Thank you so much, comrades! I am feeling pretty comfortable with linux mint, and now would like some suggestions for some absolutely necessary FOSS or free license software for the OS. So far I have the standard, Firefox, ThunderBird, LibreOffice, yada yada. Thank you again to everyone on the linux comm! 
BONUS: here's some command-line toys that are not useful or necessary, but are just real fun to take a look at especially if you're new to linux:
- cmatrix (does the matrix code rain thing)
- cowsay (ascii cow with speech bubble)
- sl (steam locomotive in your terminal)
- cbonsai (generate bonsai tree)
- neofetch (this one is actually very useful and will print system information in an aesthetically pleasing way)