Turns out the reply in my thread telling me the best way to combat not caring about Linux is to care about Linux was absolutely correct.

I picked up a laptop, installed Linux Mint Cinnamon, and I’m already obsessed. I haven’t had this much fun with a PC in a long time and it’s just a cheapo Dell Inspiron 3520.

  • Scary le Poo
    3•2 years ago

    It’s fun until you run into issues. Be careful of updates. Randomly it will fuck itself for no reason at all and require a from scratch reinstall.

    It’s good that you’re having fun. Learn all you can. It’s good knowledge to have.

    • VaultBoyNewVegas
      2•2 years ago

      All bar 3-5 games out of 600 on steam I have work on Linux through proton and wine. I also have my games from gog and ea play and they all work too. The only thing else I use my pc for web browsing, occasional email and occasional word document. Linux does everything that I would’ve done on windows.

    • @[email protected]
      4•2 years ago

      Can you be more specific about what is not doable and what is not doable simply? AutoCAD? Excel?

    • ShaunaTheDead
      4•2 years ago

      I’m not sure where you’re getting that idea from. Almost anything designed for Windows works flawlessly through WINE or Proton. If I do run into an issue I usually find that Windows users are also having the same problems so it’s not a Linux compatibility issue. Every once in awhile I’ll have to run winetricks or protontricks to install a dependency. Overall, Linux compatibility is pretty incredible these days, in my opinion.

    • 0xtero
      2•2 years ago

      I’ve been daily driving Linux since Debian 1.3 in -97.
      There’s certainly been tough times with some printers in the past, to be honest I haven’t thought about device/software compatibility in years.
      Everything (I need) just works.

    • MuchPineapples
      6•2 years ago

      I’m daily driving Linux for years now and I don’t really see what you can’t do with linux unless you want some of the few Microsoft or Mac specific software that doesn’t run in wine or so.

  • RachelRodent
    15•2 years ago

    I remember your post 🤣 I have also installed linux on my PC yesterday

    • DeebsterEnglish
      18•2 years ago

      It really is genuinely remarkable. If more people lived their lives like OP then the world would be a better place.

      • Franzia
        3•2 years ago

        I try my best, but this is not a level I’ve achieved yet.

  • @[email protected]
    8•2 years ago

    i used to operate ok Linux many years ago but I never got used to it, I want to try it now that I mostly do programming but I don’t have a PC, I only use my xorporate notebook that doesn’t allow dual boot. I hope I can buy a notebook soon and try it out, sound fun

  • SteveEnglish
    6•2 years ago

    A wise decision! Welcome, and I hope you continue to have fun with Linux! Linux Mint is a great starting distro. If you ever get around to installing VirtualBox, I recommend you also try Pop OS. I personally prefer that distro on laptops.

  • @[email protected]English
    16•2 years ago

    Good investment Jez,

    Now get yourself a mechanical keeyboard.

    a nice keeb is a must have! They have some cheap ones on amazon for 20 ish or so. The really nice ones cost almost as much as the laptop XD

  • THCDenton
    11•2 years ago

    Wait until you get comfy on the shell, start scripting and discover vim. Then you’ll truely be beyond saving.

  • @[email protected]
    14•2 years ago

    Make sure to install as many Flatpaks as possible. They are newer, often more stable and dont touch your core system so weird “it works on my machine” bugs are gone less likely.

    For me, I switched away from mint quite soon, but everyones experience varies.

    • @[email protected]English
      5•2 years ago

      I stuck with Mint for about a decade but switched to Nobara for gfx drivers. Now that Mint is on a newer kernel I’m seriously thinking of going back because my current distro is just not as stable as Mint was. And I like Cinnamon better than Gnome. I miss my Mint.

    • Tlaloc_Temporal
      1•2 years ago

      I would, but I have found flatpaks have failed to work properly on occasion, especially in situations where the software needs access to other software or their data.

      I am pretty new at this though, perhaps I just picked the wrong flatpak?

      • @[email protected]
        2•2 years ago

        Flatpaks are more restricted and for general use cases this is good.

        Can you name the apps? Maybe there is a workaround.

        For general use cases, for example I maintain a fleet of Debian PCs:

        • core Apps can be native (editor, file manager etc)
        • everything big or foreign should be flatpak

        For example Libreoffice, VLC, Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, Krita. These apps are huuge, and come with huge dependencies your core system does not need. Keeping them isolated via flatpak is saving your OS like 400 packages, it makes updates faster and upgrades more reliable.

        If you install KDE apps on GNOME this can be a problem, but may be not. Nautilus, the GNOME file manager, sucks. You can install Dolphin on Gnome natively. But other apps might be more difficult and Dolphin for sure pulls in loots of KDE Dependencies that are not native to GNOME.

        On everything but KDE you should install Flatseal to view and manage Flatpak app permissions. Its like Android/GrapheneOS (Storage scopes, Network permission), really nice. Libreoffice and other huge projects generally have access to your complete system. I dont like that, but they are not updated to use “Portals” yet, so they need it to NOT result in the problems you describe.

        https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Desktop_Portal

        • Scary le Poo
          4•2 years ago

          This should really be a top level comment. This actually solves a lot of my issues with Linux.

          I remember complaining that Linux apps were not self-contained like Windows apps are. And I got the standard speech about losing space with libraries blah blah blah and my reaction is I don’t fucking care.

          In my opinion, Linux dependency setup is hilariously broken. I understand that for the most part it works, but when it doesn’t the results are disastrous generally.

          Also I agree. Nautilus is hot fucking garbage.

          • @[email protected]
            3•2 years ago

            Flatpaks also share runtimes.

            Its bad that they have deduplication, its really unsatisfying. But having maaany runtimes in parallel is simply the state of every OS. I dont know about Android, which is really nice. But sucks also. Filemanagers are very restricted for example.

            And for example Libreoffice, VLC, SciDavis and others just work well as Flatpak for me

        • Tlaloc_Temporal
          1•2 years ago

          Dang, I wish I could find my install history somewhere…

          • I thought I had issues with the Discord Snap (which I’m just now realizing is different to Flatpack), but I’m running the Snap right now, so I guess I got that to work (mostly, maybe this Desktop Portal could fix it? Hmm).

          • Lutris and Wine have been endless trouble no matter what I’ve done, so possibly not the Flatpak’s fault.

          • Steam as a Snap broke some important features, mostly with modding. That’s a deb right now, I think.

          • And lastly mcpelauncher, which was scuffy already, but apparently is a Flatpak.

          Perhaps my impression was clouded by poorly behaved installations and/or poorly understood setups. Also maybe by Snap. I’ll have to try Flatpaks again next time.

          Honestly I’ve prioritized debs simply because that’s similar to what I know, so I can get them to work. Figuring out what exactly I’m doing with 7 part CLI installs is rough, even when they work, and I’ve been trained to skip “app store” links altogether. I am just smol bebe avoiding a windows dualboot as long as I can.