I’ve been almost-ready to ditch Windows for years. Now’s the time.
My new neighbor is an old-school nerd. He hosts install parties at our local leftist third space.
He’s going to help me switch to… not sure yet. Probably Mint. I can’t wait. It feels as good as never giving a cent to Amazon, Uber, and streaming services.
Yay.
our local leftist third space.
You have no idea how jealous I am.
Sometimes I look at my life and I feel jealous of myself. Tbh I deliberately moved here (the boonies, and a leftist / alt-culture hotspot of grassroot community living), and it has its cons, but… Next week a wool felter is taking me foraging wild plants to teach me basket weaving, then I’m teaching her the basics of fermenting food (for booze, taste, or preservation), while my 10yo kid is 500km away for her country-wide robotics competition. I’m happily trapped in a caricature.
where is this? asking for a friend.
Central France. You coming?
guess i have to find a way to get accepted into europe (and finding a bunch of money)
So, in a week or so?
😂
As an American you can easily get into any country making decent salary (by European standards) as an English teacher. Try Poland, they accept basically anyone unless you’re Muslim
does it count if i’m not from the us and english isn’t my mother tongue?
Mince alors! If been to France multiple times, went to Burgundy last, and je parle in petit peu francais as well. You went full Braiding Sweetgrass and I really envy you! We moved to the county in west Germany and it’s all conservatives here. Not that they are actually conserving anything, though.
Und ich spreche Deutsch! Been to Bavaria (I know) a few times as a kid / teen, my grandmother taught highschool German for decades, and my dad reads Goethe for fun. German was the language I actually loved. Never use it nowadays though, and it’s so rusty I can’t do anything with it anymore. And my traitor kid just picked Italian as her 2nd foreign language. She sucks.
I thought it said “nerd space” not “third space” and I was like what’s that??!!
I need one though.
What’s a “third space”? 🫣
It’s a term from city planing. Essentialy places that are not your place of work or someone’s home.
Here is a more in depth explainer by NotJustBikes: https://youtu.be/VvdQ381K5xg
Thanks! I had no idea that was a term. I suggest we upgrade those places to “second place”
We’re sort of required to have a home to sleep and such, and a workplace to make money, so third place is the term that makes sense. Somewhere you aren’t required to be, but you enjoy being.
Critically somewhere that doesn’t cost money to simply exist in.
I don’t understand that explanation. Your workplace doesn’t cost money to exist in, it’s quite the opposite. Often a third place is a pub or something, in which you’re expected to buy a drink or something.
A city park is also a third place and that doesn’t cost you money to be there.
Yeah, a third place doesn’t have to cost money, but it also isn’t a requirement that it’s free.
Something capitalism deems evil
Why not both? 🤓
Do you live in a city? If you do, there is something of the sort in most cities; you just need to know the right people or look in the right places.
If not, yeah, rough, you could try travelling in to a city though.
Before anyone says anything, no my city is not huge, no I am not in the US. The political left is active pretty much everywhere on earth, sometimes more or less underground depending on the conditions, but they’ll have some sort of spaces for themselves.
Mint is a good choice for your first linux.
Second this! Been using it for years. Not a single problem. It just works
Plus it’s built on Debian right? So if you ever want to bring things even lower-level you’re positioned well to learn more in preparation.
The “main” version is built on Ubuntu. There is a Debian based version (LMDE), but the Ubuntu based one is the “recommended” one.
Ubuntu is Debian based, so it stays true
2 years ago when I started my switch I tried ~10 distros and then did a prolonged test of about 2 months for each of the 2 distros that were the closest to being perfect out of the box and settled on Bazzite.
I wish you a happy journey and if you don’t like one flavor don’t ditch Pizza, there are many more flavors to try and one of them surely will become your favorite.
I tried ~10 distros and then did a prolonged test of about 2 months for each of the 2 distros that were the closest to being perfect out of the box
Oh wow, that’s some serious dedication. Have you ever written out your experience?
No, I don’t believe it’s of any worth, as experiences will vary depending on user preferences and hardware. What would be the value of content like that?
But yeah, I was adamant about switching. I knew I would ditch Windows. I forced it down on my self to such a degree that I had to learn how to work (while working) without the tools I used for ~20 years like Adobe for example. I freaking love Inkscape and gimp is the most unintuitive piece of software on my PC.
