I didn’t realise just how much better it would be. Like holy shit everything works. I have had very few problems that weren’t very easily fixed.
Everything that windows did, this thing can usually do better. And the things it can’t do better, it can do just as good.
Things I’ve noticed:
Mint and Linux in general use a logic that gels with me way more than modern Windows. Even though Mint is technically a very simple distro, it’s still waaaay better than what I was used to. Terminal commands are easy to learn and the way Mint is organised is great for example (how do I word this?) if I want to do something I don’t have to guess which submenu the OS is hiding it behind like in Windows. Like if I want to look at the health of my disc, it’s right there under “discs” and it tells me everything about it from the temperature to how many bad partitions it has. If I want to flash something to a USB its a fucking built in option when you right click, something I had to download a program for in Windows. If I want to use a printer, Mint just connects and prints, on windows HP or whatever company will ask you to download their personal software suite and do it that way. There are soooo many unnecessary programs companies push on Windows owners.
What brought this home is recently I bought my parents a new mouse as a gift because they complained theirs wasn’t working well anymore. I got them a blutooth Logitech mouse, nothing crazy, and I try to connect it to their laptop for them. Windows makes you go though a couple of menus to do this but whatever it’s not too bad. A popup comes up after like 10 minutes after I was about to walk away because this is a slow old computer. Logitech wants me to download and log into their software suite for a fucking mouse. Lmao. So anyway, after week I get a call from the parent that owns the laptop, the mouse isn’t working anymore. I take a look at it next time I visit and sure enough it doesn’t work. I take out my laptop. I right click the Bluetooth icon and click search. It finds the mouse, I tell it to connect. It works fine.
Now I disconnect it from my Bluetooth try to reconnect it to the parents Windows laptop, no Bluetooth icon in the system tray, weird. Also if you hover over the system tray Windows now slides up a bunch of clickbait articles for some reason, lol. I go into settings, look for blutooth, it’s not there. Remember that Windows 10 hides its blutooth shit under a devices submenu. Go to that submenu. It says the mouse is connected and the little tab to turn on or off Bluetooth is missing. I restart the computer. No change. I look up if anyone else has had this problem. I find a Reddit post complaining about the same thing. For some reason the solution is restart the laptop with its actual power chord unplugged. Confusing, but I try it. It works for some reason. I am suddenly way more thankful than ever that I no longer use Windows. When something goes wrong on Linux, it makes sense, as opposed to this where I have no idea what Windows did to cause this.
I’m just so surprised at how much better Linux is. It absolutely destroys the idea that profit motive makes for better products, or that the richest companies are rich and popular because they’re better. Here this thing is, funded by collaboration and donations, and it’s leagues better than something produced by one of the richest companies in the world that has near infinite funding.
There is no way in hell am ever going back.
Glad it’s working.
Linux has a really bad rep because people discount how frustrating windows is as “that’s just how computers are”, and since they’ve spent years learning windows it’s not apparent why the effort to learn a different OS and software ecosystem is worth anything.
The major distros have put in so much work to make things user friendly. Most people will never need to venture beyond the integrated "app store"s of whatever DE they ship with.
I use arch btw
When I talk to my mom about it she imagines coding programs in DOS, so I don’t know where the general public is on Linux sentiment. I did recently switch my mom over to Mint and she loves it.
I have been making an effort to learn how to use terminal so I’m not completely a lazy fake Linux fan, but honestly Mint does everything I need from it so I just haven’t felt the need to change distros. It’s comfy.
Maybe one day I’ll brave arch. When I have enough money that I’m not afraid to brick a laptop (through my own incompetence) lol.
Arch is as easy as anything else if you use archinstall. If not it’s not much harder as there is a wonderfully doxumented step by step on the wiki.
I found it very useful for learning what the components of a linux system actually were.
Anyway no such thing as a fake user. It’s just a tool, if it’s useful use it. If not find something that works.
Arch and especially Gentoo have a reputation for being difficult, but they both have world class documentation explaining how (and more importantly, why) to preform each step. Their documentation is a tremendous resource even if you don’t use them.
If you want to be really brave, try NixOS. It’s entirely declarative which means no
apt installcommands. You say exactly what you want in a config and rebuild your whole system every time. It’s kinda bulletproof though since every rebuild is saved in the boot menu so if you mess something up, you can just boot into an old version before you messed it up.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux Mint, is in fact, GNU/Linux Mint, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, (GNU plus Linux) Mint.
9·2 days agoI’d like to interject, what you are referring to as GNU/Linux Mint, is in fact GNU/Linux/X.Org/Cinnamon Mint
I was at my sisters house yesterday and needed to leave a little note on their computer for next time they use it. They had windows 11. I opened up notepad and a fucking ad showed up for grammerly IN NOTEPAD! It was obnoxious and overlaid on top of the app like some shitty early 2000’s malware.
Windows allows this kind of “functionality” now and people still use it. Just embarrassing.
