A Linux experience for my infected friends
Originally written .
Table of contents
- Preamble
- Part number the first - The laptop
- Part number the second - The desktop
- Part number the third - A surprise desktop
- Part number the fourth - The follow-up
- Part number the fifth - RFC
Funnily enough, after having ditched Windows, while not for good quite yet, people couldn't help but notice that I had switched to Linux, probably helped by the fact that I didn't exactly hide the fact that I had switched. One of my friends, after having found out I switched, asked me to help them get going with Linux as well, assuming everything went well for me. They weren't exactly big fans of Windows to begin with, and Windows 11 wasn't an improvement for them either.
Part number the first - The laptop
But before that could even happen, another friend, who's also a relative of the first one, asked me to fix their laptop.
Their Lenovo LOQ 15IAX9 (stupid name) was bluescreening (wifi related), and was also fairly slow. I couldn't pinpoint any issues beyond bad drivers and *gestures vaguely at Windows 11*, so I half-jokingly suggested installing Linux. The joke's on me though, since they took me up on that offer. I guess this is what I signed up for when I became tech support for my friend group. Time to set them all up with Linux Mint I guess.
The person in question is very talkative and has severe ADHD, and is pretty far from what I would call tech-literate. They manage, and they do in-fact do some light gaming, but they make no use of any programs that they're gonna instantly think of and ask 'I need X to work, will that work?'. They need a web browser, Steam, Discord and a remote desktop program so I can help them out (Anydesk is my preference, and is available as a flatpak, and thus easy to install even for a newbie), some other games like Minecraft and osu!, but nothing obscure. Everything they need is popular and well-supported.
They made a visit to me with their laptop, and better yet, came late on a day they also had to fly out, so we didn't exactly have a lot of time. Helping someone set up or reinstall Windows is something I would normally make sure we had plenty of time to do; I would typically (if I'm making a home visit) like to arrive sometime around midday, and realistically, unless the problem is tiny, I'll be having dinner at their place. There'll often be some troubleshooting, half an hour of installing Windows, then an hour of drivers and installing programs and de-bloating and other bullshit because sane default are apparently quite hard to get right. Maybe even an hour of stress-testing while we're having dinner for good measure. I couldn't quite remember how long it took me to get going with the basics, and I'm not really in the right demographic to gauge that anyway, so it was going to be an interesting experience seeing how long it would take to get going on a basic Linux Mint setup to the point that Joe Public can notionally (and hopefully) go along by themselves.
I had pre-checked that their wifi chipset was supported by the current Linux Mint kernel, just so we didn't start of on a pointless venture, but I couldn't exactly guarantee that everything would work perfectly. Who knows if the webcam, trackpad, or some other bullshit would turn out to not work and be a deal-breaker, and force them back onto Windows 11 *shudders*. Linux doesn't have a great reputation on that front. Many times there has been that one thing that didn't have support. Things are a lot better nowadays, and my own experience had been very good on that front. So I was hopeful.
They got in the door and we got going immediately. I managed to accidentally turn off the trackpad while trying to get into the boot menu, so that was fun, but beyond that, getting going didn't take any longer than it usually does with laptops as you dick about trying to find out whether or not you need to press F2, F10, F12 or Delete to get into the boot menu on this particular laptop. Once we got that going, it was mostly just clicking through the menus to install it. Wifi worked immediately, which was very reassuring. They didn't have anything on it that they cared about, so that made things easier. Getting things going in the OS was a breeze. A quick trip through the update manager here, a few searches in the software manager there, a quick toggle to dark mode, and it was just a matter of logging into everything. Even the Nvidia driver install went fine thanks to Mint's driver manager. Everything seemed to Just Work™. Wifi worked from the get-go, but I also made sure to test the webcam, which worked fine, as well as suspend upon the lid closing. That also worked fine. Battery status: no problem, Mint's got your back. Interestingly enough, suspend woke up pretty damn quick, and that machine probably has the quickest reboot I've ever seen. We had to do two reboots in order to install everything. The second one was after installing the Nvidia drivers, and I swear, I didn't even see the Mint logo. I must have blinked or something. In one moment it was seemingly not quite booted, and in the next I could see the log-in screen. Something had to have been gimmicked to make that work, but I'm not complaining. Perfect for a laptop I guess. Even the freaking keyboard back-light had an adjustable slider in the battery settings available through the tray, just below the brightness slider! I really didn't expect that! Even in cases where that is a software-adjustable thing and not just a fixed-hardware thing, only adjustable through whatever keyboard shortcut, I wouldn't have expected Linux to support it, but clearly I was wrong! Progress had been made!
