Open Keyboard settings and add application/custom shortcuts:

• Super/Win+E key for File Manager: thunar is the default in Linux Mint
• Ctrl+Shift+Esc for Task Manager: install gnome-system-monitor first

Thunar file manager has the location/address shown as buttons. Use shortcut Ctrl+L to enable typing.

To move along GUI tabs, use Ctrl+PageUp/Down in Linux instead of Ctrl+(Shift)+Tab in Windows.

To expand/contract GUI trees, use Shift+Left/Right instead of simply Left/Right in Windows

Most Linux come with Samba Client (smbclient) installed that allows you to access Windows shares, the Samba Server is typically not installed by default, therefore you will need to do more work to share Linux folders with Windows. Here are the tools for a more complete experience:

• Smb4k for viewing network shares (or use smbtree)
• Nemo-share enables right-click to share in Cinnamon’s default file manager (nemo)

For some reason, after installing and uninstalling samba and smbclient a few times, Linux Mint stopped connecting to Windows computer (yet other SMB running MX linux can be accessed fine), despite this worked fine out of the box.

Turns out it’s this flaw (not in MX linux) that it cannot negotiate with newer SMB versions that might have been addressed but it can stuck being unable to negotiate with Windows 7 (it has SMB1 and SMB2 enabled) under certain conditions. After placing “client max protocol = NT1” in smb.conf and reboot, it worked, then I removed the line and reboot and it still worked afterwards. Weird!

Linux Mint 19 also does not resolve local hostnames from DNS right out of the box (also the live CD boot) because it came with systemd-resolve which does not handle local hostnames resolution right away.