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.
There’s a great ms paint alternative from KDE called Kolour Paint, which you can grab from the software center.
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
After reading the following thread: If you don’t have anything of value to add, why comment?
What one person views as a problem/inconvenience will vary from person to person. Just because you have 25 years of experience doesn’t mean you get to dictate what constitutes as a problem or inconvenience for another.
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.
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.
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
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.
Sometimes i like to thinker, but when i need a Computer to just work/rely on (to play bills and stuff) i use Linux Mint
This is pretty similar to my experience. I don’t have time or inclination to muck about with my operating system more than strictly necessary. Mint just works out of the box and does everything it needs to do without getting in the way.
I’ll mostly share tips regarding what you said, OK?
Quite a few programs still rely on files in ~/.config/. So if you feel like the options in a program are “missing”, give its config file a check. (To see hidden directories: Ctrl+H)
There’s another MS Paint alternative called Kolourpaint. I personally prefer it over Drawing; once you install it you’ll need to install quite a bit of stuff from the KDE environment, but I think that it’s worth.
The super key can be configured to your taste. For example mine brings up composing, so if I type Super+e+1 I get ɛ, Super+a+1 I get ɐ, so goes on. (I open the menu with Alt+F1, by the way.) As implied, as a further tip - if you need certain characters you can create custom keystrokes through a file called .XCompose.
To expand on this some if you’re more of a visual person:
If you open the keyboard application, (just called “keyboard” when you do a search in your applications.) the second tab is “Shortcuts”. From there you can see an interface that shows and helps you change all the shortcuts on the system.
You can use the search feature to narrow things down quickly. The multiple “screenshot” shortcuts were nice to find for some common use cases I do.