4th day using Linux. I've not yet connected my printer, but pretty much everything else I've got... And I'm just doing my usual things without issue, and that's with some slightly niche requirements from my computer.
If I was just browsing, listening to music, doing emails and instant messaging I'd barely notice the difference. If you mostly do only that and are still hesitant, don't be! Sure, have someone help install it for you, but after that you're golden.
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Corse_Pia
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •Martin Vermeer FCD
in reply to Corse_Pia • • •@corse_pia One big difference to get used to is that Linux is an Internet OS, and your help community is almost 100% online. Not the guy in the next cubicle, not a family member. And helping out is in the culture. Got a mystical error message? Search it. Someone got it before you, and figured it out...
And yes, leave installation to someone else. You can even pay for it.
Sini Tuulia
in reply to Martin Vermeer FCD • • •@martinvermeer Sometimes it's your family member, if there's someone who's already using the same OS you are! The threshold to ask a potentially silly question if you don't understand the internet help is much lower if you adopt the same flavour as someone you already know...
And this might not appeal to everyone, but you can be that person, after a while! 😆
Sini Tuulia
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •More granular data:
I'm very particular about the way I use things, and am usually at least a little bit scared of change. I'd say I had a longer adjustment period to Mastodon (two weeks) than to Linux Mint (three days).
Sure, I'd love to have all of my years of customisations, but I also don't miss the accrued clutter? In many ways it just feels fresher.
And holy shit, my not entirely new PC feels brand new! Everything is so fast!
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Alfred Chow - Maker of Things
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •Sini Tuulia
in reply to Alfred Chow - Maker of Things • • •Alfred Chow - Maker of Things
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •Often I don't want to grab the whole of my screen and then edit it down to a detail.
Gabriel ⛺💤
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •Daniel M. Reck
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •Welcome to the #Linux family!
I was nervous about getting my massive, ancient Ricoh laser printer going when I moved to #LinuxMint a few years ago. I was shocked when it *just worked,* even with the extra hardware modules installed. IPP for the win!
My 20 year old Canon document scanner works reasonably well with the provided scan app. Can't say the same for #Windows11 thanks to the scanner relying on the outdated proprietary Canon drivers under Windows.
#EndOf10
JuneSim63
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •Sini Tuulia
in reply to JuneSim63 • • •@junesim63 I did not! I figured I'd want to move away from Win10 myself as the support was going to go away soon-ish, and dual booting would just delay the inevitable and let me slack on actually learning the new thing. Sort of a feet first into the deep end approach, but it was less trouble than I'd have thought.
I will miss Affinity Photo, and will likely be super annoyed the next time I have to hardcore edit any photos, but also didn't feel like bothering with a virtual Windows to run JUST that... 😆
Sini Tuulia
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •marco_m_aus_f
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •@junesim63 Apparently you can install Affinity Photo on Linux using tools like "wine" or "bottles".
There's a bunch of HowTo to find, if you want to get into the nitty, gritty parts of Linux at this stage:
duckduckgo.com/?q=affinity+pho…
Sini Tuulia
in reply to marco_m_aus_f • • •@marco_m_aus_f I did consider it, but as I moved to Linux to get away from Microsoft, it would kind of defeat the purpose somewhat... And I figured if I really needed to I could do that later, and use the rubber suit sex slave programme in the meantime as it's already on there. (I hate its name and its other meaning and thus refuse to use it, but here we are.)
I've used it before and don't entirely despise the UI, but will have to see if I adapt or want to try something else entirely!
marco_m_aus_f
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •Seems like you did way more research than I did ages ago 🙂
And here I thought the rubber suit only served text processing... (*notes down english vocabulary*)
Daria
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •Sini Tuulia
in reply to Daria • • •@daria One of the most important things for me is the capacity to remove objects, lint and cat hair from photos... Sure, I'm old enough to have it in my muscle memory to very manually do that with Clone and Heal tools pretty fast, as I learned retouching on CS2, but I will miss the content aware fill for sure. 😅
The amount of keyboard shortcuts seems to be vastly lacking, though, I haven't looked into how easy it is to put my own ones in as actions...
