Some experiences switching to Linux Mint

9h hey, I did that just yesterday. I'm learning h9w t9 use it t99. Eventually I want t9 6e a6le t9 run Pesterchum pr9perly 9n it t99.

@blorbopsychiatrist

Oh yeah? That does sound pretty neat. I wonder if there's a (relatively) easy way to customize the desktop to look like one you'd find in Homestuck proper lol.

im sorry to hear about your troubles with installing, that sounds horrible. ive been seriously considering switching to linux myself for a while now, since im sure ill have to get a new computer at some point. but im still not convinced it wouldnt be better to just use windows 11 with some debloating software... what would you say does make linux worth all of that?

@jadebot Fundamentally what makes Linux worth the hassle of installing it, is that actually using it is unbelievably user-friendly. Unlike Windows which goes out of its way to pretend to be a magical black box (and thus, when things inevitably go wrong because Windows is a buggy mess, it makes it really fucking painful to diagnose and fix), a Linux system bares its soul to you. It's made of text files. A fair bit of customization boils down to literally just editing relevant text files, or using graphical utilities that edit the text files for you. (Actually, one of the core design principles is that even parts of the system that aren't actually files on disc, like network sockets, can be read from and written to as if they were files.)

All the practical advantages of Linux (easy to customize, command-line scripting is super easy and also something you never have to touch unless you want to, support is far more robust) basically flow directly from the fact that the system is extremely convenient for the end user to modify as they want.

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.

@sharkalien

Fancy seeing you on the forums! So, honestly, I did write this post when I was kind of frustrated with a lot of things going wrong, but frankly a lot of it was inexperience on my end with the whole process and currently I'm feeling much better about it. It's really nice to hear your opinion on not only Linux, but Linux Mint Cinnamon, which is precisely the version I'm running right now.

I have to say by now with a clearer mind, I can honestly agree with what you've said here. For me, I already have a pretty sizable and strong PC since I initially got it a few years ago to get into high-end gaming (but come to find out I have the most fun these days with writing, drawing, and composing music), but even then, I notice Linux Mint seeming to run on my PC much easier than Windows 10 did. It used to flare up the fans over things often; not too much mind you, but enough to be noticeable, but yet with Mint, I've rarely heard them.

I don't have too terribly much to say about the settings here in Mint, I was never too in depth with settings on Windows to compare the two, although I could point out that I can't seem to disable "Middle click to paste selection" on Mint despite that being an option, lol. Ah well, I suppose it's not a bad thing really, useful in the case of some terminal things sometimes.

I am an enjoyer of FOSS myself, for example, the DAW I've used since 2017 is LMMS, a FOSS software that, funnily enough, is native to Linux (that's what the L in it stands for, after all), but I was one of the odd few who would use it on Windows. Overall a great program, and I'm happy to see there seems to be a whole software repository dedicated to FOSS or other free programs on Mint, it's been fun browsing through tons of things and seeing what there is.

The trick with Steam sounds wonderful really, though I've not had luck either time I've tried to run something through it. That being said, I've been able to run nearly all Steam programs in my library just fine, it's pretty great.

I think I won't consider moving to Windows 11 any time soon. I thought Windows 10 was fine enough for the purposes I needed it for, but now is a new chapter in my computer life, and, while yes, I did find the whole course of Linux's installation quite stressful, I think it might have been worth it in the end after all, despite my original post. Hopefully some others who happen upon this thread might consider, at the very least, Linux Mint to be worth giving a look.

> I can't seem to disable "Middle click to paste selection" on Mint despite that being an option

Ah yeah, that was the case for me, too. I just figured it might've been because of my hardware being a laptop trackpad instead of a regular mouse.

middle click pasting is kind of a funky holdover from some software stuff, there's usually options to handle it but i have to confess i'm not that well versed in mint and thereabouts

as for customization, certain other environments (xfce) are kind of comedically customizable, to the point that the window border decorations and thereabouts are configured via Literal ASCII Art which can be anywhere from expressive to. horrifying

This is the theme we're currently using for our desktop in that front; tragically it's really hard to find good themes without making them for yourself because there's like one site that has a variant for like every window manager and desktop theming system under the sun that purports to be a hub for hosting said themes, and they all have the same completely unusable interface for scrolling through what end up being the most uninteresting themes known to man anyways :(

ive been considering my options again since i made my reply, and i think ive finally made up my mind to go with linux mint. youre probably right that windows 11 isnt worth it, i think i will be much happier committing to linux in the long run. thank you for this interesting discussion!