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1. Tim 🎮 (timixretroplays@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 17:20:19 JST Tim 🎮

   Time to check out #Linux to see if it could conceivably replace Windows 10 on my home desktop. I'm installing Linux Mint - the "you should try this one" consensus, from what I could see - on my new little Acer PC, rather than a VM or a live session on my actual PC, to get a feel for what a completely fresh start will feel like.

   This won't be written as a guide to follow - this will be my first impressions as I set this up for myself. Suggestions and troubleshooting tips welcome as I go along. 🧵

   • Tim 🎮 (timixretroplays@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 17:20:12 JST Tim 🎮

     in reply to

     Also the moment this thing was on my wifi network, it'd found and set up my printer. That's just as automatic as Windows, but the fact it also did this in the live session *while installing the OS* amuses me. A Linux live environment on a USB stick has so much more utility on its own than the Windows 10 installer does.

   • Tim 🎮 (timixretroplays@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 17:20:14 JST Tim 🎮

     in reply to

     Sound works with no fettling. Plugging my wired headphones in works as expected, and it was also a snap to pair a set of Bluetooth headphones and those work too.

     Youtube video performance is not great (either whatever tiny Intel GPU this has is worse than I thought, or there'll be a properietary driver I need to find and manually enable), but getting sound hooked up was totally fine - a relief, since Linux generally has (had?) a pretty bad reputation for this.

     Kuba Orlik repeated this.
   • Tim 🎮 (timixretroplays@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 17:20:16 JST Tim 🎮

     in reply to

     Display scaling was very easy to find, and it wasn't difficult to turn on the "experimental" fractional scaling so I could go more granular than 100% (too small) or 200% (too big). See, Windows? You don't need to make someone scroll a mile down to find these settings.

     It was also trivial to make things a bit less grey (I've gone for a sickly green theme, in honour of Acer). I have already entered my password more times than I would in a week on Windows - is this why people like Yubikeys?

   • Tim 🎮 (timixretroplays@digipres.club)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 17:20:17 JST Tim 🎮

     in reply to

     I've chosen Mint with the Cinnamon desktop. I liked XFCE when I tried it on a lower-power PC a very long time ago, and most of my Linux experience comes from Ubuntu in the Gnome 2 era, so those options are very nice to see from the start, but I specifically want to check out what Cinnamon has to offer.

     A couple of minutes in, and I like it - it's clean and fast, if a bit grey. This is a 4K screen, and it's not applied any scaling by default - checking that out will be step 1 after installation.