My computer is an old horse - it has 1.8Ghz dual core (Core2) and 4GB RAM, and Cinnamon runs great on it. So no worries really. That's a good thing about Linux, there's so much less bloat that things just run way faster than on Windows.
YAFU wrote:
It is a curious thing that most distros we have recommended are based on the "evil Ubuntu" or uses it's repositories.
The evil parts of Ubuntu are mostly in the interface, Unity (at least for now... Mir is a horrible idea). And the software in the repositories is at least 90% not made by Ubuntu either. I like to look at it like, Mint (and maybe other derivatives, like Kubuntu or Lubuntu) really just take the good parts of Ubuntu and remove all the stupidity.
ofnuts wrote:
All distros are based on the same code... What makes a distro is the compromise between "leading-edge-ness" and stability.
Well, not exactly. The kernel is largely the same (apart from distro-specific patches), the toolchain and userland tools are largely the same - although even there are some differences now, eg. systemd/sysvinit/upstart - but the most differences come from different package management schemes, whether they use apt or rpm or something else, and the software selection. So it's not exactly a one-dimensional spectrum.