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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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It's going to be purchase a new hard drive and then jump to Linux Mint this August.
It's not an experience I am looking forward to (5080S, I do a lot of modding, and enjoy fangames/indie games which do not always play nice with linux) but needs must - the Linux community in general is very friendly, so we'll get through it, even if the first 6 months are rough. I'll keep the dual boot and push the windows partition to 11 if needed by work, that way I can put off rewriting my elderly access database for another few years.
Honestly, Microsoft are committing suicide when it comes to home users. It won't be sudden, but the wheels are turning, all the IT savvy folks are switching people over (already did my aunt's potato, mum's demi-tato is next week). Eventually, a tipping point will be reached and offices will start switching - I hope that day comes before I die of old age!
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
So, oddly enough, I'm not a complete novice. My background is mostly just lubuntu, puppy, mint and a bit of debian. I've shifted away from Ubuntu after the pro service ads in terminal, and the absolute fucking nightmare that is snap.
I've done my time in "oh shit I fucked up Linux again" purgatory, and it's my daily driver for work. Terminal is a place I'm generally ok with; I know enough to find my way around and fix things as needed.
My issue is I've never really run dedicated graphics from a Linux distro, and because of the continual updates and proprietary elements I worry about keeping up. I don't mind breaking things, it comes with the territory.
That said, bazzite sounds interesting - especially the optimisation. The guides on the main page also alerted me to something I'd not considered - going to have to redo my filesystem on every drive. Thanks for the idea of an alt distro, will dig into this a bit more - if it's built in fedora I might have a bit of a learning curve (never used it as a distro).
Again, infinite free troubleshooting if you run into any issues, feel free to message me! I've given a bunch of people bazzite at this point, and can run you through just about anything.
Make sure not to accidentally choose "steam gaming mode", on the download since that'll turn it into basically a steam-deck interface.
Tip: Add your non-steam games to steam to launch launch them with Proton. thats probably the easiest way.
Otherwise there's Bottles and Lutris (and maybe HeroicLauncher)
There's also umu!
It essentially (if I've understood things correctly) aims to replicate the behaviour of proton.
Works like a charm, I have a simple alias set up that will run almost any .exe - even installers and stuff. Only thing that hasn't worked so far was my digital exam software (that is essentially a windows rootkit) because it couldn't find the cursor images lol.
Thanks for the tips!
Lutris I've used with some success, and I'm somewhat ok with wine when it works out if the box (or troubleshooting using the wine wiki).
Do you recommend any other sites/guides for troubleshooting?
Bottles is just a GUI to help you set up wine environments without having to deal with wine directly.
For troubleshooting just the lutris forums and wine bugtracker. I mostly play steam games so protondb is the best source of troubleshooting tips.
Totally feels strange because my dad's laptop doesn't have the TPM requirement and he was telling me about how he was talking to the IT guy at his work about possibly switching to Linux just so he can keep his laptop. No clue if he's gonna have me or ask if Mr. IT can do it, though, if he follows through. Absolutely insane because I might not be the only person in my house using it anymore (android not included because I view it as a completely separate entity).
I was telling him that day that I could flash Mint (have the most recent addition on my laptop) to a thumb drive if he was actually wanting to switch over. He's definitely an average computer user, so nothing too special, but it still feels real weird.
Though this will also suck for a while because the tech savvy people helping them switch over will also be running IT for these people who have never used Linux before and most likely have never even used windows CMD either. Cannot wait for stories of people being fed up because their parent/aunt/uncle/friend/whoever looked up how to fix their device and entered the cursed rf command without thinking once about it.
So, in the case of my aunt, there were a few teething troubles. That said, a lot of it was just requests to add web page shortcuts to her desktop.
The really big thing is that she's stopped complaining about how slow her laptop is, and openly says she finds it easier to use.
Most of the troubleshooting is going to be around office software and games. It's also going to be about replacing windows tools (I am really going to miss my ".bat cave"), and learning new troubleshooting skills (wine is a bit rough to troubleshoot unless you're willing to get your mining gear out and dig deep into logs).
good thing about the terminal is it scares most general users so much that they won't touch it even with instructions. There will be many issues, but I don't think people running random commands in the terminal will be common
Best part is, if they do switch over they won’t go back. Not having to deal either bloat and telemetry is worth it.