If you haven’t seen them, I have written recently about my experiences with installing and using Windows 11 and Fedora 41. I was pretty unhappy with both of them for many reasons that I list out in those posts. I have had Linux Mint on my wife’s laptop for about a year now, so I figured I’d try it on my desktop.
Installation
The install process is good. I did have one issue though; I had secure boot enabled, and Linux Mint says that it will help you with this step once you reboot after the install is complete. A console came up with some choices for registering keys or just continuing to boot. Not knowing what it meant, I continued to boot, and it never came back up. With some research, I found that I should have chosen “Enroll key”. I wish the Mint team would show more info on this, but it seems motherboard-based, so I understand that could be difficult. I tried to reinstall Mint, but the screen never came back up.
Post-Install
I have had barely any issues. It’s been a pleasant surprise coming from Fedora and Windows. Everything I have installed simply works without question. The default programs (including the terminal) are good. I can still customize my system if needed, but I’m sticking to minimal changes for now.
Surprisingly, gaming is much better on Mint than Void or Fedora. Games from GOG work a lot better, perhaps because Mint is based on older packages. Some games on Steam that didn’t work now do. I also now use Lutris for GOG games, and it works quite well.
The software center is so, SO, much better than Fedora’s. I think it is still GNOME software center, but it has to be a fork of it. It runs much smoother, loads faster…and it actually works! It installs packages when I click install (imagine that).
Development has been good so far. I have changed my vim config (and several other configs) to just use default locations instead of messing around with XDG. It’s still annoying to have a lot of random files in $HOME, but it’s better than the catastrophe that is the modern Windows filesystem.
Conclusion
It isn’t often that I write “good news” posts on here. After having so many problems with Windows and Fedora, I thought it necessary to share some good news. Linux Mint is a great distro. It’s simple, and things just work. That’s really all I want. When you want to play games, they work. When you want to write some code, you’re good. If you need latest versions of applications, flatpak or adding repos helps.
Big thumbs up, and thank you to everyone at Linux Mint that make such a great distro possible.