About a year and a half ago, I bought a used Thinkpad to comfortably type on while lying in bed like a fat sack of crap. It seemed like a good opportunity to dabble in Linux, so I considered dual booting Windows 10 Professional with Linux Mint Cinnamon. Windows froze for like 10 hours while installing security updates, which peeved me so badly I just installed Linux over it entirely.

My first observation was that the laptop ran considerably less hotter. The fan no longer sounded like it was gonna takeoff on an airstrip. I was surprised by how small system packages could be for applications, like only a couple megabytes large. It was a laptop with only so much disk space, so I wasn't about to install flatpaks with several gigabytes worth of dependencies, even if they might be shared with other future installed flatpaks. Most of the time, if I needed something more up to date, there was an appimage available anyway. I much prefer using those since they're portable, significantly take less space, and don't require actually installing anything, assuming the developers didn't forget to include any necessary library packages (it always happens with the programs I want to use the most, thinking about it...).

Customizing the system's settings didn't feel like pulling hairs, either. Unlike Windows, I didn't need to edit the fucking registry just to make those changes stick, especially not after downloading and installing an update. Speaking of updates, it is so much faster to do so on Linux. I can CHOOSE to download and install package and kernel updates in about a couple minutes or less compared to Windows forcing an update down my throat at like 100 kbps. It's also really nice that it has a lot of driver support for almost every peripheral in existence. I plugged in my old Wacom Bamboo tablet and it just worked. A printer connected to the network just works. Everything just works.

That said, it was kind of by circumstance that the laptop became my daily driver. Originally, its only intended use was word processing, reading PDFs, and maybe a little photo editing or something on the side. My Windows 11 desktop PC kept bluescreening, so I had to start using Linux Mint for everything I typically did. Video editing, 3D modeling, game development, etc.

I've always been a FOSS user, so I was able to install and use most of the programs I frequently used no problem. Adobe's software was out of the question, however. Unlaunchable with both Wine and Bottles, I had to shelve some old project files. Now, I'm a GIMP truther, but honestly, seeing those videos of people using it for the first time, I think they'd be much better off using Photopea instead if they're already familiar with Photoshop, even if it isn't open source. It has almost 1:1 parity in features, and I way prefer using Photoshop for typography than GIMP.

Also, a word to the wise, just add a Windows executable as a non-Steam game to your Steam library and use Proton to run it. It's way less of a hassle to get it running than Wine some of the time.

Recently, the charging port on the laptop went kaput, so I got a new Windows 11 computer. I'll tell ya, even though it came pre-setup with a local account, debloating and disabling all the telemetry and bullshit settings was aggravating as hell. Even weeks later, I'm still finding things to disable. I put up with the stupid window auto layout snapping thing for far too long. And they changed the start menu for some fucking reason?? It used to be resizeable, and the tiles were on the right side of the apps list. Now there's this stupid fucking recommended section taking up the whole space at the bottom that you can't even entirely get rid of. They're apparently overhauling it again that removes it in a future update, and that news was 4 months ago already. I'm not even big on "ricing" my Linux desktop environment, but I appreciate the control over it, and the fucking consistency and sanity of the default design choices.

And speaking of sane defaults, the suite of applications that come pre-installed on Linux Mint are all useful and run really well. It's as if the developers actually use them on a daily basis. The default image viewer actually can view almost all image types. I don't even mind WebP files anymore, they actually open and animate on Linux. The default image viewer on Windows gets increasingly more dogshit with every update they make to it, I just replaced it outright with JPEGView. Windows' default media player: runs like horseshit, replaced it with VLC. Notepad kept distracting me with these stupid toast notifications about generating writing ideas with Copilot. FUCK OFF, get replaced with Notepad++. Windows out of the box is so user hostile, I wish I could strangle each and every person responsible at Microsoft HQ for shitting it out.

So yeah, unless you have a very good reason to stick with Windows, like having to use some piece of software that can't be run on Linux, I'd recommend making the switch. I'm not a distro-hopper so Mint Cinnamon is my only experience. There might be some other distro out that that personally gels with you better. My computer wiz friend recommends Tuxedo OS for non-tech savvy folks.