TL:DR – The Cinnamon desktop version of Linux Mint is a drop-in replacement for Windows. Any Windows user should be able to use it right out of the box. You can use it the same way that you used Windows and simply get back to doing the things that you bought your computer for in the first place.

My experience:

I didn’t really know where to start this post. I tried Linux once 10, maybe 15 years ago. While I was able to get it working, it took me several days to get it completely usable. But even as I got all the hardware working on my system, I still had to actually learn the intricacies of Linux itself. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had chosen the wrong distribution. Maybe my experience would have been better if I had known a little bit more before I installed it.

Fast forward to today. I have been hearing that Linux was ready for the desktop for several years now. After the time I wasted on it in years past, hearing that it was now ready for the desktop still wasn’t enough to get me to try it again. That changed one day when I had just a little bit too much aggravation trying to fix a problem with Windows that just wouldn’t be fixed.

Following the advice of a YouTube channel that I had absolutely no reason to believe, I chose Linux Mint as my distribution to try this time. Chris Titus of Chris Titus Tech was the channel that gave me all that wonderful advice.

I thought I would wait until I had enough experience and knew enough about Linux to begin to have valuable information to discuss. I expected to have to wrestle with Linux Mint to get it to work with all my hardware. Once installed, I expected to have a rather steep learning curve before I could actually get anything done on my computer. None of these things turned out to be accurate. What I found was that the transition to Linux was so easy that it was basically just put Linux Mint on my system and go to work.

There are a few things that I believe really helped me make the transition as easy as possible. And only one of those things had anything to do with Linux itself.

For starters, I have been using open source software on Windows as far back as I can remember. I hadn’t used Microsoft Office since college. It is just too expensive unless you have an absolute need for it. Instead, I used OpenOffice followed by LibreOffice. I never used Photo shop. I used Gimp and Krita. For programming, I always used the gcc and g++ compiler. While all of the software that I used worked quite well on Windows, there wasn’t any software that I used that would only work on Windows.

The one thing Linux had to do with making the transition easy was the distribution (distro) that I chose. Linux Mint (with the cinnamon desktop) was supposed to be an easy distro to work with coming from Windows. And it was more than I could have ever expected.

Why you ask? Well, if you can navigate and run Windows, you can navigate and run Linux Mint. You don’t ever have to use the terminal (command line) unless you just want to. All the necessary programs are already installed on the system, and getting most others that you might be interested in are actually easier than getting them on Windows. Linux Mint, as most distros now, come with a software manager for installing a plethora of programs that are already tested to work with that distro. Simply select the software that you want, click install, provide the password you created during setup, and your new software will be downloaded and installed. It’s that simple.

The last time I worked with Linux, such things weren’t available.

So Linux Mint is essentially a drop-in replacement for Windows. Coming from the Windows world, it is easy and intuitive.

On the same day that I installed Linux Mint – without a single problem – I was surfing the Internet with my favorite browser, writing in my favorite office suite, watching movies on Netflix, and generally getting on with my life.

Switching to Linux was both easy and painless. But even better than that, I have found that I am able to get more things done, and do them faster, than I could on Windows. Linux Mint, or Linux in general, might not be for everyone. Mostly it depends on what you need out of an operating system. But one thing that I can tell you is that if you think Linux might be something that is useful to you, it is absolutely as easy, powerful, and productive as any other operating system.