Linux

What laptop model?

Which laptop? We gotta know who to light up the pitch forks for.

I ran it for a while, and loved it. Cinnamon is sleek and feels polished. The installation is really fast and not bloated with garbage software.

Everything generally works, and the interface feels familiar.

It is Ubuntu/Debian under the hood, so compatibility with most software is good. Bleeding edge drivers may run into issues, but most of them work with a little fiddling.

It's worth a try. If nothing else toss it on a USB drive and give it a test drive.

It's rock solid and the desktop is very close to what people coming from Windows would expect. It's just a very good beginner distro, not necessarily something that more advanced users would choose.

For the most part, it works well without needing too much tinkering by the user. It's the Fisher Price My First Distro.

I tried it out with a 21.3 dualboot with Windows 11 and within 2 or 3 months I hadn't gone back to Windows other than to push files over. Sure, there were a few "learning opportunities" with tweaks or weird driver issues that were because of the particular hardware I'm using, but they were manageable. At this point I'm running 22.1 only on this machine.

The nice part is that being Ubuntu-based, if I run into a problem, I can search for both the more widely-documented Ubuntu version of the issue, or look for a Mint-related version. Claude does a great job with small-to-medium troubleshooting rather than me dig through forums. It's low-risk, low-work, high-reward.

It just works.

It's fantastically simple to set up, and it's (well it's linux!) fantastically powerful out of the box.

Easy peasy, just go. No need to fiddle to get it starting, good looking, and everything is there ready to be used.

Maybe all distros are like that today but they sure wasn't (even Mint wasn't before IDK maybe 18 IMO).

Step one: back up your data.

Step two: back up your data again.

i'd recommend getting a new SSD and installing Linux on that, then you can read your windows drive from Linux and copy over the files you need

Game files can be copied over the same way (obvs to different directories)

Bazzite is a lot less user friendly than mint in major ways. You get everything in mint as you do on Bazzite. I switched to Bazzite and it lasted 2 days before going back to mint. KDE is too deep unnecessarily so. Bazzite doesn't gain you much at all, at this point in time 3 years ago or so I'd not said the same thing. Mint is so polished for gaming shit usually just works now. It's not worth the hype, hassle. I've distro hopped and always came back to mint.

Source is I been there and done all that and more. Your not missing out on anything. Spin up a live USB and try it but believe me dearly it's not worth moving all your stuff reinstalling etc etc. Keep the work flow you got and master it. Other options have more maintenance and headaches.

You're not. If you're happy with what you've got, don't worry about it. Or join the great Linux tradition of distro hopping. But Mint gets a lot of praise for noobs, but much like Ubuntu there are much better distros out there. It just has name recognition at this point.

Mint is the best distro for people who need you to tell them the distro.

I use Mint on my Laptop but once Windows is done for I'm switching to:

1. Fedora, OpenSUSE, Secureblue, or something with KDE Plasma (security, stability, and ease of use priority)
2. Bazzite (for games, and dual-booted into to protect the security of my daily driver)
3. OpenBSD or something (so if something like Crowdstrike or Wannacry happens but for Linux, I have an alt)

I've never understood the fedora hype. The fact that it is adjacent to Redhat should be enough for people to want to stay away lol.

It's easier to install/use. It was my first distro before I switched to CachyOS for my latest build.