25+ yr Java/JS dev
Linux novice - running Ubuntu (no windows/mac)
It’s mostly The Sims with mods along with whatever meme games she’s hearing about on YouTube. There’s no concern about rootkit anti-cheat or anything, and so far my experience has been almost anything on Steam will run in Linux without having to do anything. She’ll run into performance issues with her current hardware before she hits any games that aren’t compatible.
This is a great suggestion. Especially the not breaking it part.
My daughter is very Linux curious but she’s not going to want to learn anything about it. She just wants to play games and chat with friends. I’ll probably switch her when I upgrade and pass my current computer down.
I use Mint. I got used to it very quickly. I have a harder time going back and forth between that and my MacBook. I’ve used Ubuntu. It’s fine also.
It’s been so long since I’ve used Fedora that my opinion would be outdated, but I observe it has many adherents, which it wouldn’t if it was terrible.
I really like Mint, but if you’re looking for something that screams “not windows” I guess you could look elsewhere. I’m not a big fan of “how the fuck do I…” and for the most part Mint has worked as I’d expect.
What if I develop software all day long and just don’t feel like an OS I need to fuck around with? I feel like Mint is great for anyone who just doesn’t want to fuck around with their own computer. Every game I want to play works. Every productivity tool I want is there. Any software I develop works fine. Anything I want to serve on my local network works fine. I click the update once a week or so and it just works.
I feel like people scoff at Mint because you don’t need to know anything about computers to use it, but that’s actually a hell of a feature even if you do know.
Mate, the great thing about Linux is it isn’t just one thing. I love Mint, but I think it’s great that people who like different things can get what they like, too. In fact I want those folks not to use it. If everyone used Mint, it would just become another Windows (or maybe RedHat would be a better parallel).
Having options means everyone is pushed to improve. Consolidation means ossification.
That said, Mint rocks and people should use it—if they want.
Probably depends on the speed of your usb pen and port. If you know for a fact that everything USB side is 3.1, USB will be faster. Otherwise eMMC will be faster. If everything is USB3.1 gen 2, USB looks to be around 3x as fast. Gen 1 is about 25% faster.
What I found in a quick search:
If any part of the USB chain is 2 or lower, it’s slower.
I’ll keep these thoughts in mind for the future. I’ve yet to try Linux on a laptop in any capacity and some of those concerns are not anything I’ve had to give thought to. I do use a pair of UHD monitors but not noticed lack of scaling supposty but that could be because they are the same DPI or maybe I’m just so used to scaling issues in every other OS I’ve internalized them.
Ubuntu isn’t bad by any means, Mint just feels more comfortable to me. I really should experiment with some other distros but as I said I don’t turn on my computer to fuck with things that are working for me. Most of my experience with anything but Ubuntu and Mint is two decades ago.
I don’t really get the whole Wayland vs X11 but I think I did try installing Wayland on Ubuntu once and it was… unfamiliar. I was troubleshooting an issue that turned out to be a bad ram stick and it left me with a negative impression of just about everything I tried because everything would crash so damn often (go figure), so I probably need to try that stuff again.
I did install /home to a separate partition to make distro hopping easier and then just… never did.
Mint is Ubuntu-based and I find it very natural to transition to from Windows. More natural than Ubuntu, despite me being slightly more familiar with Ubuntu from work.
I’ve never found it to suck, but I don’t get on my computer to fuck around with the OS and make things just exactly the way I like them. I automate some scripts to save myself typing for things I commonly do, and I do gaming, browsing, and development. I’ve yet to find Mint wanting. It makes more sense to me than macOS.
That’s just a static image, mate. You need speed.gif
In the hands of an expert you can get expert level results from tools like ChatGPT. In the hands of a novice you get novice level results. What a succinct way to put that, thanks! You probably saved me a paragraph every time I try to explain such a simple concept.
It’s the same reason that you have to pay more to stream videos without ads…
I’ve had good luck keeping the home partition and just reinstalling the OS. Set it up with the same user name and home directory and you’re done.