Preface.

It's fine. Stop being such a big baby and install Linux already. I'm doing this on fresh hardware that's kind of jank and it's still fine.

Installing.

You have to download an ISO, some magic program that makes bootable USB drives, and apply them to a USB stick. This is the hardest part of the process.

Then you plug that in and restart the computer. Now you're in Linux and can poke around to see if you're okay with this (and should; there's like a 20% chance something important like your network card doesn't work with Linux, in which case you should bail or try a different distro). An icon on the desktop offers to actually install it. It's easier than signing up for some websites.

All of the above is true of most Linux distros, particularly the ones people recommend to beginners.

One of the initial install options was to set my theme as light/dark with various colored accents. That was probably Mint-specific. It was very cute.

Problems.

  • I have a high-DPI screen. Mint defaulted to giving everything 2x scaling, which was pretty cluttered. 1x was tiny. 1.5x is blurry. I went with 1x but changed the size of all the menu fonts to be a bit bigger. This was kind of fiddly and unnecessary and took me five minutes.

  • The default scroll rate for the trackpad was way too high. There's no slider to adjust it because the maintainer of that package thinks there's some objective answer to how much a trackpad should scroll, that we're not enlightened enough to see. I had to use an obscure program to lie to my computer and tell it my track pad is half as big. This took like an hour, kind of grumpy this is a problem. I guess I could've just let it scroll too fast.

  • You can install Steam and set some setting that magically makes every game work on Linux, but it's hidden in a weird menu.

  • The default text editor is xed, and I feel obligated to use it for a while and see why they thought it was good enough to make the default, but it's not as good as gedit, or other good editor. This is self-inflicted and I could fix it in about two minutes.

  • Linux power/heat management is a little over-eager about turning the fan on whole blast, especially when streaming videos.

  • eylligator2 [she/her,none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Every time I read the weekly "get Linux post" there's always something like 'oh and, here's a technical process you're gonna have to learn to do this correctly but don't worry there's only a 50% chance you'll brick your dumb little laptop!'

    The beauty of windows is I log on and it does everything, and if it's doing things terribly, I'm blissfully and happily unaware

    • Owl [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      What part of what I wrote sounds like that to you?

      • eylligator2 [she/her,none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        The part where where I don't know what you're talking about unfortunamente, which began at step one.

        (Also, I'm mostly joking! I've been researching getting mint lol)

      • eduardog3000 [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I’m doing this on fresh hardware

        Imagine people trying to do this on their existing computer and wiping all their files because they don't know any better.

        You have to download an ISO, some magic program that makes bootable USB drives, and apply them to a USB stick. This is the hardest part of the process.

        Then you plug that in and restart the computer. Now you’re in Linux and can poke around to see if you’re okay with this (and should; there’s like a 20% chance something important like your network card doesn’t work with Linux, in which case you should bail or try a different distro). An icon on the desktop offers to actually install it. It’s easier than signing up for some websites.

        This may seem simple to you and me, but it's complicated as fuck for most people. Especially the shit about your network card not working.

        • Owl [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          "Use this program on this file" is not "complicated as fuck" lol.

          And "give up if your internet isn't working" is not rocket science either.

          • eduardog3000 [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            “Use this program on this file” is not “complicated as fuck” lol.

            Again, to you and me. For a lot of people 100% is.

            "give up if your internet isn’t working"

            You think people will try again after that? No, they'll just go right back to Windows and think Linux as a whole doesn't work.

            And again, in the process they will likely end up wiping their drive unknowingly and losing all their files.