The “Newbie” you are referring to would be Cinnamon... but VERY resource heavy, beautiful eye-candy..also, AFAIK 8as far as I know), all Linux have the terminal/command line option.
Kind of like me being able to open up the DOS Box back before XP.. I could still use the previous (prior to Win) options to have control of my own darn PC (ME doesn’t count.. not sure what the heck ME was :p).
I STILL recommend you trying out KDE (doesn’t have to be Mint).. Will take some getting used to, but easy to learn if you have the patience.. about a week or less. AND, you have the control that almost no other distro gives you (except for XFCE, which is more basic knowledge of PC.. DEF not for beginners (WIN, nor DOS, nor Mac... btw, Mac is based on Unix... they won’t even admit that :p).
Agreed. I have used KDE before for most of my previous playing/trying. I also used an early KDE iteration on both AIX and HPUX. I played with Gnome once - didn’t like it.
Really, I guess what I want is a Win7-like ease of use without the Win problems.... and more control over the system when necessary.
Appreciate the heads-up about the Mint pkg control options.