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Switched to Mint recently. So far it’s been smoother than I expected, but still had some crazy rough patches. Luckily, helping me through this junk seems to be one of the things AI excels at. I’m set up mostly how I want to be and it’s been mostly working well enough so far. Mostly.
Mint’s popularity is unfortunate because it (the last time I checked) defaults to X11, which gives you a desktop built on technology from 1984.
It’s actually comments like this which will scare people the hell away from trying Linux.
My comment wouldn’t exist if some distros didn’t cling to X11.
I’d be more worried about the lack of HDR support. Shame they killed off the Plasma edition. To anyone considering using Mint you can install Plasma on top of it with ease and get a modern desktop that supports HDR. If you don’t have an HDR monitor then Cinnamon is great.
Might want to have some people a hit more coherent on which version of Linux so they don’t get frustrated. Some people are jumping to distros that I’ve never heard of and getting annoyed it’s not windows. Like yea no kidding Justin Bieber OS isn’t getting updates. And your 3k series Nvidia isn’t working. Switch to Hanna Montana DE like the rest of us.
Switched to CachyOS a couple months ago and haven’t looked back. Everything works right out the box including NVIDIA cards. Recommended it to a coworker to check out and he switched from Windows a month ago.
Peppermint is always left out. That is the perfect on for just working, stable and easy to move to from windows. It’s also lightweight and fast.
Been on linux for almost half a year now. Don’t miss a single bit of windows, thanks to steam proton. Also thanks to microsoft for pushing me over.
Same here. I do not miss all the shit windows did. Things like:
- starting drivers manually to use graphics tablet
- finding drivers for hardware that work
- random driver crashes for various pieces of hardware I have
- BSODs
- rummaging around settings, configs and regedit to get something to work a bit better
- disabling things you don’t want through regedit or some hidden config
- uninstallable bloatware
- ads everywhere
- super key + type in the program you want to open not working
- messing around with tons of files for old games to work
- going through shady sites to get software
- not having a software center for all your downloads
- needing to install weird programs for sftp support
- needing to reinstall the os when a big issue develops and you did not manually set up backups
ironically half these things are what people think is the linux ux. Seriously, windows is just terrible, clunky, buggy and full of things you need to be an advanced user to fix.
Mints file explorer when moving large files does leave some meat on the bone for me.
what distro do you use? im looking into moving from windows, but currently use apple devices to sync my music to my phone so im on hold for now
I tried Mint initially, but it had some issues with Wayland and some other small issues, so I ended up settling on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed after a friend recommended it.
Been on CachyOS for a couple months now. If you want to go Arch, I highly recommend it. No issues with NVIDIA drivers or any of my other hardware. The only thing I need Windows for anymore is Solidworks.
I’m a very recent convert. I downloaded mint a couple months ago after seeing that my entire steam library was rated as highly compatible on protondb. At first I planned to dual boot but I didn’t have any reason at all to use windows and finally just took the plunge and made Mint my daily, and sole, driver
I also went cold turkey to fedora and once I solved my two main problems: disabling secureboot and formatting my steam library to be a linux filesystem, I have a better ux overall. Now I’m looking to move to endeavourOS since fedora is too fast with its updates which breaks nvidia drivers sometimes. (Which just means I restart while the pc is booting and select an earlier version of the OS)
As much as people complain about electron (some valid, some not) Linux has benefited quite a bit to the cross platform availability of local applications.
Download a new OS // Download the operating system you want to install. Search for Linux distributions for beginners to get some suggestions.
I feel like it’s better to actually list/suggest a few beginner distros than to tell people to look it up.
I went fedora which is not a beginner system and even fedora is easier than windows.
Common suggestions are: mint, pop os, endeavourOS. But it doesn’t matter, they are all functional OS that let you do everything.
I think it doesn’t actually matter what distro you use.
It’s like whether you’re wearing red socks or blue socks. As long as you’re wearing socks, so you don’t get cold.
