I came here to say pretty much the same thing, but found your post instead. I just made the jump this week. I’m running a Legion 5 Pro with 2 SSD’s, so I left Win11 on its drive and installed Mint on the other. They seem to be playing well together - no conflicts so far.
I’m pumped on how simple it actually was! I wish I’d have done it sooner…MS has been really irritating me lately so I finally went for it. Loving it so far!
Welcome! My main piece of advice to you is use your package manager and don’t just download software from your browser like you would on Windows. Installing software with a command line package manager is the superior way to do it—nothing to do with being a leet hackerman/woman using the terminal, it is just an easier way to keep all your software centrally up to date without having to individually update each one separately, and it’s faster to do in the terminal rather than bother with the bloat and slowness of a GUI. Generally, Windows teaches you a lot of bad computer habits you should try to unlearn. I think installing software from the web is the biggest Windows-based mistake I made when new to Linux.
I think more generally learn to use the command line, a lot of things they have guis for (eg burning an iso, mounting or formatting a drive, version control guis, etc) are completely doable from the command line and it’s faster and more reliable to just use Unix commands for these things than to rely on a potentially buggy or slow gui program.
After the initial learning curve when starting in Linux to solving advanced problemas that may or may not occur (will depend on Nvidia/exotic hardware/DE updates), you find it’s easier to solve these because there are questions and answers in the internet, than finding another way to remove Edge, Cortana and restore the look and feel of windows 7 after every major update in windows
I’m still running Windows 10 on my main PC because I have ~40 niche software needs and I haven’t had time to research Linux alternatives. But I’m running Linux on a number of the other machines I manage.
Speaking of which, is there a free software you’d recommend for video capture on Linux?
There is only 1 windows specific program that stopped me from moving over to Linux sooner but I just got it to work in Linux.
I could not get it to work with wine but luckily I found another way to run it.
@Gamers_Mate@doingthestuff if it is a software & not a game then shame cause VMs have been around since many decades, then again, you also can make a VM with GPU passthrough so even games are not a problem, unless it is an app like Pokemon Go that doesn't run on Virtualized hardware
It feels like I no longer have to play tug of war with microsoft with owning my own device.
It gets real funny when you use Linux for 6 months+ and then install windows in a virtual machine. The amount of shit you have to click no or skip on is astounding.
I only switched 5 months ago or so, but your comment is exactly the reaction whenever I use or update my wife’s windows pc. I used windows for ~30 years now, and was just “used to it” - but after only 5 months away, the bloat experience is unbelievable. Why did/do we put up with that?
I see windows users at work and they have clicked those popups so many times they they do it now without even thinking. But it looks really funny, they are interrupted constantly by Windows or apps wanting something :)
See this topic coming up was fresh for me as I installed windows last night to use USB passthrough for my keyboard. It took me about an hour to get Windows installed and to the desktop.
It was what, like 15 to get to Mint’s desktop for me.
I’ve been a Windows user since the 90s and only used Linux occasionally. But starting with Windows 10 this thing is becoming more and more difficult to manage. The unlimited amount of popups, changing settings randomly without asking, A/B testing on difficult computers or different accounts on the same Windows installation, some settings only appear after a while or opening/closing the software several times…
It’s so painful to deal with. I’ll probably switch completely to Linux soon when I have spare time.
What drive’s me crazy on my daughter’s Windows 10 laptop (Windows is required for her school) is there is a popup asking you to subscribe to OneDrive. It interrupts whatever you’re doing and you can only make it go away for a month. Even Apple doesn’t do that shit.
Oh it’s even worse than that! They try to replace your usual libraries with a one drive folder, which can cause some real fucking problems for users who don’t understand what one drive is
Don’t even get me fucking started at trying to explain sharepoint vs one drive
Adobe does something similar, except you’re already paying for an Adobe device anyway. But I remember saving a couple of files in Photoshop when I first took my former job and trying to find them later and being unable to until I realized that you had to tell it not to save in their cloud service because that was the default option.
I run Mint on my main PC. The final push was the near daily prodding to subscribe to 365 or use OneDrive or some shit. It’s annoying at best and coercive at worst when the system changes my settings without permission.
For the trouble I’ve had on Linux, it’s far less annoying, and it keeps getting better while Windows seems hell bent on getting worse. Thanks to Steam Deck all my games work with minimal tweaking. Works hard. Plays hard. Isn’t annoying. It’s hard not to love when it feels like it’s my computer again.
This October will mark my 30th year on Linux (got started with Red Hat 0.9 aka Halloween). I’ve always been able to say that Linux “works hard” but it took nearly thirty years for me to comfortably be able to say that Linux “plays hard”.
Awesome move. Welcome to Linux. Mint is a great daily driver. It just works. And when something goes wrong, you have the ability to poke around and see in detail what is happening, and fix it with the help of the excellent Linux community.
Not to mention the clear advantage of Linux not spying on you or serving you ads.
So I’ve been using Linux for close to 6 months now and I do have to admit I miss how easy it was to set up VR on PC. I don’t think there even is a virtual desktop application for Linux. I tried alvr but I guess something about my network didn’t allow the vr goggles to communicate with my PC. But even if that worked, it would still be a matter of luck whether the VR mods I would like to use actually work on Linux. Like I’m sure it would be a hassle to get content manager for assetto corsa to run properly. So I’ve been considering just putting windows on a small ssd that I can use for VR.
Right now I run a bunch of windows boxes at home and it’s super nice to be able to VPN to home and then RDP into them, the responsiveness is really solid.
I haven’t really found a comparable setup with Linux, I tried VNC but the sluggishness was real. I also tried RustDesk, but there were some weird shortcut key issues randomly.
Please pay very close attention to how Mint expects you to manage software. I haven’t used Mint in a very long time, but they should have new user docs that cover this. This is my advice for any distro (though there are some commonalities) - noobies can save themselves a LOT of headache if they take some time to be sure they understand how that distro expects users to manage software.
My second piece of unasked for advice - Mint-specific forums will be much more useful for any support questions you have than general Linux forums during the time when you are getting your feet wet. There are a lot of things that are the same between distros, but enough differences to make distro-specific advice valuable for new folks.
It could be, but I haven’t used it in at least a decade, so I can’t say. Agree though - it’s good to be plugged right into the support channels for a distro. I do remember that Mint always put a huge focus on being sure that noobies knew where to get help, and were aware of how things “worked” as much as they needed to be. I hope/assume this ethos has continued.
Yeah I remember asking this sort of meandering question about how Firefox was only showing blank pages, and someone shot back with “update your system clock” and it worked!??? 🤯 After that, I was like, guys magic is real because I just met a wizard
And if you can’t find an answer for a mint problem on a mint forum you might find an answer on an Ubuntu forum. In other words, add Linux mint to your search first and if that fails try Ubuntu instead. At least that has worked well for me over the last decade plus.
Add comment