About a month ago I switched to Linux mint from windows 11.
The first thing I noticed was mint being faster and less bloated than windows 11.
I also liked having actual control over my settings without a corporation being able to undo them at will.
Another thing I noticed was not having to add extensions to text files to run as a program instead having the option in properties.
For certain windows programs and games I was able to use wine which was great because I like to use gamemaker 8.1 which was made before they added linux support.
I tried different wine environments starting with bottles then trying Steam proton and Lutris. With Lutris being the one I ended up using due to it being the only one that I could get to run every program I needed.
The ms paint alternative called drawing took some use to due to it automatically cropping out parts of the image outside of the line when pasting in a screenshot from the clipboard.
Although I do still miss ms paint but that is mostly nostalgia.
Fortunately there is an option to save the screenshot after taking it.
Migrating from windows I appreciate the SUPER key bringing up a menu on the bottom left which brings up some apps and the search bar. Which always searches on the OS unlike windows 11 which sometimes searches the internet instead.
Another detail I noticed is if you type paint or notepad in the search it brings up drawing and the text editor which is nice for people transitioning to Linux.
Being able to move the panel or add new ones was also a breath of fresh air from windows 11 making the task bar more restrictive.
Having the option of deb packages and flatpacks is really useful as well.
I also no longer have to worry about telemetry or microsoft trying to show me ads or pop ups.
TL:DR Mint is a way better experience than windows 11.
Now list all the bad things.
Need to launch DaVinci Resolve Studio from the CLI to figure out why it won’t launch from the GUI, and then launch it again with a list of libraries to exclude in order to get it working.
Really weird errors if you try to use a USB stick formatted with FAT after applying a kernel update but before rebooting.
Multiple password prompts when attempting to update Flatpak applications over ssh in its default configuration.
Basic applications included with commercial operating systems often missing (e.g. paint application missing from Pop!_OS).
Good luck figuring out emergency mode if you don’t know what fstab is. And changing kernel parameters on Rocky 9 must be handled via grubby, not by editing configs like in Debian, Arch, or Pop.
Can’t emulate SSD on VM qcow2 files on Debian unless you use the version in backports; can emulate SSD but can’t use anything involving spice in RHEL9+clones unless you add a copr repo because it’s been removed. This makes desktop virtualization annoying.
Can’t participate in Microsoft Teams calls if the input and output audio devices are the same device or the call disconnects/reconnects every few seconds. Microphone and speaker must be separate devices for optimal experience.
Can’t use OBS Virtual Camera in Teams on Firefox.
That’s the stuff I’ve dealt with in the past 3 weeks.
I’ll add a few more
Lightroom doesn’t work at all, needing either a reboot to launch windows or a VM that struggles with performance. OSS alternatives won’t really handle the size of libraries im working with from limited experience with them.
Multiple displays of different resolutions and refresh rates wouldn’t work properly (though I hear this one is becoming less of an issue with the new DE software)
Nvidia drivers
I love the fact that at least 3 of these issues are still Microsoft’s fault.
Not OP but about the same amount of time:
Mint refused to put sound out through my sound card. It saw my card, knew the exact brand and card and driver version, could see when I plugged and unplugged things from each of the jacks, but would not output any audio. I eventually solved this by just using the DAC on my new speakers and tossing the sound card lol.
Text scaling with an nVidia card is broken and looks god awful. 1440p monitor scrolling the Mint website and the text is gray/yellow jaggy mess. Installing an experimental driver and scaling up a bit fixes it for the most part but is a sub-ideal solution as I don’t like scaling.
There’s no perfect replacement for the Snip tool. I want to just spr+shift+s, click/drag a box, and done. So far the closest I’ve gotten is shift+prntscrn, click/drag, enter, which is more annoying by far.
There’s no dark theme for mint-Y. I love the look of the XP/7ish theme it’s got going on but it’s light mode only. Travesty.
Too many password prompts when updating flatpaks. I should have used a way shorter password for this OS.
Plugging in 2 monitors of different screen resolutions can cause some serious issues if I alt/tab. Fixed by unplugging and plugging in one of the monitors but it’s fucking annoying.
You can surely rebind that to just PRTSCR? That’s the default for me. I much prefer being able to adjust the rectangle after an initial selection, not to mention that it remembers what it last was, so that you can to multiple grabs that are perfectly positioned to evaluate or illustrate some difference.