It’s amazing what people will put up with if it’s sold to them as the popular option that everyone is using. The peer pressure is real. I’ve been made to feel weird for not having an Apple phone lol
Honestly one of the reasons i prefer iPhone to Android is I can use it without being marketed heavily to. Android always has tons of ads just everywhere.
? I don’t ever see any ads.
Your apps are loaded with them more than iOS apps are. Your App Store has far more scams than apples. Significant feature and security upgrades are withheld on most Android phones to encourage the purchase of another one, though to be fair that’s not true across every model anymore.
Hell, look at what Samsung is doing with their fucking lockscreens. Android could have been great. It should have been great. But it’s totally enshittified now.
I don’t see how your inability to not download shitty adware is android’s fault. Do you just search random things in the play store and click on the shiniest result like a child? Almost every app I use regularly is FOSS and from f-droid anyway.
You don’t need every shiny new feature and Samsung has guaranteed security updates for 7 years, longer than Apple’s average of 6 years with no guarantee. The only thing on my lock screen is a picture of my dog so I have no idea what you’re going on about.
I choose what my iPhone fetches. Android and windows get third party apps I didn’t ask for with their updates. Apple doesn’t let accusers or vendors add bloat to their updates.
Samsung announced they will be putting ads on the lockscreens of new phones, using the front camera to stream the video into AI to gauge your reaction to the ad and influence which ads you see on the lockscreen.
I used exclusively linux since ±8years but at my new job we use windows11 and I’m pretty fucking shocked at just how fucking bad the experience is. Want to change the date format? Go through 5 different submenus. Not to talk about the mishmash of UI styles all over the place, sometimes it looks like w95 sometimes like w10. It just screams technical debt.
Also FUCKING ADS EVERYWHERE WTF, a license is fucking expensive and they will still force feed you ads everywhere! Also why the fuck does notepad have a copilot addon now?
Windows truly is the HR of the operating systems. It sucks balls, I’ve got issues with linux, but it’s a luxury compared to windows
Maybe 5 or 6 years ago, my parents needed a new PC. At the time, I had access to a surplus store at a local uni and was able to buy them a really over spec’d desktop for like $100. It came with Linux Mint installed on it. I set it up at their house, plugged in their printer, which worked right away, and left it there. I NEVER had to go help them with it. It did everything they needed it to do, and it never once stopped working. I had to troubleshoot my Moms windows laptop more and more over those years, but never the Linux desktop.
Yessssss, another new Linux user who suddenly realises with meticulous detail the insanity and consequent opaqueness that Windows regularly subjects you to for basic shit. You’ve seen the world outside the Matrix, now you can (and likely will sometimes have to) use Windows again, but it’ll never be the same.
Welcome to the fold
ONE OF USOne thing I love is the package manager. You just tell your computer to update a program and it updates it for you like a Steam game.
I open QBittorrent on my Windows PC and it asks me to update, which opens the browser and the FOSS hub update page. I have to download the update and install it myself, leaving an old exe file cluttering my downloads.
I also had a problem with GIMP updating, then having two versions of GIMP on my computer because the directories were different I guess. I re-did some work because it wouldn’t open in the older version before I figured out what the fuck was going on. Wouldn’t have happened on linux.
I’m going to get another SSD soon and make the jump on the big PC. I can leave Windows on the original SSD just in case and leave that shitty OS behind.
Definitely still replace windows where possible, but if stuck on it for work or something, there’s an open source windows package manager called UniGet that updates everything in one place like a Linux package manager. Makes it a much better experience, and you can search and install from the package manager instead of hunting websites.
That’s actually really useful, thank you. Too bad Microsoft let the Windows store get choked out by low quality shit before anyone started using it
I actually use Chocolatey for my Windows package manager, it’s not perfect but it’s not bad. Seems to have all the software I ever want. No idea how it compares to UniGet.
UniGet supports WinGet, Chocolatey, Scoop, Rust, .Net, Powershell, NPM, Python all in one UI. Can install from any of them, searching gives you a choice. Can have different versions of software if desired. Binaries or building and installing. Backs up the programs list to easily get everything back even from a new clean install.
Oooooh, awesome, gonna try this next time I’m dealing with Windows
You will be surprised just how easy it is
Hell yeah!
Printing
Yeah it’s actually kind of weird how good printing on Linux is? It’s been this way since at least 2008. I don’t think it’s just Windows being dogshit either, since Macs also sometimes shit themselves when you print.
Terminal
You’re still a real Linux user even if you never use the terminal. Can be pretty handy though.
PS: Have you tried bulk renaming files in the file manager? It’s so powerful compared to the Windows way, I love it.
Macs also sometimes shit themselves when you print.
Weird because Mac and Linux both use CUPS for printing. Printing got good on Linux because Apple was paying for the development. It’s split into Apple CUPS and OpenPrinting CUPS now but that didn’t happen until 2020.
