I love Linux Mint

Actually, I’ve been using Linux since SUSE 6.0 in 1998. My mother was a technical writer and one day she came home from work with a SUSE installation CD-ROM and manual. It was a completely new chapter for me, even though I had used a SINIX PC back in 1987. But only for playing Snake and typing random letters. You can guess how old I was 😉 I only used DOS/Windows to play games. The hardest part was creating boot disks for The Settlers to increase the EMS/XMS [1].

My first experience of Linux was rather disappointing. I tried to install it, which was quite successful, but then I tried to get a Soundblaster to work. It was an ISA slot sound card, which made it even more complicated. After several hours, maybe days, I gave up. And you may not believe it, but since then I have never used Linux in my daily life - as a desktop system.

Of course I have used Linux (preferably Debian) on various servers, virtual machines and at work, but on my desktop it was all Windows. Until my beloved HP Spectre x360 got “old”. It is 8 years old, and with Windows 10 it felt awfully slow, and Windows 11 was not something I expected to be able to run on it. So I decided to give Linux another go. First Ubuntu, but it felt slow and I didn’t like the concept of the - not so open - Snap packages. I tried several other desktop distros, like Fedora, Manjaro and Arch. But I ended up with Mint and love it so far. At the moment it’s Mint 21.3 (Virginia), waiting for an upgrade to Mint 22.

In my opinion, Mint [2] is the Windows killer if you want to get a lazy person to switch to Linux. If you can convince that person that they don’t really need Office 365 in their daily life, you can use Mint. And on the horizon, there is much better support for PC games on Linux. Thanks to Steam and Nvidia’s recent move to open source GPU kernel modules [3]

Yes, I’m a person who thinks Vim is the best text editor, so my opinion may not suit all PC users who have been running Windows. But if you want a chance to convince someone to use Linux, it’s Mint.

Update: The upgrade from 21.3 to 22.0 took a long time, but it worked flawless. No issues at all. I’m excited.

Links

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory
[2] https://www.linuxmint.com/
[3] https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-towards-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/