They seemed to be very happy with everything Just Working™, nothing seemingly being difficult to understand, no real questions being asked since everything was pretty obvious once you got going, and once you're in Firefox or Steam or Discord, the OS can just fade into the background. Things didn't even take that long! We had plenty of time, and we were just loafing around by the end of it. Goes to show my worries were seemingly for nothing. But after all this, the next question would be whether or not I'd be getting support questions every other week, or panicked calls two days into using Linux wanting to get back to Windows 11 because of some inane shit or some program not being cooperative, or it just bricking itself.
Part number the second - The desktop
Eventually, the first friend in this saga eventually found the time to have a day of tech support so we could install Linux. This friend doesn't have as severe ADHD, but hasn't really grown up 'with computers'. They manage, and they've gotten a lot better with experience, but they've still blessed me with golden suggestions like using Teamviewer (back when I still used that) to remote into my home desktop to get access to the internet, since the internet where we were at was down.
Installing went mostly without issue, although there was a moment of worry as the wifi didn't seem to work at first glance. Turns out they has a Broadcom wifi chipset, which needs proprietary drivers. No worries, Mint's driver manager handles that just fine, just the same as the Nvidia driver. They installed fine, but then the next problem showed up. None of the 5 GHz networks showed up. Turns out this is because Broadcom is a horrible company which provides horrible drivers, which are unable to access the higher wifi channels. This was easily fixable on the wifi router side of things, and is probably rarely a completely game breaking issue, as you can fall back to 2.4 GHz if you really needed to, but I'd hate for this to be a roadblock for someone who's using their ISP provided router, which, because it's manufactured e-waste, doesn't provide you with the setting needed to change that. Good thing someone had that exact same problem, knew how to fix it, and made a post about it somewhere where I could find: see Broadcom BCM4360 & TP-Link AC1300 Wifi Adapter (Archer T6E) - No 5GHz signal!!.
Once we were up and running and with the wifi working, it was just a matter of installing software, formatting drives so they could work with Linux, transferring files from their old install. They were for the most part right at home in Mint, with any given work-flow being similar to Windows, other than installing software going through the Mint Software Manager, but after a crash course on that when we went over the programs they wanted to install, that went fine as well. Not everything had simple 1:1 equivalents though. Firefox is still Firefox, but they were using Outlook (not the Office kind) on Windows, but Thunderbird works just fine for their use-case. Probably even better, since they were very much not happy with New Outlook. We did have to look a bit around for things they needed for their coursework in uni. They're studying maths, so they need to be able to program in R. Python I knew would be no problem, and I would have assumed that R would be a similar story, but I wasn't intimately familiar with the choices around, but we did manage to find an alternative that seemed to work, but we didn't test that right there and then. But hopefully this won't come back and bite me in the arse.
They also had a fair few Razer peripherals, like a mouse, keyboard and a Nari Ultimate headset. The mouse and keyboard were no major problem. We had to try both of the options in the Software Manager out, but after a reboot and installing the openrazer daemon, things worked fine on that front. The headset though, only showed up with mono output. Not exactly ideal. Thankfully, there's a Github script you can just run to set things up for you: razer-nari-pulseaudio-profile. After fiddling around with that, and a reboot, and some more fiddling so they could refamiliarise themselves with their headset, and things were, yet again, golden.
