When I had two laptops concurrently, a friend of mine suggested that I give Linux a spin on one of them just to see if I would enjoy being part of the PC master race of digital vegans who no longer have to fuss with the things that plague Windows users such as intentional bloatware and spying on all of your information.
The idea sounded good and he helped to orchestrate the purchase of a rather inexpensive laptop (just around $400) and promised me that with Mint on it, that it would run circles around a Windows laptop that was 3 times the price.
So far, he has mostly been correct but after using this for around a year I can understand why it turns a lot of people off.
Now first off, I am going to say that if someone wanted to dive into Linux that Mint would probably be a good way to go. If you are accustomed to Windows this pretty closely emulates what that sort of environment is like but as my friend stated, it isn't constantly pestering you to use certain MS products and doesn't load a bunch of shit into the background that you never asked for. When I look at various sites and see people complaining about Windows 11 I can only look on with sheer ignorance because I have never been subjected to that. I got worried when Windows stopped trying to fight pirates and just made the OS free. There is no such thing as free in a for-profit company, but Linux is free... how is that? I don't really know.
But I do know that for 90% of the things that I do, Mint works just wonderfully and has access to most of the things that I would ever (and most people would ever) use a computer for. Two of the only exceptions that I end up hearing about are videogames - which I do not play on a computer - and Adobe stuff, which I also do not use. So for me Mint has been wonderful and I love the fact that here we are a year later and my $400 computer is performing just as good as it was 52 weeks ago.
This is not something that can be said for any computer I have ever had in the past because I believe that Microsoft and Apple intentionally update their products unnecessarily in order to encourage slowdown or loss in performance and therefore the individual feels compelled to buy a new machine every year.
I will buy a new machine once this one starts on fire and I have no choice. Also, since it is only $400, if I ever started to be super paranoid about loss of data, I could just buy another one and call it my travel computer and have the data mirrored on both of them.
While it isn't as intuitive as just pushing icons into certain places, it is entirely possible to mimic a very Windows looking environment to the point where it feels like you are using Windows and if anyone came over and used your computer, they may actually feel as if they were using Windows.
There are some annoying caveats though and these can be the sort of thing that would annoy average users away from bothering. It isn't that big of a deal but it is much more complicated than just hitting an update button in anything that is MS oriented or in the case of Apple products, having them update it without your permission while you are sleeping.
Recently, Signal just stopped working and there was a little red notification that told me that it was out of date and cannot be used until updated. All of my old chats were there but I couldn't send anything to the few people I know that actually use Signal. So I clicked on the update link and this is what is displayed.
now this isn't necessarily a daunting thing to anyone that has ever used terminal before and often, it actually feels like it is fun because you feel like you are doing some sort of hacking seeing this happen in a command line sort of way even though for most people-including me- I have no idea what a vast majority of this output actually means. So I did the instructions line by line just like the official site mentioned, only to have some red things appear in the output
Now to a sys admin or someone that is far more nerdy than I am, this might be child's play, but to the average user who barely understand the terminal, this may as well be written in Mandarin. I did a search to see if anyone else has had this problem and yes, yes indeed they have.. there were thousands of threads about this one problem.
In the end, I had to go into the software manager and uninstall Signal altogether, then reinstalled the original Signal only to have it not work either and say the same thing, then I tried using the commands stated two pictures above and that didn't work either. In the end I found something called "Signal beta" which is never something I am fond of using, installed that through the software manager and ok, now it works.
I don't really think that your average user is going to have the patience necessary to troubleshoot something like this and this is one of the main reasons why people probably give up on Linux pretty early on.
To me, this is the price of doing business for free because Linux distros are not spying on you for profit or if they are, they don't do it nearly as often or as nefariously.
BTW this has happened in multiple other products I use such as Brave Browser, which is a product that reminds me every time I use it that it needs to be updated but alas, I cannot using the instructions provided. At least it still works.
in the end I still think that people should try to move away from MS and Mac-OS but probably not on their ONLY computer. These days though, I think that almost anyone has a dying or "slow" computer hanging around that they are afraid to toss out for some reason.
Do yourself a favor and install Mint on one of those and just play around with it. As the big companies because more and more intrusive into your personal data, it probably wouldn't be a terrible idea to at least get some training wheels on your computer bicycle.