Myself mentioned a bit below that the choice of a distribution isn’t that meaningful in the long run. But I still think that some distros should be recommended - otherwise the newbie simply says “Hannah Montana Linux, Justin Bieber Linux, Ubuntu Satanic Edition… bleeergh I can’t choose, I give up”.
damn Ubuntu Satanic Edition sounds cool.
A shame the project was discontinued, the visuals were fucking cool. (Yup, it was a real distro.)
Linux Mint (XFCE desktop) is the best for beginners coming from Windows, in my opinion. Linux enthusiasts will fawn over KDE because of customization, but they ignore that the vast majority of people don’t want to spend months tweaking pixels, widgets and animations, they just want to use the computer.
I have gnome and KDE fedoras on my two pcs. Gnome is a lot more work to tweak it and add some basic functionality(lmao at enabling right click to create new file). KDE is just fine out of the box. Nobody is forced to tweak KDE, you can if you want to.
KDE also has fun stuff like kde connect that lets you connect your phone to your pc and receive and answer to texts and other notifications, send clipboards and files. Something that is a ridiculous upgrade in QOL and its insane windows does not have it. Gnome also gets it but you need to install extension manager and search for it.
My point is that the site should be recommending a few newbie distros, instead of telling the newbie to search it. Specially because the choice of a distribution isn’t that meaningful in the long run, but newbies struggle picking one.
That said I agree Mint would be a good choice. Not sure on Xfce; I’d probably recommend Cinnamon instead, as it looks a bit more modern (even if myself would rather use MATE or Xfce than Cinnamon).
Windows user: I’m thinking about switching to Linux, mind helping me out Linux User?
Linux user: ok, so what you want to do is just figure it out yourself.
Windows user: finds debian and fucks everything up wow Linux is terrible, I’ll stick to using Windows 11.
Funny that Debian and Fedora were the only two distros that worked on my laptop. (dual GPU, others booted to black screen after install.) Debian hasn’t grenaded itself yet :)
Speaking on that: a lot of people act as if promoting Linux means simply “to get others to install it”. And they ignore that the newbie will need help the first days, weeks, even months. Then the newbie gets burned out and switches back to Windows.
That probably explains why some people manage to retain even tech illiterate people using Linux, while others struggle to convince even tech literate ones to switch.
I like https://distrochooser.de/
While your endorsement is definitely well-intentioned, I’m unsure if it correctly reflects the project’s health[1]. I’d argue we’ve got (a lot) better resources on the fediverse. Like, e.g. this excellent guide: Understanding Linux and choosing your first Linux distro, v2.0
While that’s a good read for someone more technical, the distro chooser brings it to people of lower technical prowess.
While that’s a good read for someone more technical
I would perhaps put more importance to eagerness to learn. But (I think) I understand where you’re hinting at.
the distro chooser brings it to people of lower technical prowess.
While the distrochooser definitely has a lower entry barrier, I’d argue that if one isn’t willing to read the above guide, then they might as well roll a die and choose between Bazzite, Fedora, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, TUXEDO OS and Zorin OS accordingly.
I’m not really hinting at anything. I’m saying that not everyone that comes to look at Linux will have technical info to understand why that guide matters, nor will they want to invest in learning beyond meeting their needs. Having supported windows and mac users alike, the overwhelming majority really just wanted something that wasn’t a hassle. And they favor which ever OS gives them that in the way they find least onerous.
And so the distro chooser helps the ones of those willing to put in a tiny bit of effort to try something new, but don’t want to go read extensively to do it. It’s better than rolling a die when it comes to meeting their needs.
Trying to force people to see linux the way you want them to see it will never work. It hasn’t worked for decades now. All the factions with their different ideological principles get in the way of Linux more than help it. The guide you linked is mostly removed from that thankfully and to its credit. It is also a lot of info a basic user doesn’t need to know in the end. They want “OS go brrrr”, not to understand the nuances of flatpak and snap, or why atomic might be beneficial to them. Even though knowing all of that is definitely in their best interest. I fully agree they’d be better off knowing. But they still don’t want it. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. And since Linux people won’t generally come meet them at their level (or worse you get two people trying to ‘help’ arguing with each other instead of helping), a tool that does something like the distro chooser has to come meet them. It’s only a benefit in Linux adoption at the end of the day.
