It took my old laptop dying on me for me to finally ask my geeky neighbor to install Mint on another laptop I had around.
It's been a few hours and Omigod. Why did I waste so much time? It works. It's easy and intuitive. It makes sense. There's no bullshit.
I still have to make Antidote talk to Libre Office, but whatever. The rest feels good and natural.
So please whoever is here because you're contemplating switching: do it yesterday.

I'm curious. Since you are new to Linux, how did you stumble upon Lemmy and this community? :)

Lemmy because of the Reddit API debacle.
The Linux community because I'm a far-left activist who needs to get away from BigCorpo out of general principle, but I'd been using Windows since 3.0 and it was daunting.

congrats on the move 🥰

consult https://distrowatch.com/ if your interested in what different distros might have to offer.

I had an old laptop that I didn't swap over yet just because I had a few things set up and didn't feel like moving it. It then harassed me to move to Windows 11. Also, when I tried to remote desktop, it was like, you gotta pay me for professional edition.

I've paid for Windows so many damned times, so I was like screw it and put Mint on it and donated to it as well.

One of us! One of us!

It’s true that stumbling on Lemmy usual la happens after quite some time on Linux, not the other way around.

What’s great is that OP is gonna be finding a lot of Linux stuff on Lemmy!

I still have to make Antidote talk to Libre Office

Antidote Connector for LibreOffice -- Integrate Antidote writing assistance software with LibreOffice.
https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/99349

Nice, thank you!

When I feel it's time to spread my wings. I'm still stuck on Libre Office freezing whenever I ctr-tab between windows. Baby steps, unfortunately.

Yes. Well no, not yet. To be One of you, I need to say the Sentence:

Now let me tell you why your distro of choice is Not The Right One.

Here. Done. (Phew. I couldn't list many. I've heard of Mint, Fedora, and Pikachu. Even then, Fedora might be a Pokemon, not sure.)

I'm pretty sure Fedora the Pokémon wears a Pikachu in the movie adaptation, so close enough 🤣

Congrats, that's almost exactly how I felt when I switched a year or two ago. I did a bit of distro hopping after a few weeks, and quickly resettled on Bazzite, but it was a universal experience of stuff just working better without any bullshit I didn't add myself.

If you want a very stable server = debian

Hybrid server+gaming = openSUSE Tumbleweed

If you hardcore probably Arch :D

If your are in ultra instinc you make your own OS :D

Try OnlyOffice (the appimage). It's more compatible than LibreOffice for MS formats. Alternatively, consider downloding the LibreOfficeFresh appimage, which is the latest version (Linux Mint's is 2 years old). When you download an .AppImage file, you right click it, Properties, and you mark it as executable. Then, run it. Always download appimages from the developer's source site, not from third parties.

I'll try it asap. Libre Office freezes every minute or so, actually, and not only when I change windows. It's unusable as is. Thanks for your advice.

Welcome to the bright side :D

If your are in ultra instinc you make your own OS :D

One day maybe. I have thought about doing this, but I just want it to work when I only have 4hrs to myself after work. I'd say my distro but it's prolly the wrong one, hehehe 🤪

Awesome. I remember that same feeling. For me that experience was slightly tainted by being really picky about customizations but then I found out quickly that literally any customization is possible. As a friend put it: most OSes are like buying a house. Using Linux is like being your own architect. You can use someone else's blueprints and be fine. But anything you wanna change about that blueprint is probably doable. In any case, you're in charge of your house, not some asshole CEO.

When i switched to Mint i had a bit of a learning curve, not all things worked completly out of the box. I'd like to encourage you to not give up on it, problems are solveable. The Linux Mint Forum was a great help for me (still is)

Not sure what an appimage is, but I picked OnlyOffice in what's called Logithèque in French, and maybe Software manager (or "repository") in English? Main menu / Administration / Logithèque.
After an in-depth trial of at least 4 minutes, I can say I love it, and it works fine.
You now have the unending gratitude of a random French woman.

Awwwwww yeah! TOGETHER MONKEY STRONG!!

Also something new people don't realize is that Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. If you can't solve your issue by searching for mint you can usually find a solution meant for Ubuntu or Debian that will work.

It took my old laptop dying on me.

same here and it's lead to me having a job for the last 24 years -- i would have been a factory worker like my brother, cousins and father if it weren't for my computer dying on me.

what’s called Logithèque in French, and maybe Software manager (or “repository”) in English?

Sounds like the distribution's "package manager," or rather, one of the GUIs for it. (Not sure which one because I don't know what distro you're using).

In order to understand what things like "AppImage" and other types of "packages" are, I think it helps to know the history.

TL;DR:

Since GNU/Linux is a Free Software OS, in the beginning, everybody had to compile their software from source and manage the dependencies for it manually. This sucked, so Linux distributions started curating the software and "packaging" it to reference its dependencies (that's why they're called "distributions" in the first place, BTW). The package manager (e.g. Debian's dpkg/APT and Red Hat's RPM) can recursively check for and install all those correct dependencies before installing the program you actually asked it for.

