Did the same for my parents earlier this year. I downloaded a Windows 10 theme for Mint so it felt and looked more Windowsy for them.

It’s been great for them. One piece of advice, make sure you sit down with your grandma after installing it and have her do everything she normally does on Windows.

Make sure all the shortcuts and bookmarks are in the same spots and called the same things.

lol, fixed it now :P

For me, Mint offers everything good about Ubuntu without any of the bad.

That being said, I don’t hate it, but I also don’t recommend it ever to people. The pitfalls that can come up from Snaps, plus the default layout of Gnome, are reasons why a brand new Linux user might struggle with it unless they are already somewhat of a techie.

For ex-windows users like my parents who aren’t tech savvy, I just install Mint, set up their shortcuts and desktop icons, and away they go, happy little penguins.

You could confiscate 99.9% of the wealth of the top 100 richest people in the world, and they would all still be wealthier than 99% of the world’s population.

There’s the enshitification we know and love! Freetube for desktop and Tubular for mobile is how I’ve been watching YT for over a year now, and it’s great!

Awesome

Been 100% Linux for over 3 years. All my servers, my fancy gaming PC, my personal laptop, my side business laptop, my work laptop, my Steam Deck, all Linux.

No dual boot, I have a single Windows VM on my work laptop to test Windows apps because my workplace is a Windows shop.

I don’t miss Windows even a little bit. I am so much more free and enjoy computing way more now.

Yeah babyyyy! All the way to the floor!!!

Good.

I love Mint, it has become my workhorse distro. I use LMDE on my personal business laptop. I switched my parents from Windows 10 to Mint earlier this year, and it’s been great on their very old and low power desktop.

Cinnamon is not the prettiest or slickest DE, but damn if it ain’t the most stable DE I’ve used.

I’m a KDE fanboi myself, but when I spin up a machine that I need to just work in a super dependable way and is no muss, no fuss, I usually choose Mint with Cinnamon.

Damn it, why do I want it so bad??

If you eat meat, the breakfast crunch wrap supreme is made my angels.

If Taco Bell ever releases a Breakfast crunch wrap supreme with impossible sausage, I will eat it 5 days a week and balloon to 400 pounds.

when they are available, the nacho fries are incredible also.

Depends on the pizza. If you are eating a traditional pizza just like mamma mia made back in the old country, skip the Tabasco.

If you’re eating greasy sloppy pizza from a dirty little place called, “Joe’s” load up that Tabasco and the chili flakes, and add some of that artificial Parmesan powder that comes in little packets!

Most people don’t care, they won’t even notice sadly. They will walk into Best Buy, get swarmed by 3 sales people, tell them, “I’m looking for a new laptop.”

And the sales people will take them straight over to the laptop section which is all filled with the latest Microsoft swill and sell them one of them.

There will be no discussion of privacy, no discussion of Microsoft’s recent scandals, no discussion of alternatives. They will parrot whatever Microsoft’s talking points are, “it’s safe, encrypted, secure, fast, etc…”

If we want consumers to care, we have to reach them before they buy their new upgrade. This often starts with your family and close friends. You need to inform them, you need to tell them there is a better way.

This is how I got my parents switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint. They were asking me to help with their computer problems, (10 year old computer that was pretty low-power when it was new.)

I told them that Windows 10 was EoL next year and their hardware was way to old to upgrade. I said that I could put on Linux which would be much faster, more secure and private, wouldn’t require a new computer, and would do everything they needed. My mom was nervous, but I went over everything her and my dad used it for, (browsing, email, Word and printing, PDF reading, Turbo Tax, and Spotify.)

Only slight pain point was getting my mom onto Turbo Tax cloud. But she is slightly tech savvy, so it wasn’t too bad.

They’ve been on it for about 9 months now and it works great. Their computer is much snappier, and I don’t have to worry about them getting viruses, (my dad is 0% tech savvy and will click on almost any link he sees.)

So you’re a user that tinkers with your system, breaks it, can’t get it working correctly again…and that’s Linux’ fault?

And you consider yourself an example of a “regular user?”

It’s pretty incredible how well it works. I installed Arch with Plasma 6 on a 2015 T450 thinkpad and it was so crazy how fast everything was.

Felt like a brand new machine, almost a decade old, and bottom of the line specs for that model, but it still ran cutting edge Linux like it was meant to.

My other desktops are even older, but it’s the same with Debian 12 and Plasma, they are super responsive and stable. It’s pretty wild to see a desktop that’s over 10 years old feel smoother and snappier than Windows 11 on a 3 year old, enterprise grade laptop.

As an IT guy who has worked at a bunch of companies with exclusively Windows environments, Windows absolutely doesn’t “just work.”

I can’t begin to list all the random problems I have with Windows in my day-to-day job.

Driver problems, hardware compatibility problems, software crashes, OS freezes, random configuration resets, networking issues, performance issues, boot issues, etc etc etc…

New hardware causes problems, old hardware causes problems.

Almost everything is harder to troubleshoot on Windows than Linux.

I have several test servers set up at my current workplace, they are old decommissioned desktops that are 10+ years old. I use them for messing around with Docker, Ansible, Tailscale, and random internal company resources like Bookstack and OpenProject.

All run Linux, all are a head and shoulders more stable and functional than the majority of much newer and more powerful Windows machines at our company.

Debian, Mint, CatchyOS, they all are far more dependable than most of the Windows machines. They install fast, on any hardware I use, decade+ old Quadro cards and Intel CPUs, doesn’t matter, they all run nearly perfect. And the rare times I have an issue, it’s so much faster to figure out and fix in Linux.

I switched over one of the computers in our department to Linux Mint. Threw it on a random laptop I had laying around. I did it just as an experiment, told the guy who was working on it to let me know if he had any issues using it. I planned on only having it out there for a week or two… It’s been 4 months and he loves it.

He says it’s super fast and easy to use, he doesn’t have any problems with it. Uses Libre office for documents, Firefox for our cloud-based ERP system, Teams and Outlook as PWAs installed on Mint.

I use Ansible to push updates to it once a week, Timeshift in case something ever breaks. It’s great. About a month ago I told him I would probably need to take it back because technically, it wasn’t an official deployment and the experiment I was doing had long since passed. He put up such a fuss that I decided to just let it stay. I’ll probably clone the drive, put it on his old tower, and take the laptop back, and let him keep using it indefinitely.

Linux absolutely isn’t perfect, no technology is. But in my years of experience with both, Linux on the whole is far less finicky, and far easier to fix when it breaks.

well, that didn’t last long lol

Glass has the best taste too, because it is almost totally chemically inert, you don’t get the odd flavor changes that you do with aluminum cans or plastic bottles.

I hate these companies, they are the end game of hyper-consumerist Capitalism. Cheap junk, made largely with slave labor, with extremely toxic chemicals that destroy our environment, most of which gets dumped after a few uses in landfills to slowly rot and leak micro plastics into everything.

DO NOT BUY FROM THEM!!!

Influencers on TikTok doing $200 haul videos with huge boxes of this swill for their addicted viewers, it’s horrific.