;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 The second there is a problem expect hours of consuming, likely outdated, information.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Guides helping you to navigate this jumbled mess are possibly outdated so check their dates or you may end up following directions and quite possibly break your installation when you add/remove/alter a file that used to be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.
Something the community is always loathe to admit:
That was true until Windows started breaking every other week and every major update breaks something fundamental. I moved to Linux to escape the forced update cycle that breaks my desktop so frequently that I gave up on ever having files on my computer and just worked directly off of NAS because any given week had like a 5% chance of requiring that I spend 2 hours reinstalling Windows.
Now Linux, when configured correctly, eats less of your time than Windows, but you have to learn how to use it, just as you had to learn how to use Windows. It is a dumb saying said by people who don’t use Linux because they’re too stupid to learn it, or so stuck in their ways that they can’t break up with their existing workflow, sometimes for valid reasons.
Goes well with “If something bothers you, download the source and fix it yourself”.
Linux, and other FOS software, are free as in freedom not free as in free beer.
lol. Okay, but since you want to be pedantic, most are talking about both, but sure.
edit: btw, the above is such an old interplay, it pre-dates the quote (from c. 1999.) I was literally bored with this 25 years ago.
Im not being pedantic, that’s literally the idea. Most talk about both simply because most can be had without upfront cost, but that isn’t necessarily a requirement.