someone coming over from windows. my advice: install your mint from a live CD or bootable USB. fuck around with it until you inevitably break it. keep reinstalling and learn from your mistakes. oh, and linux has the best connect four game against the pc. i swear. you don't need to know anything to have it whip your ass on hard.