Even if it’s subjective and reliant on the used hardware, if we had enough of these reports, they would become very valuable as patterns would inevitably show up.
But, I’m afraid we’re past the point in which you can reliably and vividly recollect the whole experience 😅.
There are already gazillions of reports scattered around both open and closed platforms.
But you can’t easily search for them with proper filters, they are almost useless.
What we truly need is a platform that enables this. And it needs to be federated, so every willing distro can host their own but share them to those instances interested in aggregating all distros.
Fedora and Ubuntu have their own, but Distro Watch aggregates both so that anyone wanting to switch can easily compare.
Mint is a good choice. It just works.
Haha! No it doesn’t.
Nice move.
Feel free to check back and share your experience.
Yo, so first of all, congrats on being able to ditch Windows! Second of all, I got hype-convinced to make the switch a few days ago and I have LOVED it. Moving from Windows to Mint (at least so far) was a breeze. There’s a tiny bit more thought overhead that goes into fixing things sometimes, but if I’m really honest about that, I had a lot of that with Windows, too, I just have decades of fixing Windows experience.
The only thing stopping a mass exodus is that there is no single version of Linux that is just dominating. I know that defeats the purpose of Linux, but that is what the dumb masses (such as myself) want. We want easy, and we don’t want to be special. If I have a problem I want a thousand others with the same problem, not my own little unique problem that I have to take hours away from my day to fix.
Then Linux Mint is what you’re looking for.
I’d say the stopping thing is a few multiplayer PvP games with anticheat, also some software that won’t work in Wine (adobe products, corel products, microsoft products).
Yes, I know alternatives exist (Krita, Inkscape, LibreOffice). No, they are not 100% drop-in replacements. I for myself love working in LibreOffice Writer, but when you work in a place where everyone except you uses MS Word and expects DOCX files, you can’t “just” switch to linux without issue.
The fediverse has the same issue
Awesome to hear!
+1 for Linux Mint, it’s what I recommend to 99% of newbies. It’s simple, stable, and friendly.
It’s my #1 “just works” distro
I really wanted to like Mint, and with the wave of friends wanting to move I decided to try it on a spare drive.
Wayland is still experimental on Cinnamon, and had noticeable artifacts. Shipped Nvidia drivers are Nouveau, so I looked for documentation on how to install it, and was directed by the official pages to look for “Driver Manager” IIRC. It simply was not in the “start menu”, neither via search nor via manual navigation.
Hardly “just works” unfortunately. Had much more luck with recommending Bazzite, despite its own shortcomings.
But if Mint works for you and others, you won’t hear me complain.
i quite like the out-of-the-box experience of debian13 running gnome, but i had to do quite a bit of tinkering to get my nvidia card running. it is running now, and i basically feel like i have a brand new computer.
Have fun! Whatever you do, if you run into an issue you can’t solve, stick with it. You’ll learn and become better over time.
I’ve been gaming on Linux for about 3 years now and it’s been great. Had some hiccups here and there but they were solved with some searching.
Never go to a second location, let a third.
You in trouble.
Oh yeah baby
Finally moved my gaming machine over while upgrading storage the other day. Pretty much seamless.
I know you’re getting a million suggestions and to be clear- nothing is wrong with Mint, but I recommend Fedora Kinoite as a first distro if you’re coming from Windows. KDE is going to be more familiar and the way the backend is designed makes it basically impossible to meaningfully break.
Bazzite or Zorin too
Definitely Bazzite, I also love Zorin but IMO that’s more an “Install on your dad’s laptop” OS than something for someone who knows how to install an OS.
I’m about there as well. I’m worried tho, cause I do some Sim Racing and some games don’t support Linux, and I’m worried the equipment won’t work. I know dual boot is always an option, but at a certain point, I fear I’ll just default to Windows because it’s what I know.
Mint is very comfortable for a windows user! If you’re on even slightly older hardware I really doubt you’ll find Windows more comfortable.
It’s all fairly new; within the last year. 9800x3d, 9070xt, and then the peripherals are all I’d say also new. So that also plays a part. I’m sure I will be fine, it’s just the unknown of it all, and Linux has a (imo deserved) stigma in its online support. I think the big worry is I feel like I have to learn it all, then change, instead of learning as I go. Just a lot at once, but I think it’s about time to learn.
Yeah getting hardware to work may require a bit of fiddling. There are some stellar resources, and some extremely helpful people. Most stuff really does “just work” but when it doesn’t you don’t have to learn everything, just how to fix that issue!
