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 The second there is a problem expect hours of consuming, likely outdated, information.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Guides helping you to navigate this jumbled mess are possibly outdated so check their dates or you may end up following directions and quite possibly break your installation when you add/remove/alter a file that used to be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