You can bulk rename? Holy shit yes
Yeah, you just select a bunch of files and right-click rename, same as Windows. But where Windows will then let you rename one file and name the rest “that_name (1)” etc, Mint gives you a dialog where you can choose find-replace, insert, delete, even use regex like a gremlin.
gremlin mode activated
You can use PowerShell to do bulk regex renaming
(If you hate yourself)
Powershell is quite powerful and can do a lot of things but the syntax is so fucking bad lmao, it’s even worse then bash and that says a lot
But I heard Linux was the one where you had to open a terminal to do anything?
it really is a shock. or it was for me. i rarely need to reboot, and when I do it’s like 40 seconds.
my windoze PC is always downloading updates and doing weird shit claimed to be critical, it takes forever, and it always needs a restart which takes fucking forever to get back to a usable state.
my work PC is hella locked down and they forced us onto windows 11. it is an incredible engineering achievement that they have made something even worse and more unpleasant to use than Windows 10.
The clusterfuck of the Settings app and Control Panel and whatever else feels like it is deliberately designed to strip users of any agency. Half the things are impossible to figure out without googling. I encountered this recently when I wanted to change the DNS provider.
I used to do OEM desktop support in the early 2000s for windows machines and, after a week or so, I could walk people through menus to access various settings/panels purely from memory.
now I can’t even navigate them myself and they seem to constantly change or be weirdly different depending on what build of a version of windows I am using. so I also have to Google the particular steps to get to the setting I want to see or adjust.
someone told me once, some much older guy doing IT shit at a university, that at some point in the late 2000s, part of the MS development team’s hiring process involved solving lots of puzzles. the assumption being that people who can solve lots of completely novel puzzles rapidly were a GREAT idea to hire for developing user interfaces.
it’s legitimately the only rationale I’ve ever heard that explains how fucked up it is now to try and use MS software.
One of us… One of us
For some reason the solution is restart the laptop with its actual power chord unplugged.
Microsoft creates weird issues no one else can even imagine. At this point I’m no longer pissed, I’m just curious how they did it.
I want to change as my pc cant upgrade to 11. Im afraid some programs that I use for work will stop working.
I use the pc both for work and gaming, Im gonna use linux mint as Ive never used any linux.
For work I use blender, unity, photoshop (already changing to krita), illustrator (I think inkscape is the alternative), substance painter (I think it already works on linux?), material maker (i think its foss so it should work?).
My pc is 8yo and has a i7 7700k and a gtx1080ti. It still works and I dont want to throw it away.
Do you guys know if im safe to change? Im tech savy but have always been limited to windows, and the most Ive learnt is about piracy and videogames.
Except the Adobe stuff, the software you have listed seems to work on Linux
Blender: No problem.
Unity: Works on Linux, I’ve had it open once.
Photoshop: Yea, you’ll need something like Krita.
Illustrator: Again Adobe, so something like Inkscape.
substance painter: This one? It seems to work on Linux, at least this steam version.
material maker: Seems open source and works on linux.
Cool! Thanks! Yeah those are the programs, I hate adobe so much but Ive always been forced to use them. Cant wait to switch in october.
An i7 7700k and gtx1080ti is great. Sure it’s slightly older by now, but it should still be able to run stuff well. To think windows doesn’t like it.
Yeah it was expensive when I bought it, and upgrading for hardware reasons is one thing but artificially locking the OS upgrade is bullshit. Specially when implaying games at 4k 60fps medium quality just fine.
I switched from Illustrator to Inkscape over a decade ago, it’s good. You’ll need to spend an afternoon intentionally re-learning where everything is, or a week of muddling through and finding stuff as you need it. It’s not radically different, just not an Illustrator clone.
Great to know, I guess the vector logic is still there, and Im happy to run away from adobe
Bazzite is my jam lately. I’m a perpetual distrohopper and g@mer and bazzite may have solved it for me. It just works. Nobara and mint have broken on upgrades for me in the past and my configs would break which would require manual intervention to fix, bazzite seems to have solved this and their system is very reproducible and stable. My configs get reapplied after every update.
Still waiting to see if anything will ever break. I legit haven’t had to research a single thing since downloading it and learning how the containers for flatpak, brew, and distrobox worked.
Linux has recently reached an extreme degree of parity with windows and often runs windows apps and games better than windows does even though it’s run through a compatibility layer.
It’s also just nice to look at the logs and see no telemetry, ad spam, and junk apps. Nope it’s just the 8 things I use. Bazzite seems to have best best implementation of a gaming kernel on Linux, my performance is often better than windows and 15-20% faster than other Linux distros. Even Nvidia has a stable open source driver these days, it’s wild how far Linux has come.
i personally didnt gel with Mint and went to Nobara after a day, but im glad its working for you
Oooh what’s Nobura like?
it’s Fedora but has all the important bits pre-installed. I dunno it just makes sense to my baby brain
there’s just a lot of stuff that just works and if it doesnt I can just make it work in like a few minutes. could never go back to windows after this.something as simple as copy pasting via clipboard AND by just middle clicking is such a god tier thing that i didnt know i needed until i had it
also funny thing i noticed, windows downloading was getting throttled but linux can suck the chrome out of a car with these blinding fast dl speeds
