;tldr Beginning to use a new OS, even using a distro as friendly as Mint, is harder than the overall community says it is. The second there is a problem expect hours of consuming, likely outdated, information. That said I’m happy I switched.
I’m not a programmer. If you are someone who is unfamiliar with GNU/Linux you probably aren’t either. Good news: a week after you start using Linux you’ll feel like one! Here are some critical things I eventually learned while installing Ubuntu/Mint:
You should expect to use the terminal . Period. Something about your particular hardware or software setup may require special tweaks or install that requires typing. Anyone who even hints this isn’t the case is at best deluded. I know this is a deal-breaker for many people but I’d rather not waste your time.
Locations and commands are case-sensitive . -h means help -H Human-readable (or is it the other way around? More typing yay!). It’s in /etc/ X 11, not /etc/x11 (something almost impossible to see the difference of on a blurry 1080i resolution not being properly displayed).
While the basic user storage locations mimic what you are used to, the underlying system organization is completely impossible to navigate. Pertinent files can be scattered over several locations for whatever reason so don’t even bother trying to figure out a pattern and just follow guides. That said,
Guides helping you to navigate this jumbled mess are possibly outdated so check their dates or you may end up following directions and quite possibly break your installation when you add/remove/alter a file that used to be important but has been deprecated or relocated and now redundant. Speaking of which,
It is possible/probable your distro is effectively a skin of another older distro , so you should search the underlying distro directions too in case there aren’t any for the ‘skin’ you’re using.
All said and done, I am very happy to say I now have my Mint OS on a portable USB keychain that I can use on any PC (assuming TPM permission). The actual OS is pleasantly unobtrusive, nimble, and supports 90% of what I want to do with it. Critical failings seem to be completely relegated to proprietary software (for me, 1080i support was abandoned by all the graphics card developers years ago and I’m unable to either find older working drivers like I can in Win10, or find/figure out the tweaking needed to force the issue). Check all your mission critical programs to see if they are Linux compatible , or ‘simply’ learn to use the open-source competitor if they aren’t.
Based on the data that even Mint, the overwhelming consensus being it is the most user friendly distro available, deemed it necessary to put the terminal on the taskbar. That, and if anything goes wrong and the bootup fails, it defaults to the command line interface.
That’s not data allowing anyone the disqualify an opinion they don’t agree with. A bit like if, to your affirmation, I was to object that on the three computers running Mint in my home (not counting a few others I installed elsewhere) not a single one forced me to use the Terminal. In fact, that’s the reason why I switched to Mint a few years ago: back then I realized it was the sole distro that allowed me to connect my Airpods without any hack at all, just by clicking the Bluetooth pairing button. Instant convert ;)
Even though that’s my own experience, that’s still no data to object your own. We both have different experience (none being truer than the other). I was just pointing that out.
Have a nice first day of the year.
Something as simple as changing audio quality playback requires the terminal in Mint, it’s a whole 5 clicks in Windows and even easier on Mac.
Linux Mint has a generally good user experience but it is still flawed. When something is available in the UI it’s pretty easy but there are myriad settings for general use that simply have zero UI.
The answer from developers is basically always the same… open terminal.
As mentioned by someone else, the reason guides and linux helpers tend to tell you to use terminal, is because it’s already installed, and will work almost regardless of distro.
That doesn’t mean a GUI option does not exist. It’s just that distros essentially being collections of independent software, rather than monolithic integrated systems like windows, they tend not to come installed with all the GUI applications that exist. And if they do, guides and people helping you still can’t rely on you having a particular one installed.
For audio there is a litany of control panel applications you might install, some of which allow doing things that are a right pain on windows.
As an example, I use qpwgraph to route audio from a co-op game into a remote sunshine stream while excluding other system audio, while simultaneously using discord to voice chat with a friend who’d otherwise have to listen to themself as well as the game.
Qpwgraph allows you to route audio in almost any way you might imagine. Want to send each stereo channel to completely different audio devices? Sure. Send system audio into the mic input of a discord call? Why not. Use multiple audio devices at the same time? Go ahead. Flip the stereo channels? Weird, but ok.
And the app isn’t what does it. It’s just a GUI for capabilities that already exist in the pipewire sound server.
