I’ve been almost-ready to ditch Windows for years. Now’s the time.
My new neighbor is an old-school nerd. He hosts install parties at our local leftist third space.
He’s going to help me switch to… not sure yet. Probably Mint. I can’t wait. It feels as good as never giving a cent to Amazon, Uber, and streaming services.
Yay.
i quite like the out-of-the-box experience of debian13 running gnome, but i had to do quite a bit of tinkering to get my nvidia card running. it is running now, and i basically feel like i have a brand new computer.
Awesome to hear!
+1 for Linux Mint, it’s what I recommend to 99% of newbies. It’s simple, stable, and friendly.
It’s my #1 “just works” distro
I really wanted to like Mint, and with the wave of friends wanting to move I decided to try it on a spare drive.
Wayland is still experimental on Cinnamon, and had noticeable artifacts. Shipped Nvidia drivers are Nouveau, so I looked for documentation on how to install it, and was directed by the official pages to look for “Driver Manager” IIRC. It simply was not in the “start menu”, neither via search nor via manual navigation.
Hardly “just works” unfortunately. Had much more luck with recommending Bazzite, despite its own shortcomings.
But if Mint works for you and others, you won’t hear me complain.
Fantastic love to see it. No recommendations as you will find what suits your zen, Mint is loved by many
I comment to add a cheers for bailing on Amazon & not paying for streaming services. Did so also years ago, its a great feeling. Good luck!
That’s great to hear! Welcome, and have frustrating fun!
If you don’t mind me asking; in your context, what does “leftist” mean? When I hear the term, it’s usually meant as a pejorative for some nebulous group the utterer doesn’t like.
Thanks !
Not a native speaker, so don’t put too much faith in my answer, but: for me, it means actual left, faaaar left, not the milquetoast leftf-wing parties that sometimes win elections in Western Europe.
There’s a good measure of gift economy, for example. We share many resources, grow food for each other (I do squash, a neighbor does leek, and so on–but we don’t trade, we just take what we need.) When we need musclepower we just pass the word around and strangers or friends come build a wall / clean out an old barn / stack firewood. There’s a buy-nothing warehouse were we drop everything from clothes to building materials, toys, kitchenware, and art supplies.
I volunteer to manage a pay-what-you-want hostel for hikers. There’s a lot of grassroot community politics / activism. It’s nice.
Never go to a second location, let a third.
You in trouble.
Oh yeah baby
The only thing stopping a mass exodus is that there is no single version of Linux that is just dominating. I know that defeats the purpose of Linux, but that is what the dumb masses (such as myself) want. We want easy, and we don’t want to be special. If I have a problem I want a thousand others with the same problem, not my own little unique problem that I have to take hours away from my day to fix.
The fediverse has the same issue
Then Linux Mint is what you’re looking for.
I’d say the stopping thing is a few multiplayer PvP games with anticheat, also some software that won’t work in Wine (adobe products, corel products, microsoft products).
Yes, I know alternatives exist (Krita, Inkscape, LibreOffice). No, they are not 100% drop-in replacements. I for myself love working in LibreOffice Writer, but when you work in a place where everyone except you uses MS Word and expects DOCX files, you can’t “just” switch to linux without issue.
2 years ago when I started my switch I tried ~10 distros and then did a prolonged test of about 2 months for each of the 2 distros that were the closest to being perfect out of the box and settled on Bazzite.
I wish you a happy journey and if you don’t like one flavor don’t ditch Pizza, there are many more flavors to try and one of them surely will become your favorite.
I tried ~10 distros and then did a prolonged test of about 2 months for each of the 2 distros that were the closest to being perfect out of the box
Oh wow, that’s some serious dedication. Have you ever written out your experience?
No, I don’t believe it’s of any worth, as experiences will vary depending on user preferences and hardware. What would be the value of content like that?
But yeah, I was adamant about switching. I knew I would ditch Windows. I forced it down on my self to such a degree that I had to learn how to work (while working) without the tools I used for ~20 years like Adobe for example. I freaking love Inkscape and gimp is the most unintuitive piece of software on my PC.
Even if it’s subjective and reliant on the used hardware, if we had enough of these reports, they would become very valuable as patterns would inevitably show up.
But, I’m afraid we’re past the point in which you can reliably and vividly recollect the whole experience 😅.
There are already gazillions of reports scattered around both open and closed platforms.
But you can’t easily search for them with proper filters, they are almost useless.
What we truly need is a platform that enables this. And it needs to be federated, so every willing distro can host their own but share them to those instances interested in aggregating all distros.
Fedora and Ubuntu have their own, but Distro Watch aggregates both so that anyone wanting to switch can easily compare.
Mint is a good choice. It just works.
Haha! No it doesn’t.
Finally moved my gaming machine over while upgrading storage the other day. Pretty much seamless.
Good luck!
Oh so now I’m committed I need luck all of a sudden?
"It feels as good as never giving a cent to Amazon, Uber, and streaming services.
Yay. " Yay indeed. Just started my Cinnamon journey. Old Win7 laptop - never going back, to Apple either.
Apple, with their M silicon, has been tempting recently, but I really can’t bring myself to pull the trigger when I could have a top of the line Framework for the same price as a middle range MacBook pro. Sure, the MacBook is probably more powerful, but the framework would actually be mine.
That said, in the current ram/ssd economies I’m not buying a laptop at all if I can help it. Unfortunately, I want one so I can edit on the go, and uploading TBs of video footage to my home PC and then editing remotely isn’t going to work, so I’ll probably have to cough up some dough eventually.
Yo, so first of all, congrats on being able to ditch Windows! Second of all, I got hype-convinced to make the switch a few days ago and I have LOVED it. Moving from Windows to Mint (at least so far) was a breeze. There’s a tiny bit more thought overhead that goes into fixing things sometimes, but if I’m really honest about that, I had a lot of that with Windows, too, I just have decades of fixing Windows experience.
Mint is a good choice for your first linux.
Second this! Been using it for years. Not a single problem. It just works
Plus it’s built on Debian right? So if you ever want to bring things even lower-level you’re positioned well to learn more in preparation.
The “main” version is built on Ubuntu. There is a Debian based version (LMDE), but the Ubuntu based one is the “recommended” one.
Ubuntu is Debian based, so it stays true
You won’t miss it, I’ve been on Linux since 1998. Fuck Microslop!
Please tell me what kind of place that you live that you have a local leftist third place!!
deleted by creator
Rural France, as far from the 20 biggest cities as geographically possible, a hard-left hotspot for the last few centuries. Tbh we have like 10 local leftist third places (a co-op bar/live shows place, a freecycle place, two boardgame/rpg bars, a pay-what-you-can (good) restaurant with ultra-local food, a community hall for crafts, homework, WFH, and random meetings,two community theaters.)
Thanks! As someone stuck in the hell hole that is the US, that sounds like Utopia!
It really is. Of course, we still live in a wider context of corporate capitalism, and it sucks here as it does in the whole country. They’re gutting public transit, school budgets, and healthcare. Our local representatives are hard-right assholes, because the old farts vote more than us.
yeah, fucking capitalism. well, at least you guys aren’t out there killing everyone like us. but, the old farts have been a big part in our mess too, for the same reasons.
I know you’re getting a million suggestions and to be clear- nothing is wrong with Mint, but I recommend Fedora Kinoite as a first distro if you’re coming from Windows. KDE is going to be more familiar and the way the backend is designed makes it basically impossible to meaningfully break.
Bazzite or Zorin too
Definitely Bazzite, I also love Zorin but IMO that’s more an “Install on your dad’s laptop” OS than something for someone who knows how to install an OS.
