It was as easy as reformatting a usb stick, changing the boot order and turning off bitlocker, which was on for some reason?? but i havent used linux since, i dunno Mandrake 10? I was a kid, and it has been ages. It changed to mandriva about a year or two after i bought their CD set.
anyway I'm decently competent at computers i guess? i occasionally do stuff in powershell on windows, and the terminal or w/e seems neat. I used to do more coding, a skill i refreshed and picked up during quarantine. I'm mostly familiar with Microsoft's .net stuff though.
i shoved vs code and some stuff on it, but like, what's needed to kind of, well, replace a windows desktop? I gave it a 300gb partition, which is 30% of my available space, so i need to use this thing.
I am mostly getting peeved as shit and annoyed by Microsoft's increasingly aggressive "we gotta force people to upgrade, gotta shove horseshit AI nonsense on our stuff, gotta re-enable ads on the desktop" bullshit. I even paid for windows 10 pro, this isn't a free license, and it's still a nightmare in this way and frankly i'm done. the appeal of starting with a fairly barebones OS (i'm aware i can go much more stripped down with OSes like this, not the point) is intense right now.
but i realize now i genuinely know jack shit about dick outside of microsoft and android environments and i want advice.
The laptop itself is mostly a niche use laptop, but while I'm not an advanced dork in these matters, i probably know enough to leverage it to replace windows if i can know what the strengths of this platform are, what the good software is for software development (is Code gonna be it?), whether Wine is still the emulation software of choice, that stuff.
One thing I'd really like to do is learn what the default install of Mint+Cinnamon is doing, how to go over the different components, how to pick and choose what i want this thing doing. I didn't find the official documentation overly helpful, troubleshooting the install aside, so i wanted to ask here
If i can get there, and get some windows based software running that I need, i'll ditch the windows partition entirely, and i'd like to get there.
You might find Bottles to be a lot easier to use for getting windows apps up and running than messing around with straight WINE. It has a nice GUI and handles a lot of stuff more automatically. I've only used it for a couple small things, but it is neat. The thing I've had most trouble with in WINE/Bottles is things that need to interact with external hardware over USB. It can be done in some cases but its thorny
For software development there's kind of infinite options. it depends what kind of software you're developing I guess.
In terms of "what it's doing", it should be fairly little. Been a while since I used mint but other apt based distros generally have automatic security updates on by default, so I'm 90% sure mint will too (no restart required or anything, they've never caused me a single issue, but you can disable them if you want)
If you want to see like, every service running on the machine you can run
sudo systemctl statusin a terminal and look through like everything (or go even deeper and look at every running process, but systemctl will actually get you pretty close. If you just want to see system level background daemons trysudo systemctl | grep running). On a default install without a bunch of programs installed and started there shouldn't be much besides OS internalsOS internals can look like a lot though... things like (looking at my own system for reference here)