Similar cases exists for all kinds of things you might otherwise do in the terminal.
Yeah, I needed to scour forums and use the terminal to make the num lock be on by default on startup for entering my password. And to get a game working. And to get the system to ask which drive to boot from (installed Mint on a separate hard drive instead of a partition). Still haven’t figured out how to sort pictures in a folder by date taken, but I’m gonna take a wild guess that’ll need the terminal…
It wont. File sort would be a feature and or setting of your file browser. How to use it would depend on your particular file browser.
In KDE dolphin though it would be under “right click>sort by” or “hamburger menu>sort by”.
If you want this to be set separately for each folder, you’d open Dolphin settings (again, the menu, or the shortcut ctrl+shift+,) go to the view tab and set display style to "remember for each folder).
Is sorting by date taken a feature in KDE? If so, I might change to that from Cinnamon (the default that Mint installed with). I’m talking organizing the files based on the exif data, not modification date or the like.
It’s a feature in Windows that I didn’t realize how useful it was until I didn’t have it and searching online for how to do it in Linux always comes back with some crazy-seeming solutions.
Should be. I have it under “sort by>image>date photographed”. Important to note that is not always a populated metadata tag.
You might not need to entirely switch, you can install just Dolphin (the KDE filebrowser) and use it with Cinnamon just fine.
Edit: Nemo, the file browser shipped with Cinnamon, should also have support for this. I don’t personally use it so I can’t help you further there on how to do that or what might be wrong if it isn’t working.
Not sure what you mean by ‘audio quality playback’ but I do do use the Easy Effect app to customize the EQ on a per output basis, if that helps? Edit: the app website
Who said otherwise? (and so is macOS, I could not tell for Windows but I have little doubt it’s that perfect either ;) I just pointed out that the OP dismissive tone was a bit too much. End of the story as far as I’m concerned.
For example changing playback quality from 48kbps to 96kbps.
Worse is that setting this then results in automatic upscaling on everything which will have your CPU maxed out.
Linux in general is awful for audiophiles.
I think their tone is perfect, far too many leap to claim you can use LM or other distros without ever needing the terminal and in my experience it’s 100% a lie.
This is true on all systems. Windows and MacOS both also use internal sound servers to mix all audio sources into the single PCM signal that goes to the sound card.
If incoming PCM signals are at some other samplerate than what is being fed to the audio device, they must be resampled.
You can’t feed two PCM signals at different samplerates into a single output any other way. Or even a single one, if the input samplerate is different from the selected output samplerate.
This is how it works everywhere. Not just linux. It is a fact of digital audio.
Just. No.
Your system is not going to be burning up the CPU doing audio resampling. It simply isn’t that demanding a task. It’s something all system do regularly anyway, whether it’s upsampling or downsampling, one audio stream (or at least two for stereo) or a dozen, or more.
This to me is an admission you have no idea what you’re talking about. Linux is PREFERRED by tons of audio engineers because its audio handling and routing capabilities on a system level are unmatched, as well as the ultra-low audio processing latencies it can achieve when configured for it on a kernel level.
Well having my cpu maxed out by this simple change was my experience and that’s with a 7800x3d.
It was the last straw and forced me back to Windows for over a year. Changing this setting should not be so annoying and definitely shouldn’t be hammering a cpu so badly but that’s my experience.
I could not care less about the reasons behind any of it. I have a good sound card and want to be able to set the playback quality easily and without things breaking.
That’s it. I don’t want to learn about PCM mixing sound channels or upsampling or latency. I want it to fucking work.
I will stand by my statement that Linux is awful for audiophiles, Mac beats it all day every day because it actually works without having to open a terminal.
I promise you. It was something else. Audio resampling simply cannot max out a modern CPU, and is something your system does regardless of what samplerate you are using.
That’s fine. But then don’t make claims about how it works and why it has problems. Just say you had problems.
It was pipewire and I tested it thoroughly. It was putting a single core to 70-100% during audio playback that required upscaling.
No. I described exactly the problem I encountered and will describe it how I want.
Mint was the most user friendly maybe 5 years ago. But even back then I had lots of problems with it.
Its development has been slow while strides have been made to the point that I’d consider either Bazzite, popOS, or Zorin the simplest for a new user to get into today.