A few days ago I promised a 50-page PDF "Getting Started ..." for LinuxMint. My memory was its usual poor self. The title is "Official User Guide Linux Mint" I have the Mate version.
http://www.linuxmint.com/documentati...glish_15.0.pdf
This is available in a number of languages. I use Mint 13, a LTS (Long Term Support) version. The next LTS version will be 17, to be issued this May (they say). The LTS versions are based on Ubuntu LTS versions.
About the first half of the "Guide" involves downloading and installing Mint. Don't let that frighten you. The rest involves actual use.
Since I had been using the Firefox browser and Thunderbird email for a long time, transition to Linux did not require relearning for these applications.
Most recent versions of Linux (including Ubuntu & Mint) come with the LibreOffice suite. This uses the open source code base of OpenOffice, which I have used for years. So there was essentially no learning required going from OpenOffice to LibreOffice. All the application names (word processor, spreadsheet, etc) are the same and the file extensions are the same. Since OpenOffice is "open source", the LibreOffice people could take the code without legal problems. Generally, the word processor, spreadsheet, etc, etc, of Open/LibreOffice can directly produce PDF without the need for other applications. Their defaults are the ISO standard ODF formats which MS "x" processors (docx...) can generally read - and the Open/Libre applications can read and write MS DOC, DOCX, etc., files.
A comparison, for what it's worth....
http://www.diffen.com/difference/Linux_Mint_vs_Ubuntu