I also went through with a few fixes that I now knew about from both my own previous experience, and from having to fix a few things for the first friend in this story, just so they wouldn't come back to me and bite me or them in the ass unexpectedly. These were fairly minor, like fixing a flatpak permission with Anydesk, but it's a bit annoying they have to happen.
Once everything was up and running, they too seemed very happy. Nothing insurmountable happened, everything seemed pretty straightforward. So at this point, the only question is what the future would bring. A nice bonus to all this was that as they were browsing the software manager, looking for programs they needed, they discovered the world of e-book readers on Linux. They're very much into reading, and getting another excuse to read more was right up their alley. I wasn't deep into that world, so I just said they should try out the options available for download, as well as raise the flag and sail the high seas to find the books they were looking to read. Turns out, they liked the options they found and have been very happy. The joy of installing random programs and finding they do useful stuff for you isn't something I've experienced since the Windows XP days, so seeing this joy in someone else was unexpectedly heartwarming.
Part number the third - A surprise desktop
Another friend in my friend group apparently got the word that both me and my friend had migrated over to Linux, so when they got a big paycheck to spend and decided to blow a lot of it on a big computer upgrade (new CPU, RAM, GPU, more SSD), they asked if I could come up some day to assemble it for them. No problem; I enjoy doing these things, and I've been tech support before and I continue to do so in order to be useful to others, since that's a thing I enjoy doing. And they get a PC they know is well assembled and don't have to pay the cost of assembly by some dude we don't know whether or not was high the day he decided to put in that particular zip-tie. Win-win for everyone.
Well, once I was gonna be up there anyway, they had the wonderful idea of trying out Linux as well, to see if it was something for them. They seemed convinced by the fact that SteamOS is just Linux underlyingly, so Linux must be going places. Can't argue with that. Now the question was just a matter of whether or not it truly was something for them.
Assembly went fine, but the first hurdle came from me not reading the motherboard manual. The motherboard we went with, the ASRock B850 Pro-A, has four M.2 SSD slots as well as two PCI-E slots. We went with that one because it was the cheapest board that had four M.2 slots, since they had two already, and they were gonna buy a third for this upgrade, and wanted room to upgrade to a fourth. All good. They also had a PCI-E wifi card for, well wifi. Turns out, the third M.2 slot and the second PCI-E slot are shared, so when I installed one of the SSDs in the third slot, the wifi didn't show up. At first that made me think that the wifi chipset wasn't supported under Linux, even though I had checked that beforehand, but then we went into their old Windows install to check, and the wifi didn't show up there either. A quick check of the motherboard manual thankfully told me the problem, but this turned out to be a bit of blunder. Oh well, what's done is done. They have plans to upgrade to ethernet anyway, so by the time an SSD upgrade becomes relevant, the wifi is hopefully not a problem.
Once that was all sorted, wifi worked perfectly under Linux, so it was just a matter of installing. Installing went without a hitch, just needed to guide them through some things like formatting disks, installing software. We also migrated their old data, which was a bit of a pain, but that's mostly because I forgot what folder things were in. Once that hurdle was overcome it was fine. I also forgot to turn on the Proton compatibility layer in Steam, which made them come back disappointed that over half their games weren't gonna work, at which point I just had to flip that switch and everything worked fine. Proton should really just be on by default in any sane Steam install, something that's actually been changed to be the case since I started writing this article: see Steam update brings accessibility settings and Proton enabled by default to make Linux gaming simpler. There's no reason a novice user should be scared away by Proton seeming to be much worse than it actually is, because they aren't actually using it.
