Windows 11 keeps trying to install different stuff, notifying you about how great edge is, requires new hardware, and more. Windows 12 is rumored to be cloud only with a subscription?
What will do you?
Linux is just the base OS. There’s not much to like or dislike about “Linux” as a whole from an end-user perspective, unless you happen to have hardware that’s not well supported, or software you use that isn’t available. Single distros or desktop environments, you can definitely dislike, but “Linux” itself is just a kernel and a bunch of hardware drivers. You’ve seen it yourself with the Steam Deck. Its what the distribution maintainer makes it, and what software you run on top (including the UI/desktop environment/window manager you interact with).
I’m curious what you find less user friendly about Mint (guessing you went with the default Cinnamon environment?) vs the Windows UX. IMHO, the modern Windows experience is a convoluted mess of options hidden in different places, inconsistent UI, and confusing options that like to disappear between releases? Hell, my tray icons refuse to stay all visible on my Win 11 partition, I can’t move my taskbar to the top anymore (really useful with a large monitor), etc.
IMHO, the only reason people still find Windows user friendly is familiarity. I think the largest problems with Linux these days are:
- how confusing it can all be to figure out what’s a distribution, why there are many, which one to choose, etc
- obviously drivers, especially WiFi stuff and very new/bleeding edge hardware (cough cough and Nvidia being assholes)
- software availability/compatibility: the biggest one, IMHO, and it’s getting much better in certain areas, especially gaming, with Proton which you’ve experienced already.
It’s interesting that you find the taskbar to be better in Mint, that’s the thing I’ve had by far the most trouble with. Specifically the fact there doesn’t seem to be any way to mirror the taskbar to all screens. You can’t copy it from one screen to another either, you have to meticulously recreate the taskbar on each screen. Even then some elements can only appear on one panel so if you need to adjust sound level but you happen to have something full screen over it you’re shit out of luck, either close the full screen application or go into the full sound manager instead. Then the taskbar only shows windows that are open on that screen too, which I suppose some users would like but is absolutely not what I want. I believe there was a “show all workspaces” checkbox but that either didn’t work or doesn’t include second screens. The best part is if you open a window on one screen then move it with keyboard controls in some cases it doesn’t update the taskbar, so now your window doesn’t appear in the taskbar on the correct screen at all but might show up on another.
Overall, not impressed. I need one taskbar that appears identically on all screens.
Needing to remount my Steam library from other drives every time I reboot is a tad inconvenient too.
See, this is exactly two of the points I just made.
One, the criticism you just made, and the one I keep hearing, is that you don’t like that it doesn’t work like Windows. We jump in it with some preconceptions of what a computer should act like because of familiarity.
Second, Mint/Cinnamon is merely one desktop environment on one distribution. It’s not Linux, it’s that one program (Cinnamon’s taskbar) you happen not to like. Same for the disk auto mounting, many desktop environments support doing that. Seems like Cinnamon doesn’t?
Are you really trying to dismiss criticism that the taskbar’s Grouped Window List doesn’t always display windows visible on that screen is just an issue of the user expecting Windows? Dismissing every user issue as “just stop expecting Windows” is exactly toxic fanboy the attitude that drives people away from Linux. You might notice that I didn’t even mention Windows once, I was talking exclusively about taskbar issues affecting my workflow in Mint.
I’m still using Mint+Cinnamon but I’m not going to pretend it’s perfect.
