So, the long-term support on my Mint 10 appears to have given up - many of the depositories are unavailable - so I've bitten the button and installed Mint 13.

Anything to avoid the insane user interfaces that are Ubuntu Unity, Redhat/Gnome3, and Windows 8... (we don't even consider Apple!)

First impressions - very nice indeed. They've maintained - with the new Cinnamon desktop - the good bits of Gnome 2 and Windows XP/7 and the installation was straight-forward.

I still have my default applications to install, but that's never been a problem before so I don't expect any nasties.

I also have it on our laptop now as test install. If the I like it then the main machine will get moved away from Ubuntu. I've kept that at the 10.04LTS so it has never had Unity on it. I did have 11.04/11.10 on the laptop for a bit but didn't keep them long (for rather obvious reasons).

I seem to have run into a bug: I mis-entered a PPA in the repository and now neither Software Manager nor Package Manager will run - at least the latter tells me what the issue is but shuts down immediately.

<edit> fixed by editing the /etc/apt/sources.list config file. You can't do that with windows!

You can't mis-enter a PPA in Windows either.