2d ago

Just made the switch to Linux as a lifetime Windows user.

It just works.

I'm kind of shocked how easy it was to set up. I used ventoy to make a bootable iso of Linux Mint Cinnamon on my Mini PC (Ser5 Pro), and I had zero issues with anything. Ventoy even plays nice with secure boot.

Where's the setup?

There really wasn't any. I booted into Mint, synced my keyboard/trackpad combo and my earbuds then was off to the races. It detected all my hardware including my Elgato HD60 X without any steps. 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).

Speaking of which Elgato's capture software doesn't support Linux (shocker), so I simply installed OBS, pointed the audio/video to the capture card, and it worked. Easy.

My Use Case

I have the aforementioned mini PC mainly to be jockied by a capture card for streaming Nintendo Switch to Discord. Aside from that I use it as a productivity machine in my living room for internet browsing (omg webtv!) and Kodi. The Ser5 uses an AMD Ryzen 7 5850u with integrated graphics, 16GB DDR4, and a 500gb M.2. All of the ports, HDMI audio out, etc were automatically detected by Mint.

Conclusion

Linux Mint feels premium compared to Windows 11. It's snappier, more modular, and offers a Linux GUI that's familiar/easy to use. Plus now I have the benefit of no preinstalled spyware or bloatware. Feels good to actually own my computer.

Thanks for reading!

78 comments

The secret of Linux is, if all your hardware works, it's actually easier to use for casual users. Most people nowadays use computers for web browsing and maybe playing media and light office tasks. A Linux Mint setup will have everything you need for that either preinstalled or ready to get fun the software store. If you don't need anything else, then it gets it of your way and just works. No viruses, little danger of malware, no crud to uninstall, no Microsoft account, no nagging apps, no ads, no attempts to upsell to paid cloud services or Pro, and no AI.
The problem arises when you want to go beyond that, and there's no obvious path ahead,v then people not used to the Linux way of doing things may run into trouble. But 90% of users, if someone sets it up for them, will do fine.

Welcome to a world outside of enshittification!

I put mint on a separate drive over the weekend. My two outstanding issues are my already-niche pieces of hardware. My KVM doesn't pass USB devices to my other device for some reason. I'm reasonably confident I can figure that one out. My other issue is my HID NFC reader for my Yubikey. No official driver for Linux so I expect that one to be more tricky, though I'd appreciate if anyone can point me in the right direction.

Cool! Out of curiosity, what was the trigger and/or motivation to make the switch?
- Microsoft locked me out of my Microsoft account which has a large collection of games, an active game pass subscription, and ms365. They unlocked it after I appealed and claimed it was for "potential spam" from my outlook account which I hardly ever use.
  Ridiculous. Just locked me out of all my purchases on a whim from some horrible AI moderating glitch. Done with them.
  
  You maybe got hacked and spam got sent. Anyways congratulations for the switch.

Hell yeah!

welcoms man

Next stop will be your privacy journey which would completely break your chains towards Discord which gave you trouble.
- A better way to word this is "Next will be your privacy journey which will send you down an inifinte rabbit hole that you consumes you".
  Lol no but seriously, it's a fun rabbit hole, but can get out of control if you're not careful.
  
  If you go to deep you’ll get paranoid lol. Atleast that is my experience.
- Once Revolt gets screen sharing.

While I love Elgato hardware from a design/price standpoint, it's a shame it doesn't all work on Linux. I had my Wave XLR for a year or so, but replaced it with a Scarlett Solo so I could use it on Linux.

Welcome! So happy to see new converts, and even more when they have an "it went well" story!

Welcome to stability. You are in control. sudo responsibly.

From what i remember my experience was the same when i started my journey with PopOS. Ofcourse it probably did help that i was already an amd user when i was still using windows, i already hated nvidia years before switching lol. I went down the rabbithole and now i'm on Void linux. Also used arch and NixOS in the past. I love being able to setup these minimal distros to my liking, and after that it just works and gets out of the way.

The sense of ownership and control the Linux experience offers is something I've never felt with Windows.

I started on Mint, then went to Arch Linux with Gnome. Now, I spend hours a day every day editing the dozens of config files for my Arch + Hyprland setup. I discovered NVIM plugins and decided to figure that out on my own instead of using one of the pre-made plugin packs. Now 90% of the software I use is cli. You can do anything from a terminal, and once you start it's hard to justify using bloated GUI applications instead. Especially once you make your TE and prompt pretty.

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.

Welcome! We are happy to have you. Remember, RTFM. ;)

My brother recently texted me asking for advice about installing Mint on an old laptop. He is the one that got me into computers as a kid, and he has worked at Microsoft for maybe 25 years. It made me so happy lol.
- Microsoft has a whole Linux division now. They're fully in the "extend" portion of their plan:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

Yeah I used to use Ubuntu as a Linux desktop a few years ago. I just came back to install Fedora on my desktop and the whole process was super easy. Even for gaming, Nvidia drivers, Steam with proton, etc. all set up with zero command line interaction, troubleshooting or even looking up guides or anything. It was intuitive and works.
Literally the hardest part was I couldn't find my USB stick and ended up improvising with an old SD card as installation media.
The compatibility for gaming on Linux today is generally really good. The whole experience is really polished.

This is why Mint is what I always recommend to people who are switching over for the first time. Congrats and welcome.