This person is also apparently picky with browsers. They very explicitly did not want Firefox, and even went as far as uninstalling it before even installing a new browser. Fair enough, whatever. What they used on Windows was Opera GX. 'Kay, whatever, but that doesn't have a Linux version, and I'm not going to recommend Linux to someone who needs a specific browser for casual web browsing that only works on Windows. If that's the only browser you want, then we might as well go back to Windows. After having had that talk, we tried normal Opera, which does have a Linux version on Flathub. We did need to fiddle with it to find its dark mode, but after that was over, the software front was fine. They don't use their computer for much more than games, a web browser and Discord, so outside of these areas, they don't have any obscure or problematic software that needs to run on Windows. osu! even works great thanks to lazer. There were a few more questions that popped up nearly immediately, but most were hardware related, and the few Linux questions that did pop up were very easy to answer.
It'll be exciting to see what other problems may arise; whether things turn out fine, or whether they end up going back to Windows.
Part number the fourth - The follow-up
The first round of support came in from our laptop friend, with having to help navigate Prism Launcher to install Sodium. This wasn't very hard, it just took a bit of time to navigate via chat. So far so good. Round two however was that Eduroam, a wifi roaming service most institutions of higher education use, didn't want to play nice. This came as quite the surprise. Eduroam even officially supports Linux, and even goes as far as providing install scripts for every institution they work with. It should be as easy as 'select network → select the right encryption → input username and password → go about your business', but apparently, life needs to be complicated. There are plenty of guides and forum posts about this, but most end with them getting it to work once they found the correct setting. We apparently aren't that lucky. They went to the help desk where they're a student before talking to me, but Linux is nominally a supported platform for this, so even for this, it should just have been a case of needing some magic hands to push the rights buttons. But apparently, they too couldn't get it to work, even after getting the Linux guy from out back to take a look at it.
They also needed help with their microphone. They joined Discord, and the rest of us immediately wished they didn't, because it was painful. Turns out though that Mint had set their microphone to the absolute max volume. No wonder we felt we were getting ear-raped. I dropped that down to 50%, and not only did that massively improve things, now we could actually hear them! Their phone microphone is garbage, and so a proper laptop mic (not even a proper desktop of headset mic!) did wonders.
We also needed to fix Anydesk. Anydesk is broken on Mint with default settings. Turns out though that this is a really easy fix. Just add XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME to the flatpak environment variables. We did this with Flatseal. This is probably just a packaging problem and easily fixable on that end of things. Very annoying that it needs to be done, very nice that the fix is stupid easy.
Razer turned out to be a bigger problem than expected. DPI settings didn't seem to take as expected. This was less of a problem than it potentially could have been though, since our first desktop friend had, before our Linux story began, decided to switch over to something else, as they were pretty unhappy with Razer on the whole. They decided to just deal with it for the time being, and look to better options when the time came, and keep Linux support in mind if it were to become relevant. The fix they decided to deploy was to buy a Logitech mouse. They happened to buy the same one as me, which does help if I need to help them. I suggested using Solaar to set DPI and RGB settings. Unfortunately, the flatpak version does not work out of the box. After we dicked about for a bit, I found the fix I myself deployed: setting the udev rules as suggested on Doesn't work. Tried on Ubuntu and Alpine on the Solaar Flathub manifest. The relevant commands are sudo cp /var/lib/flatpak/app/io.github.pwr_solaar.solaar/current/active/files/lib/udev/rules.d/42-logitech-unify-permissions.rules /etc/udev/rules.d and sudo udevadm control --reload-rules. That fixed it. Unfortunately, it also coincided with a round of updates and a reboot, and after rebooting, Cinnamon crashed, and it kept on crashing until they rebooted again. After a second reboot, things were back to normal again. Although the fix was easy, this kind of behaviour is worrying, especially for a novice user who's quickly gonna jump to the conclusion that their computer is borked. Thankfully it wasn't any more borked than that. Fortunately, nobody I know has pulled a Linus yet from looking to fix problems like this: see Linux HATES Me – Daily Driver Challenge Pt.1#10:30.
