I think its just a bit of a crapshoot with hardware. I'm running Mint right now and I love it, but hardware support isn't perfect:
- My AMD zen4 CPU still isn't fully supported by Mint's shipping kernel (5.15.0-56). It works today (including sleep states). But it took a month or two to get a kernel which supported sleep states correctly. And I still can't see CPU or motherboard temperatures.
- My keyboard and mouse don't work over bluetooth. I think its the vendors' fault, but I bet they'd both work fine work on macos or windows.
- My speakers randomly get all garbled and weird sometimes. I've figured out running `sudo killall pulseaudio` fixes it (until next time).
- I like using Apple's "magic touchpad". But the driver is nowhere near as good as Apple's. Sensitivity is all wrong in linux. It registers accidental light touches as clicks sometimes, and it just feels janky. And application support for smooth scrolling is all over the place - some apps support it perfectly and others (Firefox, IntelliJ) interpret any tiny single pixel scroll on the touchpad as a multi-line scroll. I've reverted to using a traditional mouse.
That said, some things have been a delight. My old AMD 480 graphics card worked perfectly out of the box, with no configuration required. When I upgraded out my motherboard and CPU a few months ago, the computer booted just fine with no reconfiguration or anything. It just took it all in stride. (I've still never seen windows handle that so well.)
I'm not surprised some people have no problems with desktop linux. But YMMV.
I run Linux mint as my daily machine. It just works? I have yet to find a substantive issue with it (other than video gaming, but that doesn't really count for most people's use).
I've been using Linux Mint Cinnamon for years, doing mostly programming, and honestly I've encountered way less issues than with Windows. Maybe it's because I'm using old hardware. I'm very satisfied with the experience as it is by default, not much need for customization or tinkering in my case.
Idk about your experiences but I've been using Linux Mint for over a year now and it's just been working smoothly out of the box (better than Windows even). The only part where I had some problems initially were graphics drivers but that's only because I messed with them unnecessarily.
I've just started maining LInux on the desktop (Mint, specifically) and am enjoying it.
Bluetooth drops out from my headphones once in a while, I can't find decent open software to control the fans in the machine, and getting sound passthrough to work from an audi o input had to be done via the commandline, but apart from that it's been an ok experience.
I'll note that I'd previously given the latest Ubuntu a go, but the UI/WM is a complete and utter mess. Mint is much cleaner.
Mint works consistently for me now. Of course, there were fixes I had to implement myself. But I get to decide my own upgrade cycle, and can always timeshift everything back (like System Restore). The OS convergence of features are high, so differences are small today. Hopefully Pulseaudio and such stuff that often break can become better.
Yes I've been struggling with the latest Mint, 50% of the time on wakeup I just get a black screen and no responsiveness. I've had dual-screensaver issues, incoorect monitors etc. Really makes it feel hackish.
Except when it doesn't? I had all kinds of frustrations with Mint on a 2019 X1 Carbon which had some newfangled digital microphone. Ubuntu 20.04 worked out of the box. There were a bunch of other frustrations too. Bluetooth never worked right. The resolution kept resetting to the display native 4k mode instead of the 1080p I set it to which caused all other kinds of display bugs when switching back
I can see that Mint could be nice though. On a desktop, running hardware a few years old.
Linux Mint have been my daily driver for over a year and I see much less issues with it then I had with Win8.
I play games in steam, draw stuff, I even have working VR (HTC Vive), everything works just fine or even with less problems then in win (like bluetooth devices, for example)
Here's my anecdata after recently attempting to move permanently from Windows to Linux Mint:
* No logitech mouse support = severely disabled experience. I can't use any of the extra mouse buttons in the way I want on my Performance MX. And yes I did spend several hours trying to get it to work but it seems that the button mapping works only for keyboard commands and even that I couldn't make work. And never could make the mouse wheel move at what I consider to be fast enough. Very frustrating.
* While it supposedly exists, I could not make f.lux work. This essentially prevents me from using my computer at all at night.
* The ridiculous amount of times I have to type in my password (and use sudo) is really user unfriendly. Yes I'm sure there's way to disable this or even use root but the average non developer user is going to be hugely turned off by this.
