My experience with Linux (mint) for 3 months

I have been using Linux as my only daily driver on my gaming computer and Macbook for almost 3 months now and I wanted to talk about it.

I chose Linux mint as my distribution for a few main reasons being :

I find Linux mint easier to use than Windows for many cases. You can install most of the apps directly through the app store with the distro maintained repos (some are outdated sadly) or Flatpak which make every app isolated from each other which can be good for some people, a thing that windows’ app store will never be able to replicate.

For my Macbook I tried many distro before installing mint (like fedora, pop OS) and at the time I really didn’t want to touch the terminal, problem is many of these distro needed at least some commands to enable wi-fi drivers. With mint the installer had connection, and after rebooting in the installed OS, I was able to install the feared broadcom drivers by connecting my installation USB key and opening the driver app without any connection. The process was similar to install the Nvidia driver on my gaming PC without connecting the USB key since I had connection out of the box.

I didn’t run on many problems except for installing windows games like sims 4 or World of Warcraft (I tested it at the time) were I had to tinker with Lutris settings (Lutris is an app that make easier to install non steam windows games on Linux) because the launcher refused to show the game after clicking on the button. Eventually, it worked after a few tries and without modifying any settings.

For steam games the process was really simple and flawless. I had to go into the game settings and enable the proton compatibility layer. I think I have some chance that all my games were compatible out of the box with proton, knowing that some games have problems mainly with anti cheat software. The steam deck was really a blessing for the Linux gaming community because more developers test their games to make them compatible with the deck and so with Linux.

I bought a nextcloud instance to sync all my files, contact, calendar, etc between my iPhone/iPad and Linux computers and I have to say that the synchronization is perfect. I had to add caldav and cardav account to my iPhone settings, and connect my nextcloud with the Online Accounts setting on Linux mint, and install the app to both to auto-sync pictures and files. It was really simple to put in place and I feel much better knowing that everything is synced and out of apple or google hands.

The only app that was really a pain to make work was Discord, it have many problems reported many times by the community, but discord never fixed them, so I eventually installed Vesktop (don’t report to discord please).

Overall daily driving Linux mint was a much easier and flawless experience than I thought, and I had more fun using it than Windows or MacOS. I remember that I tried it back in 2020 with Ubuntu but never really daily driving it because it had more problems back at that time. Linux have gone trough major changes and is now much easier to use.