Sini Tuulia
Unknown parent • • •@andre I've seen CUPS referred to and that sounds like something I could do!
Mine is an Epson and requires a bunch of pressing buttons on the physical machine to link up, and as it's hot as heck inside currently I haven't felt like running back and forth between it and the computer... But maybe eventually. 😆
Sini Tuulia
Unknown parent • • •Sini Tuulia
Unknown parent • • •kabads
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •Robin Forlonge Patterson
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Robin Forlonge Patterson • •@Robin Forlonge Patterson I'm not @Sini Tuulia , but I can say that freeciv and dosbox are both in Debian and derivatives (including afaik Mint) and work just fine.
I've never used Family Tree Maker, and that's only for windows and OSX, so it may or may not work under wine, or there are other genealogy programs that maybe could work for your needs.
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raphael
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •yay, lovely to hear of your experience! it matches up pretty exactly with my parents’, who are using their respective computers for even less – email, some internet surfing, and that’s pretty much it.
mother inherited a complete fossil of a laptop that only managed to reach useable levels of speed with linux, and my father once shot his windows installation and i had to tide him over to the weekend until i could get around to reinstall it for him.
so i gave him a mint live-boot USB drive and instructed him how to use it. just so he could browse the internet in the mean time and backup his stuff. 2 days later, he asked if he could have this linux mint instead. i told him sure, if he feels like it, he can just click the install symbol on the desktop and follow the instructions. if there’s anything that stumps him, cancel the procedure and i’ll take care of it come weekend. the day after that, my father, who never installed a program in his life(!), had installed linux on his laptop, all by himself.
Sini Tuulia
in reply to raphael • • •@gekitsu It was pretty easy, yeah! The only dilemma I encountered was that the UI to set which drive to boot from was kind of confusing, as it had a mouse drag and drop ordering and a graphical interface... The last time I'd had to do that, it was fully just text and text commands. 😆 I was glad I'd kept my old mouse, as the new Bluetooth one definitely did not work in BIOS!
I think I could have figured out the whole process myself if I absolutely had to, but it was much nicer to have a friend who knew what he was doing walk me through it. Now I know what to do if I need to install Mint for anyone else.
Jar Head
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •Raymond Russell
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •The thing that surprised me most is that the touchscreen on my aged Acer 10 inch laptop worked without any config or driver installs by me. Like everything else it just worked.
I installed Linux Mint (Cinnimon Edition).
I was prepared to take the hit if I lost touchscreen functionality but now I am a very happy bunny.
Sini Tuulia
in reply to Raymond Russell • • •Raymond Russell
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •I also put Mint onto my 15" laptop and everything works without issue.
My small laptop originally came with Win 8, then upgraded to Win 10 and now Linux Mint. I recently replaced the internal battery in this machine at a cost of £12gbp. Took all of 10 minutes after watching a video tutorial. So it has a new double lease of life as it doesn't needed to be continually plugged in and is running more smoothly than Win 10.
Laurens 🐐
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •George Saich
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •RichardInSandy
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •Sini Tuulia
in reply to RichardInSandy • • •I picked Mint because it was said to be the easiest to learn because it has a graphical interface for pretty much everything, had minimal setup, has a whole tutorial to walk you through setting itself up once installed, and also looks nice. The final push was spotting it in the wild as my aunt and cousin also use it. I knew I was going to do it for good, but it also offers the option to try it out from an USB disc/stick so if you want to see if your laptop runs on it nicely, you can just... Test it.
There's a lot of people of my skill level asking questions about it on forums in language that I can understand, too, versus what other builds seem to be sometimes. 😆 I don't really know much, and even less about the other ones!
Mostly I just looked at this: itsfoss.com/install-linux-mint…
How to Install Linux Mint [The Simplest Way Possible]
Abhishek Prakash (It's FOSS)Sini Tuulia
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •RichardInSandy
in reply to Sini Tuulia • • •