That’s excellent, I found the distrochooser recently while coming back to linux and was happy when it recommended the same distro I used years back
Mint looks pretty dated tho. I would go with Kubuntu because it looks pretty similar to Windows and is sleek and modern even without any customizations
Realistically, the best distro for a Windows user is one that runs all their existing Windows software (both applications and games) right out of the box.
Does any distro even come close to doing that?
I’ve had no problems running practically everything I want using fedora. I would reccomend mint, popOS or endeavourOS instead as fedora is far out man and might be too cutting edge with some updates. (meaning you may break something and have to use the inbuilt system of linux to boot to the last working version for a few days)
I cant use autodesk softwares but whatever maya is replaced by blender anyway in gaming industry(I was a professional 3d artist for games), theres myriad of cad software but I switched to freecad (I design parts for cars and 3d print stuff). Clip studio and photoshop was replaced by krita which is insane that it is free as it is the best painting software out there. Photoshop was replaced by gnome and illustrator by inkscape. My racecars datalogger and ECU software runs on wine, if I need to run it. Otherwise its old ass software that I run on an old ass win7 laptop that still has the required connection ports and is portable.
Only thing you might miss are some games that specifically banned all linux users but its not like they are the only games to exist. Even tarkov can be played using spt mod which gives you a better experience anyway.
TL;DR: There are better alternatives that fill the same functionality and there are only a few edge cases where there arent. As more people switch to linux that means more donations, more developers making the missing software and more people finding and reporting issues and oversights that need fixing. Its a snowball effect.
I need autodesk for work so I’m setting up a 2nd box I can remote into. I looked into virtual cloud environments but they are too expensive
That is a very clever solution. As far as cads go, freecad is powerful but the ux only makes sense to the people who programmed it. Thankdully there is a fork that is working on improving the ux and making it easy and logical to use.
Not that I’m aware of. Wine only goes so far before programs misbehave. It didn’t work well with heroes of might and magic 5 for me in 2022, for instance, terrible framerate
As a newer Linux user I think the priority in communication should be use Mint and then have some general information about how Linux isn’t Windows, with some key differences and how to do things. I know that’s more complicated than just saying it, but a “simple” get started guide would ease transition a lot.
Why do you suggest Mint over Ubuntu?
Mint in any of its default offerings feels significantly more familiar to a Windows environment than default Ubuntu, Lubuntu (LXDE desktop) or Xubuntu (XFCE desktop), making the migration “less painful”;
The ISO image is ~1GB smaller \Snaps probably 😆
Because fuck snaps
Ubuntu is developed and controlled by a corporation (canonical) and they have some non ideal practices (like pushing snaps heavily instead of the more open flatpaks or native apps). Mint takes what’s good in Ubuntu and cleans it up a lot.
I recommend Gentoo for a beginner.
What better way to understand your new OS than by compiling it from scratch?
Yeah, I agree. Especially since there’s SO much information out there that’ll come up if they try to search, and lots of it isn’t good, and tons of it is conflicting with each other. It’s best to make it as easy and simple as possible. Like just suggest Mint or something.
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Zorin OS is going to be the best for windows refugees. It is so far ahead in this area that it isn’t even remotely close.
I don’t know why people keep trotting out mint. Mint has far too many issues to be a serious suggestion.
Mint has a common issue of destroying itself on updates. It happened again to a coworker of mine a week ago when he decided to give nix a go (we are both systems engineers/network engineers).
That and mint’s GUI elements are a thin veneer. There is still a lot of legacy garbage. It isn’t made with the premise of “this GUI needs to be rock solid”. It seems to be built upon the old tired bullshit that nix users always trot out e.g. “most users only log into x y z site and make a document once in a while” or some shit. It simply isn’t true.
