Hi All, I'm slightly above a user level now. My computer is office equipment. Am not in an IT career. Was a tech back in the DOS and Win 3.x and Win 95 days. Been such a happy user of Fedora and Ubuntu for the past ~9 years. Now feeling pretty disgusted and fed up with all things Linux. Why? Just spent EVERY spare moment of the last 2 weeks just trying to get the current versions of 3 popular Linux distros to work on my new hardware system. Failure! Just built 2 matching desktop boxes: Motherboards: Gigabyte GA-B85m-HD3 CPUs: Intel (quad) Core i5 model 4440 at 3.1 GHz Memories: Corsair Value Select 8GB DDR3, single bank Disks: Western Digital WD3200BUDT 320gb SATA Wifi: ASUS PCE-N15 PCI-E Adapter They pass all the hardware tests with flying colours. (1) I like the old Ubuntu 10.4 on my laptop, so first I installed Ubuntu 14.04.1 on the above desktops: Wifi dies or slows down after a few minutes, so always rebooting. init 1 - crashes system, instead of shutting down to single user. telinit 1 - does the same thing. shutdown now - does the same thing. Unity sucks, heard of MATE, couldn't install (above wifi problems). Tried to dual-boot with WinXP-64. Microsoft's probable sabotage. Sent Q's to relevant forums on all the above, no good replies. Googled my brains out trying to find solutions, nothing worked. (2) Then tried Mint 17 MATE (Everyone's obsessed with Mint, and calling Ubuntu obsolete.): Wifi dies or slows down after a few minutes, so always rebooting. init 1 - crashes system, instead of shutting down to single user. telinit 1 - does the same thing. shutdown now - does the same thing. Sent Q's to relevant forums on all the above, no good replies. Googled my brains out trying to find solutions, nothing worked. (3) THEN tried Debian 7.6 (If Mint depends on Ubuntu, which depends on Debian... then Debian must be a few months ahead of the others on certain bug fixes [e.g. Dropping down to single user mode, and the wifi glitch].): Cryptic, confusing and counter-intuitive install process. Very slow install -- repeatedly seizing up - fixated on my USB mouse! Insisted on a UEFI booting system. Crashed install -- Failed download of updates, when told not to try. First "successful" (?) install failed to boot up. Second "successful" (?) install has no GUI, and can't apt-get GUI. But at least Debian asked me during the install to provide... rtl8192cfw.bin and rtl8168e-3.fw ... in regards to my wifi adapter. This MAY be a hint to why Ubuntu and Mint can't stay online for more than a few minutes per boot-up. But I've got NO idea how to get either of those two files installed into Ubuntu or Mint -- particularly as how the second one is embedded inside a ".deb" file! Words of useful advice =greatly= appreciated. Carl Bayswater, Victoria