I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how painless it is. Obviously if you havae special hardware it may be hard to find drivers or whatever…hell if I know! but I had similar apprehension to you and it’s been a breeze!
Someone else responded that does some sim racing. It has limits, but it seems it’s game specific and largely by dev choice. More confidence than I expected, but I have liked at literally nothing for the process yet. Free weekend though, so hopefully 48 hours is enough lol
Having never even looked at Linux before I had it up and running on my old MacBook in less than an hour! Maybe another two of playing with settings (mostly for fun), and now it’s just my computer! I’m sure it’ll take extra time to get the things you want to work to go if they’re unusual, or maybe as you point out you may need to keep a windows partition for that.
Whew this was pretty accurate! I was gonna wait for the weekend, but I was feeling some type of way last night and just said “fuck it” and it was up and running within like 20 min. I’ve done basically nothing else tho; I had display issues (an HDMI switch I have was defaulting 1 screen to 4k (it’s a 1440 screen) and 60hz (it can do 240 I think?). So I tried to force resolution on it, which worked, but frame rate wouldn’t go. So I just bypassed the switch entirely, but now the 3rd monitor is always on, even when it’s off. So I need to find a way to kill the input when the screen is off.
I only ever use 2 screens, Screen 1 and 2 for regular use/gaming, or screen 2 and 3 for sim racing (screen 2 is just the discord/whatever screen). But with screen 3 always being active, the cursor and windows get lost over there, so that’s problem 1, sorting that out.
Problem 2 is probably more easily rectified, but I’m stubborn. Do I have to mount every partition before I use it, and does it have to show on the desktop? I have a 2tb and a 4tb SSD, and I was just going to split them evenly; 1tb for Win10 and Mint, and then 2tb each for storage. If it comes down to it, I’ll just run Linux on the 4tb cause I assume it will do most of what I need, then 2tb for Win10 for the special use cases. I just had a plan and I can’t get it to work now lol. Guess that’s what the weekend is for!
Peripherals all did mostly work; didn’t test the wheel or anything, but controller and Azeron controller worked natively, Bluetooth all seemed fine. No USB issues. Really smooth process all tings considered, outside of my personal setup issues.
You’re a hero man! Way to go. You’re a Linux person now ;) I don’t have any save advice because I’m where you were plus two weeks (and with simpler hardware, so you’re probably more advanced than me already)
Anyway that’s awesome! Way to go!
Just got into sim racing as a longtime Linux user. iRacing doesn’t work because they’re lazy about enabling anticheat, but ac, beamng, and others work great. What hardware do you have in your rig? FFB “just worked” with my pxn vd6, and I had to write up some udev rules to get my simsonn load cell pedals running, but it’s been smooth so far. There is a matrix chat you can join from simracingonlinux dot com that has excellent information and folks to help.
Yeah iRacing was my worry. I haven’t played it at all yet cause it’s just so much to get started, but that’s a goal, so it’s kinda at the forefront of my thoughts. I have a Moza R5 with just the stock pedals, but I have been eyeing some Simsonn pedals something fierce. How do you like them?
And awesome, I’ll look into that! I’m sure I’m gonna have questions, but from what I’ve seen, the Moza stuff is pretty plug and play. I have a bunch of random peripherals I need to look into tho
I really like the simsonn plus x pedals I picked up. The brake pedal has way better feel and modulation, and they’re adjustable about a billion ways to Sunday. I haven’t adjusted anything yet because I’m working on a frame to invert them out of 2020 extrusion.
The r5 should work perfectly out of the box, and install boxflat to do any tweaking you may need. Hopefully you take the plunge and things work well for you.
"It feels as good as never giving a cent to Amazon, Uber, and streaming services.
Yay. " Yay indeed. Just started my Cinnamon journey. Old Win7 laptop - never going back, to Apple either.
Apple, with their M silicon, has been tempting recently, but I really can’t bring myself to pull the trigger when I could have a top of the line Framework for the same price as a middle range MacBook pro. Sure, the MacBook is probably more powerful, but the framework would actually be mine.
That said, in the current ram/ssd economies I’m not buying a laptop at all if I can help it. Unfortunately, I want one so I can edit on the go, and uploading TBs of video footage to my home PC and then editing remotely isn’t going to work, so I’ll probably have to cough up some dough eventually.