Most users do a variety of things. Some may be complicated, some may not be. The reason I tell people that Zorin is the distro of choice for refugees is that Zorin understood the assignment (although there are some very specific areas where it offers too much choice to the user, but those are exceedingly minor) and realized that the GUI and UX centered around that GUI is everything. Especially when you are trying to court windows users.
It should be noted that I am quite familiar with *nix, and he is to some degree familiar with it. Another guy we work with switched to popos on a whim a little over a week ago. He said he’s really enjoying it.
Thank you for the answer! Much appreciated.
Mint has a common issue of destroying itself on updates.
Could you be more explicit? Like, I don’t think it literally deletes itself from your drive. Right? So, what is it then?
I was just on Zorin OS web page and I like what I am seeing.
Have to set some time aside this weekend to seeing dual booting it
Is it necessary though? Microsoft have already been campaigning pretty hard to get people to switch to Linux. Telling people their perfectly good PCs won’t work anymore because the operating system is expiring, and they can’t even “upgrade” to Windows 11 is a pretty powerful message.
the copilot nonsense really irked me, but it was then they had the gumption to force this absurd recall bullshit on everyone–that’s when i said i’m done, no more windows, no more M$
it’s obviously a “feature” they sold to senior executive board members so that middle managers could spy on their cubicle drones, but to have the gumption to try and convince the world that this was something we wanted? get fucked microsoft
It’s more than that. They want training data for their LLMs. With enough training data, they can train these models to do office knowledge work themselves, removing the need to employ cubicle drones at all.
I wonder what will win out, the sociopathic need of managers and execs to gaze over heads in cubes like it’s their kingdom - e.g. “return to office” mandates that saved no money and made no sense other than to control people - or the sociopathic need of the business to cut costs so low that the stability of the entire company teeters on a house of cards, be it AI or something else.
That’s what free software advocates have been telling everyone for decades. When you use proprietary software licensed to you, you have no agency in what becomes of it, they can force you to accept changes that you don’t agree with, violate your privacy, take what you thought you owned from you.
People give up freedom for convenience and treat those that don’t as crazy misguided idealists, thinking they’re fools for using less convenient and sometimes powerful fools for pointless principles only they care about… Meanwhile, if everyone was just a tiny bit like the crazy idealists, these companies wouldn’t be able to abuse their position because a modicum of resistance from everyone would be an overwhelming force for them.
Some will say it’s dumb being idealist about computer software, but aside from computer software being serious fucking business, the practices of these companies are what birthed disposable, unrepairable electronics, privacy erosion, robber AIs and so on. Do you think a tech industry dominated by free software supporters would have allowed the rise of people like Bezos, Zuckerberg or Musk?
Jeez. Pathetic losers. On Linux for 15 years never thought of going back.
And u know what? It was harder back in the days nowadays all software is in the browser anyways so what are u even missing.I tried ubuntu 15 years ago since it was the easiest. It was hell. Now linux is a more functional OS than windows is that asks the user to do even less in order to have everything working.
Ubuntu 12.04 was nice for desktop users. It just didn’t do anything good for gaming at the time.
Couldn’t even get internet to work… It was nightmare even despite me having grown up with an ATI card.
Yea I tried all the DE back during intel 3rd gens. And I really tried and wanted it to work.
It’s funny, you’re using Linux for 15 years, but you’re still 15 years old…
This weekend I want to make a point to finally begin the transition to Linux…
You will be pleasantly surprised almost daily, I hope! There will be a minor learning curve since you are used to windows philosophy and linux is different.
I want mint to be my distro.
I’m going to be migrating to Linux and using Mint. I’m just paranoid about doing something wrong and accidentally walking into a security vulnerability. So I want to set aside time to properly learn things and understand what I’m doing but I’m just busy AF these days…
This is a very valid and smart concern to have. But the scary commands all start with “sudo”, which gives everything you type in root access. Other than that linux is very secure and idiot proof as long as you read what the commands do. For software linux is way more secure as gone will be the days of rummaging through dodgy sites for installers. Instead you just open up software center and find the app you want and it will be installed straight from the official upload. The repos software centers have are customizable so you can add and remove them. Instead of checking if the installer is secure, you check if the repo is secure on the rare case you add a new repo.
