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.
"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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
Nice move.
Feel free to check back and share your experience.
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.
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
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!
You’re going to start switching on saturday, and keep switching the following week, and… it’s a process 😁 Have fun !
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.
The fediverse has the same issue
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.
Never go to a second location, let a third.
You in trouble.
Oh yeah baby
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.
if you ever installed windows you don’t even need help. download iso and burn it to disk or more likely nowadays steup a bootable usb with the image. boot and click next next next and walla.