But even that wasn't good enough (apparently) because it happened on a per-distro basis and because (generally speaking) all the software on the system shared the same version of each dependency, so all the software had to be kept updated in lockstep. So now people have come up with systems like Flatpak and AppImage that are designed to work across distros, include the dependencies with the apps themselves so they aren't shared with the rest of the system, and in some cases also run the program isolated in a container for better security.

Bottom line is, now there are several ways to install software, with various tradeoffs:

• Using your distro's package manager: easy one-command install, integrates with the system
• Using a universal package, like Flatpak, AppImage, or Snap: easy one-command install, keeps the program relatively isolated from the rest of the system
• Compiling from source, the old way: complicated, but occasionally necessary in very niche cases, such as when the program is really obscure or when you actually want to take advantage of the whole "Free Software" thing and modify it yourself.

One last thing: GUIs for this stuff started out as interfaces for the distro's package manager, but are increasingly designed to work with universal packages as well. With the command line it's generally obvious what kind of package you're installing (because you're typing a different command entirely), but with the GUI you have to pay close attention if you actually care whether you're installing a dpkg or a flatpak. Also, if you see an app listed twice, that's probably the reason why.

One day you'll use Arch, btw

enjoy. it can be frustrating until you get the hang of it, but once you do there's no going back.

just did it yesterday.
Got the purple kernel panic screen and figured i KILLED MY DESKTOP.
Second time all went well.
Very happy

Lots of people are anti AI here, but Claude will tell you how to fix anything Linux. If you ever get an error, just copy and paste it.

TOGETHER MONKEY STRONG

Don't just run random commands though. Take a few seconds to understand what it does. If you still don't understand, ask the AI to explain it.

That way you both learn how to do things yourself, and lower your risk of running harmful commands.

Yes, though slight caveats: Mint has 2 branches, 1 based on Ubuntu, as you said, but the other one based on Debian skipping Ubuntu actually, since there are a lot of things they are dissatisfied with Ubuntu, and one among them are snaps, so if you see anything regarding snaps when searching Ubuntu threads, disregard them completely.

I'm also a Lemmy first then Linux example.
Hard not to get indoctrinated here by all the Linux enthusiasts.
So thank you all I guess?

Mine didn't die, but it's Ryzen gen 1 which is not supported by Windows 11 so Cachy it is.

I was never much of a social person, have barely used Reddit, I just randomly felt trying lemmy to see if it's any less toxic than Phoronix 😂

AppImage may be up-to-date now, but it has no self update mechanism, so a Flatpak is a better choice IMO

This. Have it explain and cite sources. Tools have uses, but you must know how to use them.

So will nerds with too much time on their hands :3 (me)

same here

i'd love to volunteer for some kind of unix-like helpline! it would be lowkey fun

When the existing information isn't super helpful, and the problem requires deep understanding of Linux, there are two choices:

1. Find an active Linux forum and ask your question, ignore the assholes telling you to RTFM and wait a few days for someone to ask you to provide the output of a command you never knew existed, go through several rounds of remote asynchronous troubleshooting over a few days and eventually maybe you figure out what's wrong. You are amazing, you make the community amazing, but meanwhile my computer is unstable and I can't use it.

2. Tell AI what symptoms you're experiencing, it gives you basic troubleshooting steps and explains them, and what took days now takes minutes.

Or, a better example, say you know what you want to do: deploy some docker containers including caddy and cloudflared, you want to deploy them through a CI process so it's repeatable, you want to segment their networks. Say you're well versed in all these topics but don't have much docker or compose experience, you can wade through the documentation to figure out the best way to set it up, and it'll take you a few days. Or describe the end state and have a solid starting point and enough explanation to correct bad AI assumptions and skip the first few weeks of regretting a decision because no one highlighted where it could go wrong.

AI makes reading the manual for many integrated systems possible.

Nah but like if someone DMs me on matrix I'll respond pretty quick. I don't have much of a life.

Also, personally, reading the manual and fixing and tinkering are the lowkey fun part.

I personally can't stand flatpaks, they're too large to update its libs every few days. On a 4 MB/sec line that I'm, it's not a good option.

Understanding how things work a little will make using Ai assistance much more reliable. If you have 0 knowledge & you are just pasting terminal commands without comprehending anything even a little bit is not really tenable long term, but I suppose if you plan to reinstall annually, it could be okay, given a mistake doesn't wipe your drive.

Welcome and other happy words.

Another reason to switch: lower blood pressure.

Also, you might like to check out AppImageLauncher to install app images as apps that appear in your distros launcher

If you want all of the above: Nixos

Welcome to the family, mint was a good choice. 👍

Welcome to Linux! Heres your starting package

Whenever you get recommended a text editor, VIM, emacs, or nano will at least be mentioned once, and yes we are in a brutal war so there will be backlash. That said, We can all agree on one thing, fuck IDEs.

Init users will recommend anything other than systemd, and that is another war in itself.

Distro-hoppers will try and justify themselves changing distros when in reality they fucked a package installation and just want to redo everything.
They may also do it to try out a new desktop environment not realizing you can just install the desktop environment in a terminal without going to a new distro.