I've been getting increasingly frustrated with Windows over the past few years. When Win10 came out for free and we no longer had to pirate it, at first I was excited but then I remembered that there is no such thing as free, especially when it comes to a company that has a strangle-hold on the world of operating systems like Windows does.
Lately, I've been hearing rumblings about how Windows 11 is going to be rolled out soon and that support for 10 will be cut off. I have no idea if this is true but there are many things that I do not like about Windows as a product and also Microsoft as a company.
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A local friend of mine is an avid Linux user and he has a couple of machines with Linux Mint on them and I was playing around with one of them one day and realized that it basically functions exactly like Windows, which is good for someone like me that isn't necessarily wanting to re-learn anything super complicated. I tried my hand at RedHat back when I was in college and other than getting it to go onto the internet I wasn't able to really do a whole hell of a lot with it. It was more of a pain in the ass than anything else and I ended up switching back to Windows pretty rapidly.
Mint, on the other hand, is actually an extremely easy OS to get involved with but there are certain things that people like me, with no experience, are going to struggle with right out of the box.
For one thing, there isn't really any such thing as just going on the internet and downloading whatever and then installing it. You have to use the software manager for this but in many ways once you get accustomed to this, it is fine. Not everything exists on Linux and I experienced a little bit of difficulty with things like WhatsApp and Telegram. However, they do work, even if like in the situation with Whatsapp, it isn't an official released from Meta and somehow, someone or a group of people got it to work.
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It wasn't that complicated though and I even installed it from the command prompt or terminal, which although unnecessary, felt kind of cool.
I have almost all the tools from my Windows machine already transferred or I should say, replicated, on my Mint machine and the only thing I am having problems with is ProtonVPN that for some reason, when activated, completely blocks my access to the internet. There is a fix for this, something about deactivating a "kill switch" but I haven't fully messed around with it yet as this was never a project to get done rapidly, I am gradually using two computers with the intent being to get everything switched over to the new computer in the event that this one stops working or MS decides to screw us all over one day.
There are some donwn-sides to using Mint, and I am not trying to challenge anyone out there nor do I claim to have really any idea of what the hell I am doing. I am a novice user and don't know jack squat about what I am doing here but this is kind of the point. Things just work!
The only con that I can find thus far is if you are a gamer. While there has been some level of support put out there for Linux users as far as gaming is concerned, for the most part I think the gaming industry isn't all that focused on an OS that has probably around 5% of the overall userbase. This likely wont affect me a great deal because I don't play a lot of videogames and if I was going to do so, I would probably just buy a console like a Playstation.
I have successfully installed all the major things that I use a computer for and for me, this is a very limited number of things. I have Brave Browser, Whatsapp, LINEapp (a popular messaging app in Thailand), Telegram, Signal, Exodus, Atomic, and Libre Office (the equivalent of MS Office) came pre-installed on it.
I think that most people out there really only use their computers to access the internet, make documents of some sort, and use some messengers. That person certainly is me and well, if you are that way as well and are not a gamer, I don't think that there is any particular reason to not switch over to some sort of Linux distribution, of which there are many.
I am only a week in and other than the issue with ProtonVPN and a small issue that I didn't understand as far as my login and administrative access was concerned, it has been smooth sailing.
I will continue to report back on this because I think this experience can be true for a majority of people out there that use their computer just for common things.