I only just switched to Linux this past week and I use Mint. It was suggested to me by someone here on lemmy. It was easy to set up, customize, and get all my stuff working on it. I have World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Elden Ring and a few other games all working on it. The only issue, and right now it’s a minor one, I’m having is the 535 nividia drivers can cause random stutters/lag every now and then but nothing major.

My point is for people like me who are new to linux and don’t want to get overwhelmed I think Mint is great. I know eventually i’ll change to a different more “advanced” distro, right now I have my eye on CachyOS, but I don’t think I’m there quite yet to confidently install it.

it was the nvidia 535 driver. I switched to nouveau and that solved the stuttering/lag. but made gaming suck. so then I tried installing 550 drivers and that just outright bricked my system, recovered and went back to the 535. works for gaming so I’ll just tolerate the stuttering I guess.

So either use Nvidia’s driver and deal with the stuttering or don’t and can’t game. great.

and since I do game I take it that it’s not advised?

yup after posting I did a bit of reading. It was the nvidia driver. switched to the nouveau driver and problem solved. sorry still new to all this.

Mint is great, been using it for the past couple days and I’ve been able to get Elden Ring, FFXIV, WoW, Balatro, and FNV with a bunch of mods running on it very smoothly. all very easy to install. Steam games worked just like Windows for installing. WoW took a bit of extra steps but nothing difficult to do. Love Mint, it’s so easy to use. It’s like “hmm I wonder if I could customize or do this on it” and with Mint the answer 9 out of 10 times is yes.

I just want to follow up and say “thank you so much!” I took the dive and partioned out space for Linux Mint. played around with it for a bit and said “fuck it, I love this thing” and did a fresh install on my laptop deleting windows 11.

Holy crap this thing has improved my laptop so much. it’s so damn fast, boots up quicklly and believe it or not my battery lasts longer now. I just spent hours customizing how it looks, it’s fun, it’s great.

Also I was easilly about to install steam, elden ring, Final Fantasy XIV and even World of Warcraft and they all work, and run, better on this machine now.

WoW was actually pretty easy to get going in all honesty. Instead of installing WoW directly on Litrus instead you install Battle.net via Litrus and it simply does the rest, EVEN going that route allowed me to install other blizzard games like Hearthstone without doing anything special.

My only beef right now is I’m having issues customizing the panel like I want. Tried installing polybar and got in a bit over my head with i3wm but I’m sure I’ll figure that stuff out soon. Got a cool app launcher going that makes things so much easier, even changed the shell and got zsh going which is great.

I love it, absolutely love it and won’t be going back to Windows ever. I imagine once I get a handle of Mint I might switch to a different distro like Arch (I love the look of that and how people have customized it) but for now this is perfect.

awesome, I’m familiar with Dalamud, I’ll give Mint a shot when I have some time. thank you very much.

I’m a total Linux noob though so should I be fairly good to go with Mint?

I use Revi. fresh install then immediately install Revi, gets rid of all the bloatware, copilot, onedrive, edge, etc.

I’d switch to a linux install but I just don’t have to time to figure out which is the right one for me, installing it, configuring it, etc. I wish I did, wish I had the time to play around with it but I simply don’t. (I mean maybe someone smarter than me can tell me a linux distro that will work with world of warcraft, steam, final fantasy xiv, etc) so I have to settle with win 11+revi

yes. when you get the the part of the installation that requires an internet connection just hit shift+f10 to open a command prompt and type OOBE\BYPASSNRO and then you can finish setting up without an internet connection.

I’ve always done this instead of the bypass email thing. THEN once you install win11 do yourself a favor and install Revi. totally makes the OS 10x better. removes all the bloatware, edge, copilot, ads, etc.

yup, I use Vivaldi and will never use another browser. has everything I need right in it. built in ad blocker and tracking blocker, integrated with the Fediverse, insanely customizable, and it’s lighter than firefox. I like firefox but i find it to be a ram hog.