I wrote in my previous post about converting my Desktop PC to be solely Linux, along with a small handful of programs and utilities that I’d been using for that one week of experimentation. Today marks a bit over a solid month, and with that comes a status report to see how the past month has gone.
I had mentioned in that previous post from a month ago that I was not entirely afraid of Linux, or the terminal, or getting my hands a bit dirty to solve problems. What I ultimately sought was an operating system that worked for me. I really only had two, maybe three, Linux distributions in mind when I took my first steps – Mint, Ubuntu, or Fedora. The sheer simplicity and cleanliness of the Mint Cinnamon desktop, along with my previous experiences with it, were the clear winner. It’s all about personal preference, I don’t care what the Arch folks say…
Since that first week, I did manage to upgrade my older gaming laptop (the one I described previously as a Discord/Slack terminal) to Linux Mint as well. This laptop has an older nVidia GPU, so I did have some learning to do. None of the required learning was difficult in the slightest, and I found that with the help of Brave Search / Brave AI, I was able to get nearly all of my questions answered (and usually correctly on the first attempt). I’ve found myself buried in the terminal just a small number of times, but each time it wasn’t like I’m hacking through the Windows Registry to make something work — it was deliberate, careful changes to get something functioning. To be clear, most of that was to add some customization to my environments.
Every piece of hardware “just worked”, from the various USB devices, to the networking (both wired and wireless), to the bluetooth mouse, to the networked printer that it just found-and-installed. This was pretty impressive compared to my previous Linux hardware experience form well over a decade ago.
Nearly every day then, I have one of these two machines running and I’ll be honest — I’ve had very little problems making the transition. As I said before, my personal, at-home technology needs these days is extremely simple, and I’m finding Mint a very capable operating system. The interface is clean, it’s very light on resource consumption, I’ve found customizing the panel and the menu straight forward and fun, and keeping the system updated (and on my own schedule) is very easy and intuitive.
In a future post, I intend to list each of the applications I’m using, why I’m using them, and what my thoughts are. But the spoiler is — I’m able to get everything I need to done with just a single exception that still requires a Windows machine. That one application is Zwift. But for now, I’m happy and content with 2/3 of my home computing devices running Mint. It’s been a huge breath of fresh air. I even managed to cobble together a script on my laptop which disables the builtin (and I should say, almost broken) keyboard every time I plug a USB one in. Fun. Easy. Learning new things. It’s good to feel that about computers again!