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^ I was going to suggest EXACTLY the same thing.

I've now been using Linux as a primary desktop for almost 4 months. I recently considered moving back to Windows as the boot OS. Right now I really don't want to do that!

I bought a very cheap copy of Windows 7 Pro from a seller on Ebay ($30) and installed and activated it as a VM under VirtualBox. I need Win7 for Quickbooks, Quicken, and, soon, TurboTax.

Linux has MANY UI and usability quirks that turn me into a raging madman. Also I insist against what aspies may declare, that Linux's UI is consistently slower than Windows. Just not as crisp.

But above all the core of Linux is *predictability*. No forced-upgrade bullshit and no continual battle for my machine and data against Microsoft's fiat imperatives.

Pxsant here has criticized my own criticism of Linux and claims that everything I've stated is off base, that Linux is perfectly reliable and stable and user-friendly. So that's a differing opinion.

I am trying to remember which version of Mint you installed.  I think it was XFCE right?   If so, that might account for the issues you have seen.  XFCE is the least stable of the three common versions (Cinnamon, Mate and XFCE) available for Mint.    My personal favorite is actually Mate.   I like the Mate menu system better than the Cinnamon menu system.  Both Cinnamon and Mate are very stable.

VirtualBox is a great tool.   I have Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 10 all running in VM's on my main Linux Mint mate box.

I am amazed they cannot standardize on Linux and come up with something really idiot-proof.

To lock your XFCE desktop to prevent XFCE from making changes to it --

sudo chattr +i ~/.config/xfce4/desktop/*

For example, this prevents XFCE from automatically re-arranging the position of desktop icons.

If you want to make changes to the desktop, then you have to set the immutable bit (i) back to off --

sudo chattr -i ~/.config/xfce4/desktop/*

To verify status of the immutable bit --

sudo lsattr ~/.config/xfce4/desktop/*

Maybe this can help the stability of your XFCE desktop.

Gorn, I wonder if trying the MATE desktop might be useful. Maybe just create a bootable USB memory stick with Mint / MATE and try it for a while and see if it addresses the problems you've experienced with XFCE?

Or, alternatively, install MINT / MATE as a guest in your virtual machine?

The goal would be to get a feel for whether it might prove better for you than XFCE, without having to change your existing system unless MATE really proves better for you.

Anyway, just an idea... one you might well have already thought of.

After all of these issues I've had that contradict what the experts here have stated, anyone says to me about comparative merits of X vs Y on Linux means anything or has any credibility, so I am loathe to waste my time even more.

I run Xfce because I was told by you guys it was the fastest UI. Things can still be slow in launching.  I'm not going to regress from that.

As far as the VM - UHHH no! I want something simple and reliable, not another !@^&( virtual machine I have to boot in order to do certain work.

I already have that (and accept that) with Windows ware.

To lock your XFCE desktop to prevent XFCE from making changes to it --
...
Maybe this can help the stability of your XFCE desktop.

REALLY?

That will be my "work flow" , non flow, Linux interrupting me with error messages.

So if I do ANYTHING at the UI level that would affect these settings, it WILL then error out or crash programs. I'll drag an icon on the desktop and get a big ugly error box when I release.

God damn does that sound lame.   Much more so than the occasional unnecessary but FOSS programmer initiated crash I get now.

Completely unacceptable.   What you are stating is an absolute admission of defeat, that the UI *IS* buggy so I have to patch around it with a lame hack.

The UI should just be stable, period, and not mother-f***ing change things on me or corrupt shit because it's crap software (which it may be.)

I shouldn't have to put the UI in read only mode to get work done.

I still don't think you or Pxsant sit in a Linux desktop session 8+ hours a day and do writing or programming continuously, or that either of you pay very close attention to how the flow of work on the keyboard goes.

Because if  you did you would understand that things launch slowly, that the UI gets messed up randomly, that certain subtle settings that assist your workflow get lost in Linux.

Linux inferior to Windows at the UI, an absolute truism.

PS: NOTHING PERSONAL in the above. You guys take a certain position in these discussions that I completely disagree with based upon direct experience. 

There's sort of a crudeness, for want of a more politic work, with the opinions of some very technical and otherwise extremely knowledgeable IT people when they are confronted with issues in the "softer" areas like UI. IT people who don't live inside content creation tasks tend to fluff off truly irritating issues as though they should be considered insignificant.

Kind of the same idea as a programmer that tells you that assembly language is totally good enough and you need nothing better, because at least you don't have to flip front panel switches to store a boot loader.

If I have used the same session of Windows in a Virtualbox VM a few times - meaning once I started it, I close the session for now by saving rather than shutting down Windows in the guest -

Certain integration settings are lost, even though they appear in the settings dialog for that VM,

Bi-directional copy and paste is lost. I RELY ON THAT. I may have a browser session in Linux (which I treat as a primary desktop) and I copy (say) a confirmation code from a banking website. I want to then paste that into Quickbooks inside the VM. NOPE. What gets pasted in the Windows VM is the trash in the local VM's clipboard. NOT the clipboard from the Linux desktop.

I wind up creating a temp file in the shared files in Linux, saving the text, and reading it in the VM and copying and pasting that using Notepad.

To get bidirectional clipboards working again I have to shut down the Windows VM (time consuming) and reboot the guest.

Not a serious functional limitation but clearly the result of poor testing and bugs.

Just now I found that Chromium decided to create duplicates of every single one of my bookmarks. I have bookmark folders along the menu labeled things like "My Stuff", "Links", "Search". Each one had an additional copy. So two "My Stuff" menus, etc.

At least they are side by side with the originals (no idea which one is "original") to make deleting a bit easier.

I assume it's a Linux thing.

The fun never ends with this amateurish shitware.

I started to enumerate all of the mostly little but consistent irritations that Linux foists on me. And these posts cover most of the misbehaviors I've found.

Hey, I said some good things, too.

To bottom line my misanthropic rant above:

The writers of FOSS and also "really serious" IT people who support this stuff commercially for a living seem to have big blind spots about the day to day usability.

I'll give you a concrete example which I suspect won't make any sense to you, or perhaps it will:

I am typing a sentence. The cursor is at the end of the line. I want to select the line and cut it and paste it somewhere else.

My fingers are trained to: hold down the CONTROL key and press the KEYPAD HOME key simultaneously. The CTRL key puts the cursor movement into "select" mode. The HOME key moves the "selecting" cursor to the start of the line. The same as holding down the mouse and sweeping across the sentence.

I've been doing this for 20+ years. It is a shortcut, MUCH faster than any alternative key or mouse sequence for that action, and I do that and similar edits a lot.

By default when I do this "key chord" in Mint, it types a digit 7 even when numlock is off. IT SCREWS ME THE F&(& UP.

A naive techie would say "oh golly gee why does that matter? Do it a different way. I don't care about writing. Hah hah."

It's the typing equivalent to me of saying "ok, now you will try to run wearing slippers, across a pool of Crisco oil on a basketball court."

Tourette's until I figured out how to force Linux to do this the right way.  It honestly took me 3 hours to find how to make that work in Linux.

The writers of FOSS don't seem to take heavy commercial users seriously at the UI end. Features aren't stable, they aren't customized consistently in one place, and Linux only makes a deceptively superficial attempt to work like Windows.

It's small scale sloppiness, the micro version of why (for example) there will never be serious and usable financial software produced by FOSS heads.

"After all, you could have a front panel flipping switches" the geeks who have the power to make this right would say.