;tldr Beginning to use a new OS, even using a distro as friendly as Mint, is harder than the overall community says it is. The second there is a problem expect hours of consuming, likely outdated, information. That said I’m happy I switched.
I’m not a programmer. If you are someone who is unfamiliar with GNU/Linux you probably aren’t either. Good news: a week after you start using Linux you’ll feel like one! Here are some critical things I eventually learned while installing Ubuntu/Mint:
You should expect to use the terminal . Period. Something about your particular hardware or software setup may require special tweaks or install that requires typing. Anyone who even hints this isn’t the case is at best deluded. I know this is a deal-breaker for many people but I’d rather not waste your time.
Locations and commands are case-sensitive . -h means help -H Human-readable (or is it the other way around? More typing yay!). It’s in /etc/ X 11, not /etc/x11 (something almost impossible to see the difference of on a blurry 1080i resolution not being properly displayed).
While the basic user storage locations mimic what you are used to, the underlying system organization is completely impossible to navigate. Pertinent files can be scattered over several locations for whatever reason so don’t even bother trying to figure out a pattern and just follow guides. That said,
Guides helping you to navigate this jumbled mess are possibly outdated so check their dates or you may end up following directions and quite possibly break your installation when you add/remove/alter a file that used to be important but has been deprecated or relocated and now redundant. Speaking of which,
It is possible/probable your distro is effectively a skin of another older distro , so you should search the underlying distro directions too in case there aren’t any for the ‘skin’ you’re using.
All said and done, I am very happy to say I now have my Mint OS on a portable USB keychain that I can use on any PC (assuming TPM permission). The actual OS is pleasantly unobtrusive, nimble, and supports 90% of what I want to do with it. Critical failings seem to be completely relegated to proprietary software (for me, 1080i support was abandoned by all the graphics card developers years ago and I’m unable to either find older working drivers like I can in Win10, or find/figure out the tweaking needed to force the issue). Check all your mission critical programs to see if they are Linux compatible , or ‘simply’ learn to use the open-source competitor if they aren’t.
People who have these complaints often have forgotten how hard it was to learn Windows and how hard it was to find info before XP lasted for 14 years. These are all the same problems you would have if you had never seen Windows before. For instance I don’t think you would be complaining about case sensitivity if you had not used a system that wasn’t first. Also, Windows itself is a “skin” on older OSs; Windows retained DOS compatibility for years and many of it’s quirks, like the case sensitive thing, are a result of that. Not to mention that the WinNT kernel was built on from the Win32 kernel (itself an upgrade of the Win16 kernel) and IBM’s OS/2. There are literally screens in Windows 11 that are the same screen they were in Windows 95, the format dialogue for instance.
Built a new small PC recently and set up dual-boot with 2 drives… Linux was easier to set up and get running overall than Windows 11. When I installed Linux, it found my drive to install on with no problem, but W11 could not without bringing over Intel storage drivers on a USB stick. Linux had built-in drivers for all of the hardware, everything working right on first startup. Windows required me to download Wifi drivers onto a USB stick from another computer before I could download anything. Windows also required for me to download many other drivers from the motherboard mfr website. Now Windows is hassling me to activate with a non-generic product key that I didn’t buy yet. Linux just worked from the start.
In fairness to Windows, the kernel and the drivers are the few of the objectively good things about it.
Neither NT nor its age are the problem. It should be a testament to how well it works for the things we’re using it for today.
The problem is the userspace. The things that you interact with and see. That is what you’re referring to when you mention “the format dialog”. Not NT. Win32 isn’t a kernel, it’s an API that is used to sometimes talk to NT indirectly and give userspace functionality.
Where NT is truly starting to show its age is with things like scheduling on AMD Ryzen chips with 2 different CCDs. That is a Microsoft skill issue. Had this issue cropped up not even 10 years ago, they would’ve figured it out. This is what is gonna age NT. New hardware, not new software.
It’s literally its only job to talk to hardware. Scheduling and memory allocation are the most important parts of any OS.
Precisely. MS didn’t do a very good job maintaining it for Ryzen CPUs recently, though. I remember the whole fiasco with Zen 4, when it just came out, it ran better on Windows 10 than 11.
Then, more recently, 9950X3D needs manual thread pinning to run some games better.
Like, come on… this isn’t something any user should even be worried about.
But also keep in mind that “just talking to the hardware” is one hell of a reduction and oversimplification, too.
Keep in mind, these issues with Ryzen scheduling are fairly new. People yap about NT being an issue when it wasn’t for many years and it still isn’t even the primary issue (and it usually gets fixed by the vendors themselves in one way or another).
Yeah, but now we are old. 😅
Age has nothing to do with ability to learn, brain plasticity is a myth. The reality is that anybody who can spend 6-8 hours a day learning is going to learn faster than those who have to do other things all day.
@atomicbocks @nuko147 Would be good to hear from an expert with data about this.
Source
That’s the problem. We have many things to do now every day. 6-8 hours per day is only working (pure working time, not commute, breaks etc). Also mood and energy is another topic. It has nothing to do with our ability.