I’d like to hear people’s journeys and motivations from people who switched over the last few months, and if there were particular challenges that were faced.
Yup, installed Linux Mint for my 60+yo mother. She hardly uses her laptop and does not need anything advanced. We set it up, installation went very smooth (obviously), set up her browser so she can use it like she’s used to, and we figured out how to use the printer. Thankfully it was no hassle at all, it just connected via USB and interacted very well with the printing and scanning software that came with Mint. She was already using firefox and libreoffice, so that was no hassle either. So far so good!
Took the plunge this week. My secondary hard drive now has Mint and I’ve got it working so when I boot up I select which os/drive to start up. The plan is to use Mint primarily for awhile and get used to it.
Definitely a bit less intuitive, and many things are still needing to be done through the consol instead of the GUI which is annoying. Haven’t had success migrating my Firefox profile without creating an account. Haven’t figured out how to get the “dual” monitor setup to work the way a I want either. Feels like a bit of a downgrade but I’m hoping once I get past the initial setup pains it’ll be smooth sailing.
Thanks for sharing and congrats on making the jump! In my experience, when I broke Linux, most of the time it’s because I wanted to try something new, and only occasionally an updated software breaks something, but it generally only takes a bit of effort to pinpoint the culprit. Especially on Mint, once you have things working they’ll work as they are, and any issue you may encounter will be easy to resolve after you figure it out the first time.
On Windows it was the inverse… Microsoft often wanted to try something new on me.
I switched to Mint in March. I have to use W11 for work and I thoroughly hate it. I did not want all the ads and AI stuff that come pre-packaged. I also did not want to upgrade my pc - I have an arbitrary rule that I’m only allowed new hardware every 10 years, so I have another 2 years left until I can upgrade.
So I used all my anger and pettiness, went on youtube to see how difficult it’d be to install Linux. The first video I found was Zorin vs Mint, and I thought Mint was a good fit for an absolute noob like myself. I really did not want to faff with learning commands and stuff so I was very pleasantly surprised with flatpaks and whatnot. Overall I’d say it was a very good experience, I’m just annoyed I’ve not done it earlier.
How do desktop functions perform on Linux Mint compared to Windows on your current machine, qualitatively speaking? I’ve kept my parents’ 13 year old laptop alive with Linux, a replacement battery and SSD, so 2 more years should be no problem unless your needs drastically change.
You’ll find there are dozens of ways to “install” an app on Linux, in varying degrees of portability, ease of install and ease of upgrade.
It’s an absolute joy, although I am a little annoyed at the random freezes I sometimes get, like when everything stops responding with no rhyme or reason. At least when Windows crashes, it crashes good and just reboots. But Mint needs a hard reset. Other than that, I managed to get all my games to play thanks to Lutris so I couldn’t be happier! I’ve had some tiny tweaks to make, for example my sound got crackly after some update, but thankfully there are tons and tons of troubleshooting that basically take your hand and guide you through what you need to do to sort issues. I’m immensely grateful for all those forums.
Your mention of a laptop reminds me I also installed Mint on my 16 year old lappy, it’s quite slow but it actually works with all the OG hardware (bar a new battery)!
I switched from W11 when Copilot Vision was scheduled for a forced install. Choose Debian KDE because my servers are all Debian-based already, and I wanted boring and stable. For the most part, it’s been smooth sailing. There’s a touchpad issue sometimes that requires reloading the mouse module, and updating my Dell dock requires loading a Windows boot disk to run the installer from that environment. That’s about it for problems. Using apt and flatpak to manage updates for all my software has been great. I do not miss downloading and clicking through installer wizards all the time.
Yes! Two folks swapped to nix, one to mint.
Getting VR to work has been a journey on nix. Everything on mint has gone smoothly afaik.
Windows 10 EOL (and moving) both roughly lined up, so we all decided to get away from big tech. The nix os was new, interesting, and feels very powerful when things work. Mint was a known safe choice.
Thank you for sharing! VR has been a well reported pain point, but interesting to hear that Linux Mint handled it well now. I don’t own a VR headset – which one do you have that played nice with Mint, if you don’t mind me asking? In case I ever feel like getting my own.
I did about 2 years ago. Dislike Microsoft decision to go against the user choice and all the bad updates and trying to make things worse. I went to Fedora after being on kubuntu for a while. I just needed something with kde 6 so wayland could work good.
So far I have not really found a good way to convice family. Instead they stay on familiar Windows 10. Will see if I have better luck after W10 ESU runs out.
