Just made the switch to Linux as a lifetime Windows user.
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A friend just had her Windows 11 PC hijacked and used to drain money from her bank account. Not too much of a worry with Linux of any flavor.
It took 5x as long to wipe the disk and reload Windows as it would have to load Linux, plus another hour to change the settings to turn off as much of of Window's advertising and spyware as possible. Microsoft will no doubt change the settings back when Windows update runs or maybe just pile on more ads.
I'd much rather deal with some hardware incompatibilities than Microsoft's bullshit.
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Audio support for streaming was still unavailable when I tried this. Maybe because Mint Cinnamon is still X11?
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The sense of ownership and control the Linux experience offers is something I've never felt with Windows.
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My comment was not meant to steer anyone away from Linux, just pointing out something.
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Congrats! There’s probably a few things not perfect that you haven’t noticed yet-but ya, despite what the trolls say, Linux pretty much just works these days. Oftentimes better than windows.
Sometimes you’ll run into a program that is windows only and that’s a pain. The first thing I do is try to find a linux alternative-sometimes you can sometimes you can’t (stuff designed to interface with your hardware can be a pain sometimes - controllers, rgb lights, fan speeds, motherboard stuff). Bottles works great for running windows programs. And if all else fails a windows vm.
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Plus now I have the benefit of no preinstalled spyware or bloatware
Now you get to choose the bloatware and spyware yourself! /s
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I got 35+ years into Windows.
I'm the guy they get to "fix" stuff in PROD.
I fight Windows all day.
I'm not doing that at home anymore. -
Windows 11 no longer "just working" is what made me finally take Linux seriously as an option and I am so glad I did.
I genuinely think it is ready for prime time. As I said elsewhere the concept of immutable distros is a game changer for those of us who like to customize but hate the command line
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Yeah I have a Ser5 as a living room PC, wiped windows and have Nobara running on it. Linux is great - browse the web, play games, stream videos, and all with interfaces that actually work on a TV. I don't miss Windows at all.
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Real shit tho
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The only thing I had to work around was downloading the deb build of Discord Canary to enable audio output in Discord streams since it was only recently added to Discord's dev/beta build (Canary).
Keep in mind Linux is all about FOSS, if the software you use doesn’t have all the features you want look around for alternatives.
I encountered this same issue when installing Discord and opted to use Vencord instead.
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You'll probably be installing programs and changing a lot of settings over the next few weeks. Make sure you use TimeShift (pre-installed on Mint) to make system snapshots. (It works like System Restore on Windows. You can even run it from your Linux Live flash drive if you mess up something so badly that you can't boot from the hard drive).
LibreOffice comes pre-installed and you can use Thunderbird for email. And if you used Steam to play games on Windows, you're in for a nice surprise. Steam has a native Linux client and it uses Proton / Wine to let you play your Windows games on Linux. It's handled everything I've thrown at except for a couple of older games.
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It might be; I've only ever used in on Wayland to make up for Discord using its ancient version of Electron. If the canary branch Discord works for you though I'd stick to that, I was just offering another option for either yourself or people reading the post!
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Glad to hear you're on Linux, living a more sovereign life and having an easy time with it. Mint does indeed work very well for me too. I put Mint XFCE on a ~2015 laptop that Windows was bloating down to dysfunctional. Now it works reasonably well.
You'll hear other people say Linux works well until it doesn't. Well so does Windows. It has many issues too that people tend to not mention. Don't get discouraged by those people. Most of the time Linux is totally fine for normal users, it's people trying to do abnormal things that then causes issues.
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Welcome to the club
I did the same thing last summer and also switched to Mint and never looked back. So basically Im a fellow newbie. It was the best decision as everything just works minus the windows shenanigans.Even gaming is almost perfect (apart from the occasional tinkering here and there) its more than great. All my games work great, some better than under win.
Im even in the middle of building my new gaming PC exclusively for Linux in mind.
As I have to use win 11 for work (work laptop) I can see switching was the right decision as every update makes it more annoying and bloated.
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Some truths cut too deep
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Welcome to the team.
I hope you brought your boincing shoes because as soon you'll get comfortable you'll start hopping a lot -
I've just made the Switch to Linux for my gaming PC. I'm running Bazzite right now and it mostly worked. I had some trouble with my Bluetooth controller and speakers but they started working after I switched over to desktop mode and then restarted.
A lot of the troubles I'm having are mainly because it's an atomic distro instead of a normal one but that's on me. I figured an atomic distro would make it less likely I would accidentally break something.