Launching games outside of Steam and some other well trodden games, like Minecraft and osu!, seems to be a bigger pain. Nothing seems insurmountable; I could probably get the games in question going if I babysit the whole process for them, but we haven't had time for that. It's annoying that this process isn't idiot-proof though. Props to them for getting into Wine and Bottles without me though. I didn't expect that much enthusiasm and willingness to just jump into it, though not everybody has that, so there's definitely work to be done on this front. Things need to 'just work' just as well as it does on Steam, which itself isn't even perfect.
Civilization V ended up displaying a really annoying issue. The Linux version of it apparently has a memory leak or something, since one day, when we were gonna have a multiplayer game of it, it quickly completely crashed, for no obvious reason. After a reboot, it happened again, but this time I noticed that my page file (all 32 GBs of it!) was chock full, on a fresh reboot when I hadn't done anything beyond launching Steam, a game and Discord. This was easily fixed by launching the Windows version with Proton, which doesn't have this issue, but holy yikes, that would quickly have killed any willingness to play that game for someone who wasn't willing to troubleshoot it.
A minor issue that showed up for our desktop friend was hibernation. It isn't enabled by default in Linux Mint, apparently because support and reliability is iffy. I didn't even notice this, since I just leave my computer on, and sleep mode I knew worked (for values of) because I'd had that tested with our laptop friend. 'No biggie', I though, since I had seen guides on how to enable it, thinking we just had to go through one of those, and we're good. The procedure had changed between Mint 21 and Mint 22, but a new guide was available, so we went through that, and the hibernate button appeared, we tried it, and it mostly worked. This was still fine for values of, and the lack of hibernation wasn't a huge issue anyway, rather just a minor inconvenience, so reducing that inconvenience, even if we couldn't eliminate it, is still what I'd call a win. And then, after an update and a reboot, the hibernate button disappeared entirely, for reasons I still can't figure out. Apparently Mint is smart enough to not show that button when the relevant configuration isn't valid and won't work, and it is in fact correct, since when we try to force it to hibernate via the terminal, it just fails to properly hibernate and boots back up in an iffy state. But since none of the configuration we set to enable hibernation in the first place has changed, and none of the obvious fixes online seem to fix it, I am unable to do so. So this adventure in hibernation just did a big round-trip back to where we started: with it not being there.
One problem that magically solved itself was screen sharing with audio through Discord. The audio-half of that didn't work at all when I installed Linux, and while I noticed it, I deemed it non-essential, and concluded that I couldn't be arsed to fix it, although fixes seemed to exist, so I would just get around to it if it ever became essential. Our second friend in this story disagreed and did want it fixed, but we didn't deal with it immediately. We were gonna get around to it. Then the day came where we were gonna fix it, and it was already fixed. Apparently there's been an update somewhere that fixed this particular issue on Mint. I'm not complaining. It's actually very nice to have issues just magically fix themselves; it's just not something I'm used to.
One dealbreaker did eventually show up. Our third friend in this story, fairly quickly discovered that GTA V Online has kernel-level anti-cheat. I did mention to them that games with kernel-level anti-cheat wouldn't work, and gave them a list of the top of my head of games that had that, but the response to that was 'you just listed a bunch of games I don't play'. League of Legends was one of the exceptions, but that one alone was unimportant enough to ignore, at least in the moment. The annoying thing about this is that GTA V Online used to work just fine on Linux, and then they introduced kernel-level anti-cheat, and the anti-cheat they're using, BattleEye, is Linux compatible, but they couldn't be arsed to enable that feature: see GTA 5 moves to kernel-level anti-cheat on PC after purchase. Even better is that BattleEye hasn't really helped the situation in GTA V Online. Cheaters are still rampant. They just don't care. This game alone might have been ignorable, but GTA VI is probably going to end up in the same situation, and that one is too big to ignore for them. They were holding of on migrating back, since Windows 11 really is not proving to be an enticing prospect, but they did get a USB stick and put the Windows 10 installer on it, just so they would have it ready to install, and one day, that day did come. With kernel-level anti-cheat being a dealbreaker, it was only a question of time. Another friend in our friend group shrugged of using Linux since they play League of Legends, a game which also did work on Linux before it got kernel anti-cheat, but they're similarly holding of on Windows 11, and are going to stick to 10 for as long as possible. Our friend here did reinstall Windows 10, since that's at least a known evil, rather than 11, which isn't going to be better. You can probably hold out for a while even after support ends and security updates stop being pushed, but it's far from an ideal situation to be in. Kernel-level anti-cheat was simply an unavoidable dealbreaker for them. They were very happy with the rest of Linux, and found it to be very mature. They and would happily move back if kernel-level anti-cheat was no longer a factor. The fact that they stuck with it for over three months in spite of this dealbreaker is something I would consider to be high praise to the Linux desktop experience.