I find it pretty easy to convince non-tech older people to use Linux. It also helps just denying them tech support if they don’t use Linux 😁
Yes I have 1 convert and 1 on the edge. The convert said Windows is behind and wanted to use Linux. Probably to be cool and stuff. He’s learning the ropes of Arch on Cachyos for now
I’m just finishing off switching now. My media server and laptop have been on Xubuntu and Mint respectively for the last few years, but my main PC was stuck on Windows 10 while I got some stuff finished. It’s now on Mint while I confirm that everything’s transferred over properly.
While I do prefer Linux, it’s been quite frustrating so far. The big stuff has been pretty smooth, but I’ve had a few silly little issues that have made things harder than they should be.
My Bluetooth headphones wouldn’t stay connected until I removed them and added them back, and I couldn’t print until I deleted an outdated certificate. MusicBrainz Picard wouldn’t move and rename files correctly until after an unrelated reboot. I couldn’t write to a drive mounted through fstab because none of the guides I found said that you had to do anything different for an NTFS drive, even though some of them were aimed at people switching from Windows.
At the moment, every time I add a podcast to Clementine, it downloads every episode, and I can’t see any way to change it.
Nothing major, but I’m going to pull all of my hair out by the time I’m done 😫
NTFS is rough to deal with indeed. Right now getting niche hardware to work is one of Linux’s barriers to adaptation. If the device’s data streams are documented well, it can be technically possible to create homemade device drivers, but you’ll have no hair left to pull before you even begin.
Recently started testing Linux:
-laptop: Switched an old X1 Carbon to Linux, but had a lot of problem with the WiFi card (Intel Wireless 7265). It’s supposed to be Linux compatible, but it simply doesn’t work. After a few days of distro hoping I settled for Kubuntu + a WiFi USB adapter(details here if you’re furious: https://sh.itjust.works/post/47717768)
I’m still hoping a future update will make the WiFi card work and that I’ll be able to remove the USB WiFi adapter. And I’m wondering if 8GB of RAM is enough for KDE (Mozilla regulatory freeze).
-For my gaming rig, I went dual boot with Bazzite and I’ll be upgrading W10 to 11 for the software not Linux compatible.
My main problem (and disappointment) is that my Logitech G915 keyboard and JBL quantum headset cannot use their specific software on Bazzite/Linux. The basic stuff works, but all the keyboard (macro keys,…) And headset (spatial sound control, two sources live mixing,…) Handy advanced features doesn’t.
I had a PC I used for games and stuff that had Windows, switched it to Linux. Don’t want Windows 11 and it didn’t support my computer anyway.
I’m jealous of those that converted to Linux from Windows 10.
I didn’t migrate until Windows 2000.
I started baby steps when Steam stopped supporting Windows7. I built my main gaming PC to dual boot W10 & Ubuntu maybe 3 years ago? And that just worked so-so honestly. Felt like everytime I went to play co-op games w my friends, whatever game we picked that weekend didn’t work correctly in Linux. But because I had Win10 right there, I also never forced myself to learn anything either. Biggest thing I could find was the problems seemed to be related to the Nvidia drivers, but never could quite figure out how to update them.
Recently I doubled down with a new PC, and this time it’s Ubuntu only. Made an effort to find native Linux apps where possible, learned a few terminal commands, forced myself to also learn Bottles (play Windows games), and bought a Radeon video card instead of Nvidia. Learning curve for what I wanted wasn’t nearly as high as I feared. If anything, I think it’s pushing me to consider distro shopping, as I’m starting to understand why folks don’t like snaps. Looks like Mint will be my next stop.
Biggest challenge so far is there’s a few apps I use that just don’t have a great Linux equivalent. AutoHotKey is the biggest one, but I see there’s some new options here I didn’t try yet. https://lemmy.zip/post/47337622 I have not dicked around with my 3D printer software yet, but I’m sure that will be a hurdle.
Converting someone to… are you mistaking it with a sect?
With the power of Free and Open Source, I grant thee eternal computing liberation!
Let’s be real it is a sect.
I helped switch my 88 years old grandma to Mint a few months back when her laptop started to run painfully slow. I don’t think she understands that I changed her OS but she is happy with “whatever I did to her laptop”, now her laptop runs much faster and 0 problems so far for her needs, very simple needs but she actually uses it a lot!
For like a good chunk of people, all you need from a computer the news, online videos, one social media, email, banking, simple writing and printing. Linux does fine and some distros actually do better than Windows at the basics.
Moved my father-in-law from Windows 10 to Mint.
Biggest problem was all his ‘documents’, which were office365 web links rather than ‘actual documents’. Linux presents them as the urls that they really are. They open just fine, though, and can be exported as real local docs for libreoffice etc.
Security and privacy were the main selling points for him. He’d done some reading and thought that Mint was among the best choices for a newstart that just want everything to work; no interests in playing games or anything. I agreed that was the most solid choice. I use Arch btw myself, but wouldn’t recommend that for beginners.
