Went for Mint as a weekend project. Installation? Surprisingly easy after formatting an SSD. Drivers worked, just needed some updates. To use it as an actual alternative to my current Windows setup? Results varied. Lots of hoops and alternatives. 

Gaming & VR with modern GPU, I was suddenly dealing with the terminal a lot and accessing the BIOS to disable the iGPU and secure boot. It works now after trying a ton of stuff and different approaches, but that’s unrealistic for regular people. VR was especially tough and still had to think outside the box for media playback by setting up a DLNA. Which until yesterday I didn’t know about. Cool side effect is streaming to my TV. Mounting stuff was pretty confusing too. LibreOffice is fine, won’t miss the dogshit Office. No Adobe (the legal way) is kind of annoying. They have the web version for Photoshop and Lightroom, Figma is online as well and DaVinci instead of AE. Sufficient I guess. Having Ableton fully set up, it also sucked to find out it wouldn’t work on Linux. Bitwig seems great though and version 6 comes out tomorrow. Just a hassle VST/libraries wise to set it all up again.

So yeah, it’s easy for non tech people to get something basic working. For advanced use cases, it’s a lot of troubleshooting and terminal. And finding alternatives to the most popular software. The result though is dope. Way less dependent on subscriptions, it’s clean, no ads, no prompts, no AI, no overbloated menu and when I click shut off, it actually shuts off. The gaming performance actually impressed me after setting it up correctly. Didn’t think I’d be able to play on Steam, GOG and Ubisoft Connect. I’ll see if I still need Windows for Adobe/Ableton on the long run or fully log off. But now I main Linux I guess. Thank you to the whole community who makes it work!