A fair bit later to all this, our first desktop friend had a show-stopping issue with Linux itself. GRUB broke to the point it wouldn't boot, and just threw them into the UEFI shell. For any novice user, this is synonymous with their computer breaking. It is no longer usable in this condition. The fix wasn't hard, but this is completely unfixable without domain-specific knowledge or a decent level of google-fu, but more to the point, it's unacceptable that it happens to begin with. In-OS issues are usually traceable to specific programs, and then you can start in that end, with error messages and the knowledge you've already accumulated from using that program; not to mention the fact that who still have a whole-ass computer that's mostly still working which you can use to google your way to a solution, or maybe just an alternative program. Sitting there and googling from your phone what the problem might be is a horrible experience, and being thrown into this experience without warning is not great. Even Windows deals with this in a better way, since boot-stopping issues on Windows are usually a BSOD, and those at least give the user a pointer to follow, rather than having to figure out for themselves how to explain what happened, given there is no clear error message to read out or Google. This is the perfect moment for a novice user to throw in the towel and conclude that Linux isn't for them, since it just completely stopped working for no apparent reason and with no obvious way to fix it. I look forward to getting a newer kernel just to be able to experience the new Linux bluescreen on kernel panics, featuring QR codes; I have faith that that's a big step in the right direction in making things easier to troubleshoot, see Linux's DRM Panic "Screen of Death" Sees Patches For QR Code Error Messages. Bluescreens aren't a great way to inform a user that things have gone wrong; ideally things shouldn't get to that point, but for a somewhat technical user, just having something to google is an enormous help.
All in all, the result were pretty well summarised by this question I asked them a few weeks into the switchover to Linux: 'Has the computer been behaving?', to which the answer was either 'yes' or 'mostly', and when the answer was 'mostly', the follow-up question 'has it been behaving better than with Windows?' returned a pretty clear 'yes', which I consider a pretty solid win. There's still work to be done, but depending on just how willing you are to troubleshoot, and how broad your software horizon is, Linux is potentially very ready for human consumption. It's just a matter of ironing out the remaining kinks, even if there are a lot of them to iron out. Kernel-level anti-cheat remains a scourge, and if we could come to admit that it isn't effective, then this hitch would be gone over night. But as it is, Linux probably isn't ready for the capital G 'Gamer', since they're very likely to have that one game that they play religiously, or a few games they'd be really bummed about not getting to play, and one of those being a big, current and popular multiplayer game with kernel-level anti-cheat is fairly likely. If you're mostly a single-player gamer, it's a lot easier to concede the loss that is those multiplayer titles, if you even care about them to begin with. With this situation in play, Linux quickly becomes an either/or prospect. Either you're a grandma and don't need to worry about the prospect of your software not working to begin with, or you're a gamer who doesn't care about the select games which have kernel anti-cheat, in which case Wine and Proton does you good, and you're just as well off as Grandma, or you do in-fact play one of those games, and Linux is a complete non-starter.
