My Transition to Linux (LMDE6) from Windows 11

Hey, what’s up?

Today, I wanted to share my transition from Windows to Linux.

If you’re thinking about switching to Linux or if you’re an experienced Linux looking for a fresh perspective.

Then this post could be for you.

Let’s go right in.

Firstly, I have to say that I am not a complete Linux newbie. I learned computer science and I use Linux many times before. After only a few days, I thought a lot about switching to Windows because I ran into a bunch of issues, obviously. The biggest issue that I got was that I had to install manually the Nvidia driver using the terminal.

DISTRO

The distro that I choose for now is LMDE6. I was initially hesitant between Linux Mint Normal edition, Ubuntu, Debian. I wanted something that is quite user-friendly and solid, where I could settle to do my work and a bit of gaming.
The options that I was considering were:

• Debian: because it is known to be rock-solid, but still needs some manual tweaks.
• Ubuntu: I’ve read that Ubuntu/Canonical made a bunch of mistakes with snaps. Now to be honest, I don’t know much about snaps, I’m just repeating what I’ve heard.
• Linux Mint Original Edition: I’ve had experience with Linux Mint, but I still wanted a bigger challenge.

After some research, I found Linux Mint Debian Edition, which I think is an in-between for all these distros. It has the user-friendliness of Mint and the rock solid of Debian, and it is still giving me a bit of a challenge.

AFTER INSTALLATION

After installing LMDE6, I obviously updated my distro which went pretty well and installed my favorite apps.

The most important ones are:

1. Free and open source productivity apps like Gimp, Thunderbird, Inkscape, etc.
2. Google Chrome and Brave as a flatpak.
   Now, I’ve had a bit of issue with that. My work require a lot of drag and drop of files with the web browsers. Mostly images, videos, copy-paste etc.
   I’ve learned that flatpak are pretty cool because they can be installed on many distros. The main issue is that they are isolated, self-contained and they couldn’t read my files. So I had to change the permissions to make it work.
3. Davinci Resolve, it is my favorite video editing application. To make it work, I had to install manually the Nvidia driver because it is not available in the software manager of LMDE. That was a bit painful, but I managed to do it.
4. Steam & Scrcpy, for my gaming needs, these days, I mostly play warcraft rumble and smaller indie games. I installed Scrcpy which allows me to mirror my phone on my computer so that I can record the game. I also installed Steam and Proton so that I can play video games in the future. So far, I haven’t played any, but it’s there if I want to.

CONCLUSION

Most normal people don’t care about:

• Installing their own drivers.
• Errors with updates.
• Using the terminal. I think the terminal is powerful, but it’s a skill in itself, and I don’t think most people want to deal with that.
• Free & open source. Yes, for a programmer, it’s cool that you can go and look at the code. It also shows some transparency. But most normal aren’t going to look at the code. For me, I know how to read coding, but I’m not interested in the code. Now, imagine normal non-technical people.

They just need for things to work that fulfill their needs.

So that’s pretty much it, I hope this post was helpful to you. If it was, you could consider following me on social media and if you have any thoughts or comments, you can leave them below because your thoughts could help future readers.

I hope this helps, peace!