Mint and Me: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Linux

I first heard of Linux in 2004 or thereabouts. It was interesting, but I didn't have my own computer, so it wasn't like I could install it or anything. All the computers in the house belonged to my parents.

I had a classmate who used Linux in 2007. She had trouble using Stella, the program we were required to use for our mathematical-modeling class. It would crash frequently on her machine. So I didn't get Linux.

After Vista, Windows 7 and 10 were pretty darn good. So I didn't get Linux.

Then, support ended for Windows 10, and I heard some concerning things about Win11. I'd also used it on my work computer for 6 months and was very unimpressed. The Start menu defaults to only showing 3-4 programs, and you have to select each new program individually to get it to display on the default view--a really dumb change after 30 years of Start showing everything. Not only does it integrate genAI in all of the worst ways, but "Shut Down" no longer turns your computer off.

I have been using computers for nearly all of my 40 years. When you choose "Shut Down," it is supposed to shut down the OS, and in newer computers, it is supposed to also turn the machine completely off. Not "Sleep." Not some additional standby mode. OFF. No power. No Internet. OFF.

I use a laptop. A gaming laptop. If I leave it in a bag in sleep mode, it will get very hot. This is dangerous. I would rather gargle molten glass than have a laptop that cannot turn all the way off when I want it to.

And so, I needed to install Linux. A helpful friend gave me info on which instance of Linux was easiest for a beginner (Mint) and what to use to run Windows apps when I wanted (Wine). All without ever having to install Win11.

(That's right, kids, it took something as astonishingly bad as Windows 11 to get me to make the switch.)

Doing this was scary. I'd been using Windows computers almost exclusively since Win3.1. That's a long time to get used to one company's idiosyncracies.

I also discovered that since all of my flash drives were in storage, I'd need to buy a new one. A minor setback, but worth the trouble.

A boot USB is rather easy to make. The main problems were: 1) my Acer laptop won't allow me to disable RST, so I had to use the Debian version of Mint, and 2) I had to go online to find out which buttons to press for the boot and BIOS menus.

But these were only minor hiccups. With some help from the nice people at the Mint forum and Discord, I was able to get Linux Mint up and running on my PC.

So is it worth it? Well, for me it was. I now know that my OS itself isn't spying on me or pushing AI in my face, which is a biggie for me. I also can run all the software I could run on Windows, either by using Wine or installing the Linux versions. Printer drivers and other such things were also no problem.

Mint is also very easy to customize, and comes with LibreOffice pre-installed, so you can edit all your Office-created docs with no problem. Firefox also comes included with the OS, which I personally recommend as it's the only browser that isn't also spyware, plus the AI is very easy to disable.

I rarely even touch Win10 anymore, and that's only for the rare program that doesn't have a Linux version. (Yes, I left Win10 on my harddrive for dual-boot purposes.) I'm very happy with the change, and my only regret is that I didn't make my Linux partition bigger.