I mean a popular app distribution is flatpack that ships apps like steam and blender and whatever in a sandbox with access only to resources they absolutely need access too. To the point where you need to allow the apps to get access to another drive even. Just to make sure nobody will inject ransomware through the blender default cube I guess.
I have four pieces of advice
- btrfs file system for easy backup and recovery
- Encrypt your drive
- use an ad blocker everywhere
- use virus total to scan anything you might be wary of, and if you really feel like you need an AV, they do exist for Linux.
I usually prefer Debian based systems, but when I finally ditched windows 3 weeks ago, I switched to Manjaro, and I’m loving it. You got this!
What’s wrong with EXT4 ?
If you are worried about disk space don’t use backup on btrfs though it fills up yr drive I never encrypt my drive but maybe you should Manjaro is great though!
Take it slow and do it the right way, don’t let Lemmy pressure you if you’re making slow but steady progress. It’s a learning curve for sure
Basically don’t run random sudo(superuser do, root access) commands you find on the internet without reading what the command does from docs or asking ai.
Leaving windows makes you more secure.
Also don’t worry about turning secureboot off. It makes it a lot less annoying and gets rid of a lot of issues. Also also steam doesn’t like running on linux and having it’s library on windows filesystem you gotta format them both, if your games are on a separate drive.
There you go, the two hurdles i had with linux.
Agreed.
Had the same problem with the Steam library on a Windows filesystem and some annoyances with NTFS drives.
Other than that, pretty easy overall (you have to tinker around with some games and wineversions though)
My only two issues were also steam on ntfs and secureboot, which are easy fixes. I’d like to add “flatpack apps not having access to another drive” as a very common beginner problem I had. Solution was easy: Add the drive in flatpack settings/flatseal or just don’t flatpak.
Ive been seriously looking into making the switch. After some reading I decided Mint would be the easiest transition and downloaded the ISO to try it out with a USB boot. Im sure its a fluke, but since I have dual monitors the display was messed up and whenever I tried to fix it the entire GUI went away on both monitors and wouldn’t recover. I had to force power off the machine and ive been hesitant since then to make the actual switch. Id hate to brick my machine right off the bat, just trying to swap display sources.
Please give it another go. I think you’re right, thrt was a fluke.
I’ve heard that happen with mint before. Try a bit more modern distro like fedora or openSUSE maybe?
Mint is the one everyone touts, but mint is pretty shit tbh. Check out Zorin OS. I have a funky triple display setup and it handled it like a champ. Also UX/UI on Zorin is fantastic. There is GUI for everything.
I had a bit of trouble like that too… Tried Ubuntu and my 2nd display would have static bursts going through the middle horizontally. Couldn’t figure out a fix, tried out Fedora and had no problems.
As a long time Fedora user, it’s difficult to convince other Linux users of how reliable it is. I’ve used it on multiple computers for I think about a decade and I’ve rarely had problems, certainly fewer than I had with Windows.
Last week I finally parted with standard Fedora to try out an immutable version, right now it’s Bazzite… I’ve got to say it’s very cool, for some things it may be better for beginners, but for most I’d say it’s better to stick to the normal ones.
I think it’s better with KDE, though, especially if you’ve got multiple monitors with different pixel densities.
I had some gaming issues on Gnome, the mouse wouldn’t lock to my main window and it caused all kinds of problems.
Could not find a fix, swapped to KDE Plasma and the issue was gone, I’ve been liking KDE a lot more since, haha.
I flip flopped a bit over the years on my laptop, right now I’m on KDE as I feel it’s the better DE at this time.
On the desktop I’d always go with KDE, no question.