Over the course of this story there has also been a number of smaller questions, but they've often had quick and simple answers. With my apparent status as a local Linux guru now (christ...), I'm able to provide those answers and have them be accepted, which probably makes the transition to Linux a lot simpler. If the whole transition is clouded in an aura of uncertainty which makes one think that things aren't working the way they should be, and that you may or may not be doing things 'correctly', then I understand why someone would want back to the familiarity of Windows; better to go with the devil you know than with the unknown. I didn't even need to use the terminal before I was more than a week into using Linux, and even then, that was for some pretty obscure nonsense, but our first desktop friend in this story needed it on day one to run a script to get their headset working properly. That kind of thing is going to be a dealbreaker for any potential Linux user who doesn't have a Linux guy or gal in their friend group to set them straight. The more things like this are streamlined and people are guided into the correct paths, the more I believe this problem will go away, and I do believe we're getting there. It's just gonna take a long time before things are truly there, unless something like, say, Microsoft pulling a fast one and the world recoiling in horror to the point that even businesses start considering not using Microsoft products and services, happens. The future looks bright for the Linux desktop, even if we're not quite there yet.
Part number the fifth - RFC
As I was finishing this article, I made a request for comments from all our main characters in this story, to make sure that I hadn't missed anything important. First I asked them straight, and then I gave them a copy of this article so they could read it and hopefully be reminded if there was anything.
From our laptop friend
They were kind enough to provide some corrections to this article, but beyond that, felt that the article covered their experience well.
From our desktop friend
They were so kind as write several paragraphs worth of thoughts on their migration to Linux. Here are their thoughts in full, lightly copy-edited:
My experience with Linux started as if both on a bumpy road and as a smooth walk in the park at the same time. On some levels it was the best experience in the world, I finally had an OS that worked! We didn’t have much time to actually check that everything worked as it should when I first installed, so it was exciting getting home to see if everything was cooperating. The first thing we noticed was that Linux and Razer were not best of friends, at least not when it came to my headset and sound. I was stuck with mono sound until my Telaneo fixed it for me with his magic hands, which was a small side quest. I also experienced that the sensitivity on my mouse was hard to keep track of. The software I got to work with Linux didn’t actually change it, and was kinda useless in that sense. It didn’t really matter though, since I had planned to buy a new mouse (the same type as Telaneo's) in the future anyway. The old one was freezing up and disconnecting all the time, so Linux probably just saved me from more irritation on that front. The part I probably enjoyed most from The Transfer™ to Heaven was the BOOKS!!! I downloaded so many books that the websites blocked me for a period for downloading too many.
It has been an interesting trip though. There are a lot of new things to learn, and a lot of different things and ways do to stuff, which I’m slowly figuring out. The newest experiment was getting hibernate to work, the only thing I actually miss from Windows. We got it to work for a while, but suddenly the button was gone. I’m not too bothered though! With how joyful this whole experience has been, I seriously can’t be bothered to care. I love this OS so much, and I will never regret switching.
I’ve also had a number of minor issues along the way. Audio on screen-sharing (Discord) didn’t work, but that was just Discord not supporting it, but magically got support after a couple of days. I’ve also experienced sound lag when I stream CS2, which I haven’t solved yet, but I don’t really care too much. It got a bit better when I turned of the hardware acceleration though. Geoguessr (the browser game) was also a bit laggy for a while. We cross-tested with Telaneo’s computer as well, and he too was lagging. This was solved with a simple user-agent switcher though and works perfectly fine now.
A new little update after yet another period of The Golden Age™. I suddenly one day had a problem with my boot sequence (grub?). For some reason it couldn’t get past the grub line thingy and actually launch the OS. This was funny since I couldn’t really pop on to Google and troubleshoot it myself, when my computer wouldn’t start properly. I then (ofc) called Telaneo on video so he could troubleshoot for me. As is typical for my luck the command lines also appeared on the one screen I have in portrait position, but in landscape format, so everything was sideways. 😂 We fumbled around a bit with it, but in the end it turned out to be as simple as just exiting the whole thing and everything launched as it was supposed to. He also fixed something in terminal to prevent it from happening again.
From our second desktop friend
Our second desktop friend had a few comments to make, as they hadn't made as many support requests to me as the others had.