Same thing with Ubuntu.

welcome home! <3

Welcome to the dark side, we have cookies
Having said that, just as a suggestion, take a look at KDE. It feels a bit more windows like, is extremely customizable and as such can be made to work exactly how you want it

Plus now I have the benefit of no preinstalled spyware or bloatware
Now you get to choose the bloatware and spyware yourself! /s
- Real shit tho

Linux Mint is terrific, also recommend it to new Linux users. I just want things easy, clean, and fast. Also, fuck Microsoft.
Debian + KDE
- I bounced around to all sorts of systems and DEs and came to this same conclusion. Debian + KDE is where it all ended up after try easily over 20 different systems throughout the years.
  It’s the most “we trust you, but also respect your time” combo I’ve found.

Im gonna switch now when support for win 10 ends too, I would switch now but I have work to finish.

Good on you! It's a pretty good time to be transiting to linux. I transitioned a few years ago, and there were a lot of things that sucked back then, that just aren't an issue anymore.

As someone who uses RHEL for work every time I have to set something up on a windows system I groan. It really boils down to the app, some are very easy to use but it seems anything that involves OS config, the registry and permissions becomes a royal pita. Linux isn't 100% pain free (looking at you package conflicts) and SSL config sucks on all OS's but the majority of the time it presents smaller hurdles because I can dig into any part I need to.

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.

Welcome to the team.
I hope you brought your bouncing shoes because as soon as you'll get comfortable, you'll start hopping a lot

Welcome to the club :D 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.

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.

really the only annoying thing about linux nowadays is finding out the name of the software

Welcome! Be sure if to reach out to the community if you have any issues or questions. We love to help!

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.

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.
- Can you give me a brief idea of gaming on bazzite? I've done so on mint but I'm looking for something maybe better
  
  Like SteamOS, it boots into game mode and provides the option to switch to desktop. There are versions of it that don't have the game mode but I'm using my PC primarily for gaming. As an atomic distro the system files are read-only. It's called atomic because the entire system is updated in a single operation instead of just updating individual packages. This means that installing new software can be a bit tricky requiring things like package layering or DistroBox.
  One of the big things is the ability to just rollback your system to an earlier version if the update broke anything.
  Bazzite is a custom image based on Fedora Silverblue. If you're interested in non-gaming versions of you can look at Fedora Atomic Desktops.
  
  Bazzite and Chimera are "SteamOS-like" distros that are more focused on providing a game console like experience.
  They're immutable operating systems, and the primary UI is Steam. Definitely usable as a desktop PC but that isn't really their target niche.
  
  It just works for me. I tried it about a year ago when I still had an Nvidia card and Wayland wasn't playing nice. I've since upgraded to an AMD and most things just work out of the box.
  Indiana Jones and the Great Circle gave me some trouble, but that's just typical for MachineGames's engine on Linux.
  The most difficult thing about Bazzite is figuring out rpm-ostree and package layering. Luckily there isn't much I need that's not in the package library.

Linux works great generally. My wife and I have been using for 20 years since we dumped windows.
The deal is that Linux is great for FOSS but limited for commercial apps. One generally needs to deside based on apps they run. Hardware is similar.

Congrats! I'm excited to see your upcoming posts on distro hopping.
- Some truths cut too deep

Forewarning, wine appears to be a bit broken on Mint at the moment. I was recently experimenting with it in a VM, and I could not seem to get it installed properly - even after adding the winehq repo. Debian, by contrast, just works. I still use winamp for my music library, and play a few games that are windows based.
- Fortunately I have no need for wine.
- wine works without issues for me on mint 22.1. I use foobar2k, and most games I play are windose only. but I use proton for games, not wine.

Some Elgato hardware is supported by OBS, FYI. IIRC the HD60+ or S+ or something.
- Right. I said that I use OBS for my Elgato HD60 X. Works great!

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.

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.

Cinnamon is a dope desktop manager, too, good choices all around.

Related to the Discord Canary comment, Vesktop is a third-party Discord client that's properly supported Wayland for quite some time now. I've been using it ever since swapping to Linux full-time to make sure streaming works correctly.
- Audio support for streaming was still unavailable when I tried this. Maybe because Mint Cinnamon is still X11?
  
  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!

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/212c09b1-aa18-421d-93b4-a53b1bddf265

Foreign words to me. Happy for you nonetheless

It just works
Sometimes, and until it does not work.
I have Linux on a Lenovo laptop, when I connect it to my hdmi matrix there is no resolution that works for it to correctly display. There is no way to keep the display from turning off despite setting it to never turn off.
- Same can be said about Windows though... it is supposed to just work, but then why do I get a call from my parents every month cause something is broken on their Windows 10 computer?
  
  Windows is a disaster. Linux Mint was easier to install than Windows 11 and it's not even close.
- Yes, this is Linux. If your hardware is supported, it's outstanding. If not, you will need to figure it out yourself. Vetting purchases for compatibility is the most important part. As a bonus, it also makes you vote with your wallet for the manufacturers that don't do a bunch of proprietary bullshit.
- Laptops often have issues with Linux because they have a lot of proprietary garbage- web cams being the most infamous.
- 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 they'll just pile on more ads.
  I'd much rather deal with some hardware incompatibilities than Microsoft's bullshit.
  
  My comment was not meant to steer anyone away from Linux, just pointing out something.
- Immutable distros help tremendously with the "It just works (and doesn't stop just worksing)" aspect. Fedora Kinote is what finally allowed me to transition from Windows. Literally zero issues for over eight months now and I am not a super techie person. I hate the command line and need GUIs.
  Honestly I think an immutable KDE distro is going to be the windows killer for pretty much anyone looking to switch. It's literally better than Windows in every way.
  
  Try Aurora which is Kinoite with some nice extras added
  That was the "just works Windows killer" for me.
  You can rebase directly to it to just try it out, and simply rebase back to standard Kinoite if you don't like it.

78 comments