;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 The second there is a problem expect hours of consuming, likely outdated, information.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Guides helping you to navigate this jumbled mess are possibly outdated so check their dates or you may end up following directions and quite possibly break your installation when you add/remove/alter a file that used to be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.
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.