Their wifi performed significantly worse than it did under Windows, with random dropouts and a poor connection being recurring themes while they were using it under Linux. This was fixed by getting a 10 metre cat-6 cable and using ethernet instead, which improved performance beyond what their wifi was capable of under Windows. Yet another reason to use ethernet, and yet another potential problem for those who don't have that option. Presumably the Windows driver for their wifi card gets more attention, such that obvious problems, such as drop-outs, are fixed, while the Linux driver only gets to the point where someone can conclude that it do be working, and no further testing is really made, with there not being enough people to complain about the problem for it to reach the relevant people, as well as those people already having their hands full and there not being enough of them to support every last chipset to as good a standard as Windows. It could also be a configuration problem, as I have seen some wifi cards being capable of performing well under Linux, but with horrible default settings, and figuring out the necessary tweaks is not an easy job, which shouldn't be necessary in the first place. Wifi is one of those few critical things that for the normies should Just Work™.
They use a drawing tablet and pen when playing osu!, and while it did work upon first install, it quickly regressed to not working for unclear reasons. The tablet is clearly connected and works fine in their desktop environment; the mouse moves just fine. But osu! sits there saying 'no tablet detected'. They used OpenTabletDriver on Windows, and the flatpak of it on Linux also can't see it. Given that it has worked fine before, and their tablet is known to be supported, this is probably a misconfiguration of some kind, but finding the source of that misconfiguration is not easy.
They really liked the Mint Software Manager. It has everything they need (after I set it to also show unverified flatpaks). It's easy to search, and since it integrates results from Flathub, it has most everything a casual user will need when looking for Linux alternatives to their Windows software. For them, it was mostly a case of:
- Search for alternative to Windows program X.
- Find alternative program
- Search for that program in Mint's Software Manager.
- Install.
- ???
- Profit.
Flathub and Mint's repos are also decently curated and not full of garbage, unlike Microsoft's whatever-the-fuck-it's-called, and even the mobile app stores at least to some extent. It also helps that it has a lot of useful software even at first glance, unlike Microsoft's whatever-the-fuck-it's-called, which barely has anything that's not an outright scam. I remember reading a funny anecdote about how someone migrated to Linux to get away from Microsoft, but then had a really tough time installing software, since they weren't using their distro's software manager or app store or whatever, specifically because they thought it was comparable to the Microsoft Store, that is, they thought it was filled with malware and scams and no actual useful software. An easy mistake to make, and thankfully an easy one to avoid by showing them that it is in-fact the primary way of installing software on Linux, with lots of good stuff available, but it's funny how Microsoft keep making things worse for themselves. When even the normies know to avoid it, it's really bad.
They made liberal use of ProtonDB to see if their games were compatible with Linux. I had found it to not be completely reliable, overestimating compatibility, but it definitely remains a useful pointer. And most things do in-fact work, barring the obvious but really annoying edge-cases like kernel-level anti-cheat being a no-go on Linux.
Streaming on Discord proved iffy for them. I had noticed this myself, but never to any extent worth mentioning. It worked as expected after sharing sound magically fixed itself, with only minor hitches and such, nothing I can't deal with. They, however, had problems with screen-tearing or artifacting when streaming, as well as the fact that sound wouldn't work when only sharing the application. The same applied to their mouse pointer, which wouldn't be captured, which is annoying when you want to point people to what you're talking about. Some of these problems only happen when sharing their screen, while others happen when sharing the application, so both are broken in their own way, and neither perfect.
R2ModMan worked great for them as a mod manager, specifically for Risk of Rain 2 and R.E.P.O.. I myself have been using Limo to mod Skyrim, so even modding seems to work fine on Linux, although the ground isn't as well trodden as it is on Windows.
Overall, they found Mint somewhat more difficult to navigate compared to Windows outside of any trivial use cases, mostly just due to being more familiar with Windows. Some basic understanding of Linux or computers in general, as well as patience, is required to go all in on Linux.
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