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Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux?

Man, I really tried today to get Linux on my Framework laptop.

I can’t believe how goddamn frustrating the experience has been, and I’ve dabbled in Linux for decades.

I try Mint. Install as a dual boot… Installation done. Reboot. Straight into Windows. Check partitions and nothing has changed.

Try again. All seems fine. Boot. Some error screen that won’t let me get into Mint.

Do this like four more times with no luck.

Tried Ubuntu. No easy way to install as a dual boot unless I want to mess around with custom paritions. Also, GNOME sucks ass, but Ubuntu seems way more polished than Mint.

I did get mint on a mini PC I have running through my TV. But audio wasn’t working, so that took a while to sort out. And the onscreen keyboard does nothing on the lock screen. So unpolished, and I have no idea why it’s recommended “for beginners” when it feels unfinished.

With windows, there’s no messing around. Everything just works. And I fucking hate that I feel forced to choose a miserable, hacky, terminal-based experience with countless hours of installing shit through commands… Or a smooth, reliable, easy one with bloatware and spying on the backend. Goddammit!

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communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the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.

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- Showroom7561@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I appreciate the reply.
  
  Fedora and Ubuntu are officially fully supported by laptop, so it’s Mint and a few others to a lesser extent.
  
  I won’t use Fedora due to it being American, but the Fedora experience was quite nice the last time I tried.
  
  I may explore other options through the Framework (laptop) community to see what else I can try.
  
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  - communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Bazzite works around the issues with american patents, if that’s the problem.
    
    If your problem is american control over your computer, I assure you, they have extremely limited control, at best, they own the package manager, which only runs if you tell it to.
    
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mlg@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Gonna be a useless recommend, but try Fedora or Bazzite (Fedora Silverblue gaming with tweaks to make it easier).

I’ve had some friends with similar complaints about Mint having one off issues with hardware, which is usually because its downstream Ubuntu which means kernel support can be all over the place.

Fedora is probably best bang for buck in latest stable release without entering the realm of unstable rolling like Arch. Really the only thing I’ve found that it lacks is more varied support for ARM boards out of box and a cross compile package for ARM from x86.

By default it does have a slightly annoying repo setup because software that isn’t FOSS ends up on RPMFusion which you have to enable as a user, which is why I suggest Bazzite, which also uses the immutable Linux design which makes it much easier to prevent from breaking or fixing by rolling back a change.

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- Showroom7561@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Fedora is fully supported on my Framework laptop (as is Ubuntu and Mint), and I did have it working off an external SSD to try.
  
  But… Sigh…
  
  It’s American, so I won’t use it. American is one big reason why I want to quit Windows. Maybe I’ll just keep trying. 😮‍💨
  
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  - mlg@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Bruh, uh… maybe OpenSUSE lol?
    
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CitricBase@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Your experience is not invalid, but It’s fucked up that you’re giving Windows credit for “just working” when Windows doesn’t even try to support dual booting. In fact the reason Linux is having so much trouble is because it has to tiptoe so that Windows doesn’t break.

If you don’t like Gnome or Mint Cinnamon, why not try KDE? Something like Kubuntu, perhaps? I use Fedora KDE myself.

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- Showroom7561@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  From Window’s perspective, there’s no need to dual boot. But I get what you’re saying. I’m not trying to defend Microsoft, and think that they’ve been enshittifying windows for years now.
  
  But everything works without jumping through hoops. And if it doesn’t, the fix is usually very easy and done through a GUI 99% of the time.
  
  But you are right. There are many flavours of Linux to try. Aesthetics aren’t my priority, though. I do need things to work without spending hours trying to figure it out.
  
  I’m at an age where messing around on my computer for days on end is long gone. 😵
  
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- Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Couldnt OP use the boot loader feature of Windows and add their distro as anotger option?
  
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Schortl@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Had the completly oposite experience: mint installed in 2 hours with everything working. No bloatware, no bullshit. Biggest obstacle was, that changing the device bootorder is nog enough- uefi seetings needed some love to. I can imagine that this is not necessery if you do not use dual boot ( like win…talking about experience…)

For me everything works perfect- mint is my primary os now

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- Showroom7561@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Ok, a quick update.
  
  After posting, and a little soul-searching, I decided to install Ubunu and give things another try.
  
  Installation failed the first time, seemingly right at the end! Tried again, and it went through.
  
  Set things up, and things seem to be OK. I’m only running a browser, and needed to try a paid windows program through Wine, which installed and loaded up without any real issues.
  
  I go for a walk during lunch. Come back to the Linux login screen (expected, as I’d assume it locks like Windows). Log in… blank slate. All my work was closed, and it was like a fresh reboot. What the hell??? No error messages or anything. I literally have the browser and like a few other programs installed, so it’s not like the system is a mess from years of bad software installations.
  
  Sigh…
  
  Then I try another paid Windows program used to convert video files. It seems to work, but it’s not detecting my Intel graphics card. As I look for help on how to do this (officially, from my Laptop vendor), I get pages and pages of things to try… all through the terminal.
  
  I mean, this is stuff that just works on Windows. No messing with stuff.
  
  I really want Linux to be my daily driver, and even I type this from Ubuntu, I can’t help but feel like something is going to catastrophically self-destruct at any moment, and that kind of anxiety is never felt while using Windows.
  
  I couldn’t imagine setting linux up for my wife, if this is the experience I’m having.
  
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Gibibit@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Yeah with Linux if it doesn’t work you’re often just screwed.

I can recommend a rolling release distro, having the latest and greatest can sometimes give you bugfixes that are critical for your setup. It can also break stuff but nothing a rollback won’t fix.

Another reason to prefer rolling release is the upgrade path. For Ubuntu upgrading is just awful when you do any tinkering. I ran Kubuntu 20.04 for a while and because I had some custom package sources installed it wouldn’t let me upgrade to 24.04. Nobody could help, and the package manager is awful it doesn’t let you trace which packages are blocking the upgrade.

I’m kind of miffed that everyone is recommending mint as a starter distro because as soon as they start looking for guides on how to tinker there is a high chance they are going to make their system un-upgradable.

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- Showroom7561@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  Yeah with Linux if it doesn’t work you’re often just screwed.
  
  This has been my experience for decades. Even if it works, something will suddenly stop working and I’ll have no way to fix it without hours of research and messing around.
  
  With windows, I can fix anything quickly through the GUI. But haven’t had to in a very, very long time.
  
  I’m going to look at other options. I want to stick with a distro that is fully supported by my laptop to avoid even more issues. But the options are limited.
  
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