My time with Linux has been equal parts amazing and absolutely infuriating. Linux Mint is NOT usable out of the box. Here have been my issues:

Nvidia GPU - Trying to figure out how to get the drivers working was a nightmare with ten million different people giving different advice on how to get it to work. Eventually I was able to get them signed and it seems to work

Bluetooth - Another nightmare. Bluetooth is terrible on Linux. It took hours to get it even remotely working ok, but I still don’t think it’s perfect.

Compatibility - Some things just straight up don’t work for seemingly no reason. None of my controllers work with Steam, no matter how many countless hours I’ve spent troubleshooting.

And that is where I am disappointed. Troubleshooting Linux issues sucks. There are so many people giving their opinions and all of them are different and most don’t work.

When Linux is working right it is amazing, and I love it. But right now, it just isn’t as good as Windows and extremely infuriating more often than not. Guess I am going to switch back and give Bill Gates all of my info again. Really fucking disappointing

Update: Controllers seem to work after forcing compatibility mode in Steam. No idea why that was off or why Steam was essentially hijacking my controller, but it seems to work now. For everyone that helped thank you.

  • muhyb@programming.dev
    4·
    13 hours ago

    Normally I don’t suggest distro-hopping for newbies but sometimes it’s a good idea to try a couple distro before settling in. Since there are tons of different hardware, some distros offer a better out of the box solution for some hardware.

    Try openSUSE Leap for instance. Also someone suggested trying KDE Plasma on Mint, so try that first. It might alone solve your problems.

    By the way, if your need for Windows can be covered on a virtual machine, go that way instead of dual boot. Windows really can mess with your bootloader.

    • hartofwave@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 hours ago

      As a daily OpenSUSE user on both my work and personal machine I’m not sure if I would recommend for a first timer, I feel like it makes a lot of assumptions as how much the user knows

      • muhyb@programming.dev
        1·
        58 minutes ago

        They just need to learn how YaST works and it’s done mostly. They won’t even need terminal for anything. I installed openSUSE Leap on my sister’s PC and she’s using it without any problems for quite some time (Though gotta admit installing Xbox controller driver was a hassle, maybe it’s not like that for Tumbleweed). She previously used Manjaro, Pop!_OS, and Mint and she had problems with all. Leap is pretty much perfect. (Let me put nazar amulet here 🧿)

    • thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe
      4·
      13 hours ago

      While KDE plasma can be made to work on Mint (I’ve done it as a PoC) it is NOT something a beginner should be doing because a) it’s an unsupported config and b) you need to pull in non mint repositories to get the plasma files, and then you’ll be fiddling around to get it working again when an update breaks something.

      If Mint has been troublesome then popOS ubuntu and Fedora would be better choices.