I feel like eveyone should reccomend Fedora KDE edition, its close enough to Windows for new users and modern enough to not push people away.
I have KDE on my laptop and gnome on my desktop. Beyond basic custiomization like icons, background, loading screen animation and some hot corners and shortcuts I don’t feel the need to touch it and it just works.
I don’t want to reccomend fedora since you need to add your own nvidia drivers. I’m looking to move to bazzite or endevourOS myself. Bazzite seems to be super easy to install and “gaming os” just seems to mean “its linux but steam and nvidia repo is preinstalled”
Most people who just have a PC don’t have a DGPU, for those who do the built in open source driver is good enough for 99% of use cases. People heavily exaggerate how much you need the proprietary drivers and you can always install them later if you really want (its not needed in the vast majority of cases to get it booting).
Tons of people game and those usually always have a nvidia gpu. Might as well get a linux with the drivers preinstalled otherwise your first half hour of linux use will be honestly a bit daunting looking rpmfusion.org and terminal. As opposed to same as windows, minus the debloating and rummaging for drivers.
No I mean genuenly you dont need then, maybe they preform better but strictly speaking proprietary drivers arent nessesary. You could just as easily not install them and the vast majority of people wont notice the 5% performance penalty.
Without rpmfusion drivers my games become slideshows.
Check out CachyOS as well.
People have their gripes over the “big corporation” side of this but I also daily drive fedora KDE and I love it. My only complaint is 2 things.
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Wireless shuts off after long periods of sleep. Suck if I’m torrenting my Linux isos.
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Very rarely it’ll freeze up and I need to hard restart.
Both of which could be a me issue. But besides that it’s a beautiful, easily and highly customizable system. Highly reccomend as well.
I also have issue number 2 with fedora KDE (kinoite). It’s happened like 3 times in the past several months
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Honestly I don’t mind 11. It’s miles better than 10 ever was IMO. However with that being said, Linux is better. I have to dual boot Windows 11 on my computer because unfortunately there’s no way I can use my Elgato Capture Device on a Linux machine.
I downvoted you for not minding Windows 11 🐵
Alright, I need to move my main desktop to linux. Help me decide which distribution. Note that I already run a desktop-less server on Debian, a raspi on their flavor of deb and have a laptop I rarely use on fedora (installed it to test the waters, but Mint would probably suit its use case more).
My main desktop PC is on windows and I wanna switch but im not sure which distro to switch to. The thing needs to be gaming ready for 2024 hardware. Debian is too slow to update for such a use case, I dont jive with Ubuntu philosophy, Arch is… im just not that kind of guy… so Im leaning on Fedora but I kinda dont like that it has 100 updates every time I boot it up. Is there any in between? Stable and quick with updates, but not when updates can crash the thing?
Edit: thanks for the recommendations, I’ll probably check em all out!
I have fedora. It is fast with updates and it just works. You aren’t pestered constantly with popups to install the updates and then your pc will randomly force restart to do the updates, you are in control. You just get a small popup that there are updates and you can decide what to install and when.
The only Issue I have is sometimes the updates break nvidia drivers. Thankfully linux keeps spare images of the working OS ready. What it means in practise when your games run like ass. I hard reset pc using power button while its booting and select another version and use that for a few days.
EndeavourOS should be fedora without those problems and iirc the nvidia driver distribution system is in the appstore by default (saves you from running like 3 commands).
Bear in mind if you do not disable secureboot, for every big kernel expansion you descide to add, you need to manually sign keys. This involves running a console command and restarting. I just disabled secureboot.
I know you said you’re not an Arch kinda guy…but I highly recommend Garuda.
Takes away most of the rough parts of running Arch, and comes in more flavours than you can shake a stick at. The forums are highly active, and Devs/admins/mods are very quick to respond to question/issue posts.
Edit: I’ve only had one single update related fuckery in the 3ish years I’ve been running it, and it was through personal error.
Peppermint is worth checking out. I don’t game but Debian and some extra on top. Lightweight
