this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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My condolences for the Windows issues. I hope you have a great time with Mint, that was my first daily-driver Linux distro. These days I seem to have fewer issues running games than my friends running Windows, and I hope it’s the same for you.
I'll be honest, they've shot themselves in the foot. I'm a normal user, so as long as my things that I've setup just work there's no reason for me to change. As soon as they screwed it up I'm ready to jump to the next thing to make sure it just works. I forgot to mention that I did not try reinstalling Windows 10 because the auto rollback feature said it was no longer available for me (I think it expires after a week or so, and I was troubleshooting after work for longer than that time to try to get it functional again.) so multiple chances for Microsoft to keep me in their services but just couldn't make it easy.
I recently swapped to Mint and have been enjoying it. I still have Windows as my daily driver and I have a handful of things that I still need windows for, but I have a media center and a gaming PC set up both on mint. There was an odd quirk with Steam where it didn't launch after some update, and it was a bit asinine to be honest. But after a few hours of research online I found the issue and modified a file so it loaded properly. Stuff like that sucks, but it gives me experience navigating the OS and understanding how it works.
To your point though, it overall just works. My wife uses it no problem and is getting use to where things are. I maintain the system though, ensuring updates are applied and searching for solutions when needed (for instance, we use caffeine to stop the monitor from going to sleep when playing games with a controller)
Absolutely, they take their market cap for granted and have been making the user experience worse for years. I’m a pretty technical person so I switched to Linux for fun and software developer clout, but I’m so glad that the Linux desktop experience is getting good enough for everybody. I’ve had mostly an “it just works” experience on the major distros like Mint and Fedora, and honestly even the issues I’ve run into were simple enough to solve with some internet searches.