I have Mint 4.0 installed on a test machine. It’s fairly nice (I like it better than Ubuntu), although I don’t like the Gnome desktop. It installed smoothly alongside my Mepis partition. Haven’t tried any of the wireless setup stuff. I installed VirtualBox and have a virtual WinXP installation running. There’s a front-end to Wine called Wine-Doors that only sort-of works (haven’t had too much luck with Wine anyway, so it doesn’t surprise me). A couple of other applications won’t start for some reason (haven’t tried to figure out why yet); other than that, it’s pretty OK.
I have downloaded some of those run-from-CD/DVD versions of Linux and did the VMware virtual window for a few others.
The problem with Linux is that there are too many versions (around a dozen), which is confusing.
I also tried out the VMware virtual window. It worked, sort of, but several of the VM-specific programs said they needed upgrading, but would not connect to the Internet link to upgrade. The VMware virtual window was about like run-from-CD — pretty to look at, but it wouldn’t ‘read’ data on the hard drive outside of the virtual window, and anything saved inside the virtual windows was erased when the window as closed.
I have a standard Kworld pctv card that none of the versions of Linux have recognized. They sort of see it, but they won’t/can’t run the drivers to make it actually work.