It just works.
I’m kind of shocked how easy it was to set up. I used ventoy to make a bootable iso of Linux Mint Cinnamon on my Mini PC (Ser5 Pro), and I had zero issues with anything. Ventoy even plays nice with secure boot.
Where’s the setup?
There really wasn’t any. I booted into Mint, synced my keyboard/trackpad combo and my earbuds then was off to the races. It detected all my hardware including my Elgato HD60 X without any steps. The only thing I had to work around was downloading the deb build of Discord Canary to enable audio output in Discord streams since it was only recently added to Discord’s dev/beta build (Canary).
Speaking of which Elgato’s capture software doesn’t support Linux (shocker), so I simply installed OBS, pointed the audio/video to the capture card, and it worked. Easy.
My Use Case
I have the aforementioned mini PC mainly to be jockied by a capture card for streaming Nintendo Switch to Discord. Aside from that I use it as a productivity machine in my living room for internet browsing (omg webtv!) and Kodi. The Ser5 uses an AMD Ryzen 7 5850u with integrated graphics, 16GB DDR4, and a 500gb M.2. All of the ports, HDMI audio out, etc were automatically detected by Mint.
Conclusion
Linux Mint feels premium compared to Windows 11. It’s snappier, more modular, and offers a Linux GUI that’s familiar/easy to use. Plus now I have the benefit of no preinstalled spyware or bloatware. Feels good to actually own my computer.
Thanks for reading!
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Hell yeah!
Next stop will be your privacy journey which would completely break your chains towards Discord which gave you trouble.
Once Revolt gets screen sharing.
A better way to word this is “Next will be your privacy journey which will send you down an inifinte rabbit hole that you consumes you”.
Lol no but seriously, it’s a fun rabbit hole, but can get out of control if you’re not careful.
From what i remember my experience was the same when i started my journey with PopOS. Ofcourse it probably did help that i was already an amd user when i was still using windows, i already hated nvidia years before switching lol. I went down the rabbithole and now i’m on Void linux. Also used arch and NixOS in the past. I love being able to setup these minimal distros to my liking, and after that it just works and gets out of the way.
Same thing with Ubuntu.
I started on Mint, then went to Arch Linux with Gnome. Now, I spend hours a day every day editing the dozens of config files for my Arch + Hyprland setup. I discovered NVIM plugins and decided to figure that out on my own instead of using one of the pre-made plugin packs. Now 90% of the software I use is cli. You can do anything from a terminal, and once you start it’s hard to justify using bloated GUI applications instead. Especially once you make your TE and prompt pretty.
Forewarning, wine appears to be a bit broken on Mint at the moment. I was recently experimenting with it in a VM, and I could not seem to get it installed properly - even after adding the winehq repo. Debian, by contrast, just works. I still use winamp for my music library, and play a few games that are windows based.
wine works without issues for me on mint 22.1. I use foobar2k, and most games I play are windose only. but I use proton for games, not wine.
Fortunately I have no need for wine.
Yeah I used to use Ubuntu as a Linux desktop a few years ago. I just came back to install Fedora on my desktop and the whole process was super easy. Even for gaming, Nvidia drivers, Steam with proton, etc. all set up with zero command line interaction, troubleshooting or even looking up guides or anything. It was intuitive and works.
Literally the hardest part was I couldn’t find my USB stick and ended up improvising with an old SD card as installation media.
The compatibility for gaming on Linux today is generally really good. The whole experience is really polished.
Im gonna switch now when support for win 10 ends too, I would switch now but I have work to finish.
Welcome to stability. You are in control.
sudoresponsibly.As someone who uses RHEL for work every time I have to set something up on a windows system I groan. It really boils down to the app, some are very easy to use but it seems anything that involves OS config, the registry and permissions becomes a royal pita. Linux isn’t 100% pain free (looking at you package conflicts) and SSL config sucks on all OS’s but the majority of the time it presents smaller hurdles because I can dig into any part I need to.
Good on you! It’s a pretty good time to be transiting to linux. I transitioned a few years ago, and there were a lot of things that sucked back then, that just aren’t an issue anymore.
Welcome! We are happy to have you. Remember, RTFM. ;)
Welcome to the dark side, we have cookies
Having said that, just as a suggestion, take a look at KDE. It feels a bit more windows like, is extremely customizable and as such can be made to work exactly how you want it
My brother recently texted me asking for advice about installing Mint on an old laptop. He is the one that got me into computers as a kid, and he has worked at Microsoft for maybe 25 years. It made me so happy lol.
Microsoft has a whole Linux division now. They’re fully in the “extend” portion of their plan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
The sense of ownership and control the Linux experience offers is something I’ve never felt with Windows.
