…and it went very smoothly. I installed on a spare PC for now, but I could absolutely see this becoming my daily driver. I’m mostly surprised at how snappy and responsive it is, even on 10 year old hardware!

  • TrueStoryBob@lemmy.world
    9·
    4 days ago

    Me too! Just replaced my eight year old (and beat to crap) Chromebook with a corporate hand-me-down laptop that I stole got when they ordered new laptops! Just played around with both Mint and Ubuntu for a couple weeks and I’ve seriously loved it.

  • A_Chilean_Cyborg@feddit.cl
    11·
    7 days ago

    Welcome aboard!

    Linux has it’s tradeoffs, you must accept that sometimes, in some cases, you may get somewhat inconvenienced, but in exchange, your computer is truly yours now, with time you learn to deeply appreciate that, also, people who develop desktop, usually want to do it so people who are normal, can use it, I’m not a technical person and have never had a problem I couldn’t fix, you just need to keep trying!.. or find your way around it, contrary to popular beliefs, a big chunk of the Linux community is eager to help new people, for sure there are people who are elitists and gatekeepers, but are a loud, obnoxious minority.

    Enjoy Linux!

    • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      7 days ago

      Thanks! I think I’m willing to make that tradeoff. I also wouldn’t consider myself techy (as in, not a tech professional or anything), but I am pretty confident in my ability to google and figure stuff out.

      I’ve even run into my first issue now: It turns out that Realtek wifi USB devices don’t play well with Linux.

      • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
        3·
        7 days ago

        To save yourself some headache on the wifi front, I recommend - at least for non-Laptops - getting a repeater and hooking your computer up via Ethernet cable. Yes, WiFi does work, but it can be a major PITA.

        • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          7 days ago

          I might do that in the end, but I’ve already ordered a different one that is supposed to be more Linux friendly. The other one was falling apart anyway - I had to sort of bend it back together.

          • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
            2·
            6 days ago

            I had two different ones for a while and was suffering from occasional network dropouts that would force me to restart networking, and would sometimes take minutes to recover (DHCP discover) - eventually I had enough and bought a repeater + connected via cable. Interestingly enough, the “dropouts” would not allow new connections, but existing connections would remain active mostly. So it was definitely a driver issue.

            • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
              2·
              6 days ago

              Well I might be going down that route if this new one doesn’t work. My PC isn’t in a good spot to connect directly, but a repeater is an alternative I hadn’t considered.

      • A_Chilean_Cyborg@feddit.cl
        3·
        7 days ago

        Googling is all you need (maybe change the search engine for a more privacy respecting one, like brave search or kagi, but still the same)

    • Electricd
      2·
      6 days ago

      I recently discovered that GrapheneOS users can use Curve Pay for mobile NFC payments in the EEA

  • Squiddork@lemmy.world
    6·
    6 days ago

    I hope you find it a suitable replacement, I haven’t used Windows in years thanks to Linux.

    My advice, the good documentation on parts of Linux is quite literal it’s best not to skim over sections. Sometimes the authors choice of words will infer answers to questions you might have.

    A bit of competency in the shell/command line will go a long way, being able to view hardware (lsblk, lspci) mount drives, traverse the filesystem (ls, cp, mv, chmod etc) and a few of the basic commands for example

    This should give you the ability to:

    1. Back up all your important data from a live environment in the event that your distro is completely borked before reformatting

    2. Gives you solid foundations to learn more in-depth parts of Linux if needed, access to internal documentation (man pages etc) from the shell itself is useful too.

    Don’t be afraid to dive in, it’s hard to break things learning the basics if you’re not root.

    • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
      5·
      6 days ago

      I am looking forward to getting more comfortable in terminal. At the very least, I know how to navigate around the file system, use SSH, and some other basic stuff. I find it hard to retain this info unless I’m learning it for a specific need/purpose, so I’ll probably slowly pick it up in a random order as I have problems to solve.

  • ProfThadBach@lemmy.world
    6·
    7 days ago

    I have mint on two laptops and I want to install it on my desktop but right now I have too much work to do and can not get a couple of days to install it and set it up the way I want. I have a lot of files I need to move first.

    • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      Moving all of my files was my holdup too. I had to set up some backup storage before I could consider Linux on any of my machines. Then, there was a lot of back and forth while I was paranoid about forgetting something. That step took a while.

  • SeventySeven@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    7 days ago

    I am going to distro hop and experiment with it a bit more before I make the switch, I haven’t thought about things such as my peripherals being incompatible under Linux until I tried it for myself. I couldn’t use some of the buttons on my mouse (Logitech G502) to change things such as the DPI/sensitivity, and my headset (Arctis Novo Pro Wireless) also had similar issues, both of which use software that is only made for Windows. :(

  • shittydwarf@sh.itjust.works
    71·
    8 days ago

    Glad you decided to give it a try. It really shines on older hardware and really shows how much bloat windows actually has. I’ve been using Linux since the 90s, it’s incredible how far it’s come. Show us your socks. Especially in relation to gaming in the last few years, there’s almost no reason to deal with microsoft any longer!

    • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
      62·
      8 days ago

      The bloat is real! I really thought this old PC was just chugging along because of the hardware, but it seems perfectly content to run Linux.

      • ButteryMonkey@piefed.socialEnglish
        7·
        8 days ago

        I was expecting this on a pos enterprise system that barely managed win 10 (but has 12 usb ports!!!). For context, the replacement drive I got for it from the IT department that “disposed of” the tower had windows 7 installed on it, they said that was the best it could probably do, which is why they were obsoleted years ago.

        There must have been something really wrong with other components because even with antixlinux, which doesn’t even have seem to have sound support out of the box, and is meant to be used off a usb (keeps a persistent state on the USB so you can take your OS and data with you), it was slow as molasses. (I also tried mint and raw Debian and a couple other things and they all sucked hard)

        So I threw Ubuntu back on and use it only for the Plex desktop app in my bedroom where I try not to watch too much tv. Is the only thing that runs on it without issues as long as I never close it. Reboots take 10 min tho. Not even remotely worth troubleshooting (that’s pc#4 in my house… I live alone. I have other options.)

        This all to say, if it doesn’t respond well to Linux, there might be something else going on :)