Thank you all who reached out, it really was awesome.
Was super easy, even my Nvidia cards driver was basically automated. Haven’t played anything yet but I’m sure I’ll be fine.
I opened up the command thingy a couple of times just to get some settings how I wanted them, but could have gotten by without it.
The biggest stumbling block for me personally was getting the thumb drive in order, then the hardware to boot from it. First you gotta use a thing called Rufus to format the drive correctly, not sure how or why, but you do.
And then I couldn’t get my laptop to load bios no matter what key/s I mashed at restart, but searching " advanced startup options" in settings brought me to a menu to reboot from my (now correctly formatted) USB drive.
The rest drove itself. Still some stuff to figure out with it but it’s doable. Very polished and user friendly.Thank you all again so much!
One of us One of us One of us! :)
Again: Hallelujah, another soul saved!
So now it’s basically down to this: Keep using it for whatever you would normally do in windows. And if you’re having issues, try to sort it out.
And then one day you’ll suddenly realize how long it’s been without Windows, and that you don’t really see a reason for going back any time soon.
I went for it, kept what I wanted on an external hard drive and nuked the rest. No ragrets
Welcome to freedom and perfect mental health.
The best part will be never having to download an exe or msi file to get stuff to work. Just look for the software you want, install, have at it.
I’m sorry, it just brings me so much joy when I read stories like this one.
perfect mental health.
JFC dude, seriously?
The best part will be never having to download an exe or msi file to get stuff to work.
LOL Because Googling a website, clicking the download button, and clicking “next” on the installer is so much harder than compiling from source code or trying to figure out how to install one of the 34 different Linux filetypes…
Most people just use a package manager the vast vast majority of time. People don’t typically compile from source or figure out different file types.
That’s great if the package manager has the software you’re looking for. Which is 50/50 in my experience.
Well, it all comes down to distro when it comes to package selections and availability.
I can say though that in the last year or so I have found 100% of the software I needed in the repositories and that includes at least a dozen proprietary applications ( including some that require registration and / or licensing such as Burp Suite Pro and JetBrains Rider ).
Everything I have installed came to me in the same package format ( or was automatically converted to it by the package management tooling - all the same to me ). A single command updates everything.
That is without resorting to Flatpak which I am sure provides a pretty good selection to other distros as well ( at the cost of a second package format ).
Makes me wonder what the heck it is that is not what you want/need 50% of the time. Must be a pretty peculiar set of software.
1 script, 36 package apps plus 31 FlatPaks installed in one command. Any other thing I need or want, it’s just there via CLI or any program installer such as Discover.
Having said that, and being positive that over 90% of any Linux Distro users would be dumbfounded by reading your comment, I choose to assume you’re just trolling and let you be moving forward. Have fun googling crap in Windows.
Right. If anyone has a different experience than you, they must be trolling… 🙄
Correct.
command thingy
They grow up so fast.
Which flavor did you choose? I am now rocking basic mint with XFCE on my older machine and LMDE on newer.
How do you like LMDE vs regular Mint?
Cinnamon I think
That’s the Mint classic option and a great one. It’s an easy mainline go to for users with all the basics baked in.
Welcome to the penguin party! 🐧
Minty got a fresh Mint :)
Now that you have Mint, next time you want to make a thumb drive for installing a distro all you have to do is plug in a thumb drive, right-click the .iso file, and select Make Bootable USB Stick. (or from the Menu choose Accessories ‣ USB Image Writer)
And here’s a nice intro to Mint for you. That site has lots of other helpful stuff too. Enjoy!
right-click the .iso file, and select Make Bootable USB Stick
And most of the time it will even work!
I kid, I kid… kind of. My outcomes when making bootable sticks from ISOs over the years have been very random.
I prefer Ventoy, because I can put however many different ISOs on it by just dragging ISO files to a folder, and I can use rest of the drive for regular file storage. But still it’s really sweet Mint has such option easily available!
I use Arch by the way.
I did too, never again. Fedora just works.I went from “Hey Mint’s nice plug-n-play”, to failing at installing Arch, to hopping to Manjaro then Endeavour for a short while, to installing and building my own Arch+i3+rice, to end up returning to Mint because it just works
Idk I think I’m too smooth brain for Arch, but I’m trying to get into NixOS now, it seems really cool!
I love Arch but think I have too much of a koala mind for Nix.
One of us must be smarter than they think they are.
Welcome to the Club!
Haven’t played anything yet but I’m sure I’ll be fine.
<_<
Lol
You will be fine. I game on mint with an Nvidia card. Steam has a setting to fall back to proton for all games without native Linux, and for everything off steam use Lutris (install it from the website, since the package manager version is too old to be useful)
What’s going on with Lutris and Mint these days? Still need the Debian ppa from OpenSuse or did they start officially supporting it again?
They provide .deb files. I didn’t hunt any further than that
I see. Just checked their site. It appears that we still need the OSBS if we want automatic updates.
That is, if the method still works. I’m way overdue for actually sitting down and playing a game.
Flatpak?
Does 144hz+GSync work on Mint or Pop!os? I reward it had issues, and I’ve also read it works so I’m confused.
You don’t need 144 Hz and GSync. Waves hand in Jedi mind trick style.
Unfortunately for me… your powers don’t work on me. They’re a full necessity D:
Next on the list: get into tabletop RPG, but not DnD.
I can recommend Pathfinder and Shadowrun.
Fate, Savage Worlds, or Traveller.
Pathfinder is just the GNOME classic of RPGs.
more like Cinnamon and GNOME Classic being DnD 3.5
Now we’re splitting hairs 😁
I hope the update to 24.04 works well
I’ve been through a few on regular Mint and the Debian edition and they have been very smooth.
Yeah I didnt haha, thats why I mentioned that.
If you do, I made a post about how to circumvent it manually.
Also on Mint here after trying NixOS and then Zorin.
Note about Steam gaming: Steam seems to choose the experimental version of Proton (their compatibility layer) by default which exhibited very poor performance.
As soon as I forced games to launch with version 8 (latest stable) I was getting full frames on Fallout 4.
As soon as I find the time will do the same thing. Congrats!
I’m happy for you!!! Happy to hear you’re enjoying your freedom.
