I’ve been using Linux Mint on my new (used) laptop for the past week, and I have to say, I’m pretty happy with it. Desktop tooling and options have expanded dramatically over the past five to seven years, or maybe Mint was always this customizable and I didn’t know because I was using Ubuntu in the past.
(Technically, Mint is built on Ubuntu but uses its own desktop environment, called Cinnamon)
A lot of people choose a Linux distro based on its built-in features, but unfortunately, there has tended to be a lack of emphasis on aesthetics, which is something for which Apple has everyone beat. But this seems to have changed as aesthetics are playing a much larger role in some of these distributions and Linux bros are finally realizing that few people want to spend all their time at an ugly console. And Mint is honestly one of the best. You can very easily change the default theme color, so if you don’t want the pleasant “mint” green, you can choose blue, or orange, or really anything, and the colors all have this pleasant hue to them. I settled for blue.
The truth, is, too, that there are only so many locations to place something like a start menu, or an area on screen where quick-access programs are shown. For Windows it’s the bottom left of the screen, for Mac it’s bottom center. Many Linux distros have it top left. What’s nice about Mint is that you can change it the way you can with many distros, but it was more or less designed for bottom left, which is where I prefer it because it feels so familiar there. Sometimes I wonder if top left was just an effort to be different, but it sometimes makes for a weird experience, IMO, and I don’t see what’s wrong with giving people something they are already used to, since most people learn on Windows anyway. If you’re coming from Mac, you can set it to be bottom center if you want (other tools exist to mimic the specific way it behaves on Mac, too).
Of course, using the terminal is still a defining feature of Linux. It’s less and less necessary, but for “power users” it’s still there. I don’t (quite) have a vested interest in being a Linux administrator, but I still like using the command line at times, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I still remember. But I did go in and change the colors, so while my normal user terminal has my username in green before the prompt, the root user has purple. Lightsaber aesthetic! [“You are on this council, but we do not grant you the status of greybeard!”]
There is no Notepad++ for Linux, though, so I’m sad about that. But there are other programs. It’s also interesting to see that ifconfig now uses different network interface names, such that they reflect more information about the device (see https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/PredictableNetworkInterfaceNames/).
Even though Firefox technically works the same way on Windows as it does on Linux, the desktop application tooling is different, and I have to say that Firefox on Windows looks a little bit slicker. That’s kind of a bummer, but functionally they are the same.
Also, I was fine setting up my bluetooth headphones, though it was a bit finicky at first.
At the end of the day, I want to learn more about Linux and want to use it as my daily driver going forward, but I’m not necessarily trying to be a poweruser. I like having an aesthetic desktop experience because I don’t honestly use my computer for very much. I use the browser a lot, I occasionally use word processing programs, and I might do some programming, and Linux is very favorable to programming. I also have a larger hard drive now, so I have some virtual machines set up so I can play around with those again.
I turned my Windows computer on the other day to copy some of my bookmarks over, and true to form, it brought up this annoying installation prompt asking me if I wanted to get the most out of my Windows experience, which ultimately just tried to get me to log in to my Microsoft account. Yeah, ‘get the most out of my experience’. Right. More like ‘give Microsoft most of my data’. It turns out you can disable this prompt from appearing, but for as thorough as I tend to be going through all the settings, I had never in my life seen the little checkbox that now exists to bring this prompt up on startup. Fuck Microsoft.
(I say this, but there’s a decent chance I’ll still have to work with Microsoft’s Azure services at some point in my career. Eh. You do what you can)
I appreciate the work that has been done on Linux Mint, so I donated the monetary equivalent of a Qdoba burrito. In the future, it’d be really cool to donate large sums of money to these projects that create a buffer between us and exploitative corporate interests. Sometimes I wonder if my early retirement job might actually be writing code for open source software. It’s an appealing thought.
So overall, it’s been a great experience. I did get a weird change in my desktop settings this morning that was easy to reset, but it was a mild annoyance. Bugs exists, but it’s still been a way better experience than it used to be. It looks nice, it does stuff. I’m excited to start learning more using this computer.