* Node is really, really good on Mint. A full stack MERN/gulp application took 10 seconds(!) to yarn. On windows it would take 2-3 minutes. And chrome just seems much faster for dev. While working on a multiplayer game with 5 windows open (MultiLogin) all of which are connected to livereload, it is about twice as fast for reloads vs windows and a bit faster than macos/macbook pro. Gulp itself takes about 20 seconds to start up on windows the first time is instant here.
So in the end there's just no way I'm going to use Mint for every day use i.e. websurfing and of course gaming. I'll switch to it when I want to do serious heads-down dev.. maybe. To be honest the fact that its a bit faster for node probably won't be a good enough incentive to go through the hassle of setting up a dual boot.
>I've heard of people having lots of issued with Mint too
It's based on Ubuntu, so probably shares some of the same problems, especially when it comes to driver support.
Network and audio hardware is most often the main culprit, lots of no-name brands out there that mobo makers toss on to keep costs down, unlike CPU's and GPU's where there are only a few well known, well-supported options.
Same here, I have a Linux Mint desktop set up for my kids and overall I'm happy with the performance. It hasn't been 100% smooth though. In particular updating from Mint 17 to Mint 18 took some effort to get things working properly. Maybe proprietary Nvidia drivers were to blame, but it didn't Just Work until I sat down with it and sorted things out.
Yeah, but I find the Mint experience often more polished vs Ubuntu. In Ubuntu (at least in previous versions) there was always a bug somewhere that annoyed me, in Mint it's almost flawless.
The experience is dismal, even basic crap still doesn't work. I installed mint a couple of months ago (clean install), right after booting, the mouse doesn't work. THE PS2 MOUSE DOESN'T WORK!!!
It's fine for servers, but for a desktop, you have to be masochistic to want to use it, unless the only thing you use it for is to build software.
Mint has been the best distro for me so far (Mainly a windows user). the only gripe I have are the default system sounds in mint, they can be a little harsh. This is a small OOBE complaint.
It's nice to see Mint acknowledged. Ubuntu stuff usually runs fine, but official support is a plus compared to the usual attitude of letting the user sort it out.
I'm in a similar place, with Mint on a desktop and laptop for some time now. The real issue is never on the desktop: it always runs fine. However, the laptop seems to have developed driver issues over time, to the point where the trackpad requires special care and feeding... The little nooks and crannies of laptop drivers remain the single reason I think Linux is so hard to get right on laptops. The successful users I know all have Thinkpads.
Yeah, there has to be a better way of rolling out hardware support without making the distro unstable for old hardware..
Even with Jammy/Mint I'm having to use mainline installer to get support for a 2022 laptop that would otherwise suffer insufferable keyboard input lag and issues.. Something the Mint community tries to scare people away from.
I just installed the latest version of Linux Mint and the default graphics card driver had a bug that caused my entire system to freeze after a few hours of inactivity.
To be able to replace Apple or Microsoft, not only do you need user friendliness for how the machine works, but you also need to get rid of all the miscellaneous tech and configuration problems that crop up.
As I understand it, Linux laptop sleep/suspend/hibernate is still a big PITA.
And that's the reason why I love Linux. Even though I complain a lot about several of its shortcomings, I am a happy user. I just recently installed Mint it in a 2011 Macbookpro , and it is great.
- My AMD zen4 CPU still isn't fully supported by Mint's shipping kernel (5.15.0-56). It works today (including sleep states). But it took a month or two to get a kernel which supported sleep states correctly. And I still can't see CPU or motherboard temperatures.
- My keyboard and mouse don't work over bluetooth. I think its the vendors' fault, but I bet they'd both work fine work on macos or windows.
- My speakers randomly get all garbled and weird sometimes. I've figured out running `sudo killall pulseaudio` fixes it (until next time).
- I like using Apple's "magic touchpad". But the driver is nowhere near as good as Apple's. Sensitivity is all wrong in linux. It registers accidental light touches as clicks sometimes, and it just feels janky. And application support for smooth scrolling is all over the place - some apps support it perfectly and others (Firefox, IntelliJ) interpret any tiny single pixel scroll on the touchpad as a multi-line scroll. I've reverted to using a traditional mouse.
That said, some things have been a delight. My old AMD 480 graphics card worked perfectly out of the box, with no configuration required. When I upgraded out my motherboard and CPU a few months ago, the computer booted just fine with no reconfiguration or anything. It just took it all in stride. (I've still never seen windows handle that so well.)
I'm not surprised some people have no problems with desktop linux. But YMMV.
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