I could, but then whole-screen Printscreen is gone and I use that about as often
It’s nice that these programs have all kinds of extraneous features, I’m sure people out there find use for them. I just want a quick and simple snip tool that doesn’t take extra button presses to confirm that no, really, I don’t want to use extra features
It’s the same number of keypresses (or in my case, one less), and you have additional functionality that doesn’t get in the way. I’m curious how “more annoying by far” to click-drag-enter vs click-drag.
You can readjust the selection, you can record video instead… Etc. Only difference is one keypress.
Fascinating.
And
Are conflicting statements within your own comment.
I couldn’t care less about the additional functionality, that’s not what I use snip for. And it does get in the way, that’s my whole point. Needing to press enter to confirm that I’m “done editing” is an extra keypress that isn’t needed and gets in the way.
As I stated I regularly snip at work on a Windows machine and pretty regularly at home which was until recently also windows. I’m very used to tapping a 3-key shortcut as 1keypress, click/dragging, and moving on with my life. That one extra keypress adds a second or two of confusion and annoyance every time I use it, and I can’t even easily retrain myself as I still use it on Windows regularly.
I would rather re-snip the 1/500 times this matters to me than press enter the other 499 times. I get others might like it, but why is it not an option for people like me?
I have software for that already that does even more than the snip replacers, though I can’t think of any time I’ve used a video when 3 screenshots would have worked too.
Basically it boils down to over design without option boxes for those who don’t want to do things exactly as the software designers intended.
What’s the spr - key?
You mention:
And say its annoying compared to
Which seem to me like the same number of keypresses. In my case, it’s one less. The only main difference is the order of that one enter-key being afterwards. And, by using that key as a confirmation-step, you get a whole bunch of extra functionality that you say you don’t use. Which, if you don’t use it, will still give you the exact same functionality, and doesn’t affect you.
Consider if you ever need to repeat the screen grab 10x times, the difference is:
I find it fascinating to care so strongly for something that is objectively a worse approach in every single way, with the only difference being the ordering of one keypress. And to care so strongly about that one keypress, that the optional versatility that gives (toggle video recording, adjust rectangle, reuse rectangle, move rectangle with same dimensions) is all in all considered a worse alternative. To each their own, and UX design is arguably not yours.
Yes, which is entirely useless to me and not something I want. Incredibly simple concept you’re having trouble with.
Nope, you’re really shit at reading comprehension. It does not function exactly the same, that’s the problem.
I will not as I do not ever need to do that. Idk what weird world you live in where you’d ever need to take 10 screenshots of the same still screen but I can think of even easier ways to manage something like that then with a Printscreen manager.
You’re the one typing out multi-paragraph replies to me simply stating that windows does this better and it’s silly that Linux doesn’t have something as simple as Snip. I don’t really care at all as it’s one keypress, it’s just funny.
Subjectively, you mean. I do not need or want hose extra features and it now takes time to tell my PC to not use those features. So no, it’s a worse approach to me.
You really have a hard time with other people valuing stuff differently then you, huh?
Those features are less than worthless to me. I do not ever need or want them. The fact that the software cannot handle that I don’t is useless bloat, which Linux is usually all about removing.
Go fuck yourself you stuck up prick. Fucking Linux users I swear
Nope. Better UX design by every single metric. I hope you don’t have a say in anything related to UX design. Cheers dude.
Scaling is inconsistent, so if it’s your media PC, you may end up standing in front of the TV to configure things.
I am at around 3 weeks of using Mint as my daily driver, here are the issues I have had:
My Realtek sound card would not output 5.1 over S/PDIF. I worked on this quite a bit before finding a thread of someone with the same model having the same issue where even the guru over on the Mint forums couldn’t make it work. Solution was to just use the analog 5.1 out instead.
NVIDIA drivers are not amazing, especially running multiple displays with different resolutions. I get poor performance on my secondary monitors when running even moderate GPU tasks on my main display. In Windows I could watch a stream while playing a game in a borderless window, but in Mint I will get choppy framerate on the secondary displays. Further game performance is mostly good but I get occasional choppy performance in Proton games, even running via Lutris. None of this is a deal breaker, just mildly annoying.
This is less of an issue with Linux and more of me being a doofus, but I went to add my ntfs drives to fstab so they mount when I start up. I have done linux server admin professionally for 20 years, surely I can manage fstab - nope! A careless typo caused a startup failure. Fortunately it was easy to boot into maintenance mode and fix the issue.
The wonderful thing about living in a fully Linux world is that you can ditch NTFS. None of my computers or disks use it. It’s all ext4 or btrfs, and then ZFS on my media server.
I am in the process of doing exactly that, as I migrate data and applications into my Linux build I will repartition that space to ext4.