I’ve made the switch. Well, I’m 90% of the way there, but it’s finally happening. I’ve moved to Linux Mint from Microsoft Windows. I know everyone is interested in my choice of OS, and I’m a people pleaser, so here’s your blog post.
I’ve been in the Microsoft ecosystem since DOS 5.0 and moved to Windows upon the release of version 3.1. I was probably happiest with Windows 7. Everything after that has been a steady decline in the OS.
Microsoft seems to only build Windows as a feeder to its business model. It is no longer built for the user. Development is unfocused and features get added that nobody asked for. The system feels heavier, slower, and cluttered. Advertising is embedded into the operating system itself. I come from the old school of if I pay for the OS it shouldn’t have any ads. Part of the problem is no one does anymore, they get it with a new PC.
Users used to be in control of the Windows. We used to decide when our machines update. I used to wait until I was sure patches were stable before installing them. That model is gone. Windows updates when it wants. Overnight updates, forced restarts, interruptions working on something. I’ve had machines stuck in boot loops because of updates.
As I get older and hit the early retirement phase of life, I realized I no longer needed Windows. Most of what I do is in the browser. Gmail replaced Outlook years ago. Office is expensive and irrelevant for individuals. The list of required Windows applications has shrunk to a handful. QuickBooks 2019 is one of the few holdouts for me, and it’s not too much of a pain to run it on a separate machine. Once some of these issues disappear, Windows will be out the door. See what I did there? I’m here all week.
So I moved to Linux Mint. On my old hardware, it provides better performance, more stability, and control without having to tinker with it too much. I tried Ubuntu before and didn’t like it. It felt like a bit of a mess and required more tinkering than I wanted.
Mint is clean. The Cinnamon desktop is familiar enough and the learning curve is small. It behaves like you expect.
Performance is great. My Mint install is running on a 15-year-old Dell XPS box with 16 GB of RAM. It runs smoothly and is definitely faster than when I was running Windows 10 on it. It still bugs me that this old machine will run Windows 10 but was artificially prevented by Microsoft from running Windows 11. Perhaps it was a blessing because I have grown to really dislike Windows 11.
Hardware support on Mint is a little mixed, but again, I’m using a 15 year oald machine. Video worked immediately, which was a surprise given I have a dual monitor setup split between integrated graphics and a dedicated GPU. A simple BIOS configuration change and it just worked.
Networking and printers also worked immediately after install. Audio, however, did not. I couldn’t get HDMI audio to work correctly, so I had to fall back to a direct 3.5mm connection. It’s probably a driver issue. My scanner also does not work under Mint, so it stays connected to my laptop. These are some of the trade-offs of using old hardware with newer operating systems.
The bigger adjustment is how Linux works under the hood. In Windows, connecting hard drives requires little thought. Partition it, format it, and it simply appears. Linux is not as straight forward and you have to mount the disk (insert dirty joke here). It wouldn’t normally be a problem, but I use Dropbox with the Dropbox folder on a separate drive from the main drive. I had the problem where Dropbox launched before the drive mounted. This led to constant errors until I figured out how to fix it.
Fixing it required the command line. Also not normally a problem, but I was only a dabbler with Linux. I’m not familiar with all the commands you need to configure things using the command line. This is where the magic of AI came in. Years ago, I would have had to search various forums to find the answers I needed to get things working. I’m too old to waste time on all that bullshit. Using ChatGPT, all I had to do was describe the issue, and it gave me precise commands to run. It made configuration in the Linux world doable.
Moving to a new OS is not all puppies and rainbows. When you’ve been using one OS for decades, even basic things like finding the right settings take time. I’m used to the location of all the settings in Windows. It’s like muscle memory. Once everything is configured, though, Mint just works. If the icons were the same as Windows, you might not know which OS you were using.
My daily computer use is pretty basic these days. Browser, email, content consumption. I use the Brave browser, and it behaves exactly the same as it does on Windows. I’m still searching for apps to replace what I was using for editing photos, videos, and audio. I did replace Photoshop Elements with GIMP, which has a Windows version I’ve used in the past, and Acrobat with Master PDF Editor, which I had never heard of before but seems to be a solid replacement. For the other few things that still aren’t working, I can fall back to my laptop when needed.
The Cinnamon desktop environment is solid but a little constrained. There are limits to how you can customize it. Panels are a good example. I tried to move a grouped window applet from the right side of a panel to the left and could not get it to behave the way I wanted. I don’t understand why it has these constraints.
At this point, Linux Mint does just about everything I need. It’s liberating knowing I can use my computer free from the shackles of Microsoft and Windows and Office. Mint will require you to think a little differently. But as long as you’re not dependent on Windows applications for getting your work done, and if most of what you do lives in the browser, the transition is straight forward.
Try it out, and you might get that minty fresh feeling too. Oh, I forgot to mention that it’s FREE!
Leave a Reply