About a month ago I switched to Linux mint from windows 11.
The first thing I noticed was mint being faster and less bloated than windows 11.
I also liked having actual control over my settings without a corporation being able to undo them at will.
Another thing I noticed was not having to add extensions to text files to run as a program instead having the option in properties.
For certain windows programs and games I was able to use wine which was great because I like to use gamemaker 8.1 which was made before they added linux support.
I tried different wine environments starting with bottles then trying Steam proton and Lutris. With Lutris being the one I ended up using due to it being the only one that I could get to run every program I needed.
The ms paint alternative called drawing took some use to due to it automatically cropping out parts of the image outside of the line when pasting in a screenshot from the clipboard.
Although I do still miss ms paint but that is mostly nostalgia.
Fortunately there is an option to save the screenshot after taking it.
Migrating from windows I appreciate the SUPER key bringing up a menu on the bottom left which brings up some apps and the search bar. Which always searches on the OS unlike windows 11 which sometimes searches the internet instead.
Another detail I noticed is if you type paint or notepad in the search it brings up drawing and the text editor which is nice for people transitioning to Linux.
Being able to move the panel or add new ones was also a breath of fresh air from windows 11 making the task bar more restrictive.
Having the option of deb packages and flatpacks is really useful as well.
I also no longer have to worry about telemetry or microsoft trying to show me ads or pop ups.
TL:DR Mint is a way better experience than windows 11.
I am at around 3 weeks of using Mint as my daily driver, here are the issues I have had:
My Realtek sound card would not output 5.1 over S/PDIF. I worked on this quite a bit before finding a thread of someone with the same model having the same issue where even the guru over on the Mint forums couldn’t make it work. Solution was to just use the analog 5.1 out instead.
NVIDIA drivers are not amazing, especially running multiple displays with different resolutions. I get poor performance on my secondary monitors when running even moderate GPU tasks on my main display. In Windows I could watch a stream while playing a game in a borderless window, but in Mint I will get choppy framerate on the secondary displays. Further game performance is mostly good but I get occasional choppy performance in Proton games, even running via Lutris. None of this is a deal breaker, just mildly annoying.
This is less of an issue with Linux and more of me being a doofus, but I went to add my ntfs drives to fstab so they mount when I start up. I have done linux server admin professionally for 20 years, surely I can manage fstab - nope! A careless typo caused a startup failure. Fortunately it was easy to boot into maintenance mode and fix the issue.
The wonderful thing about living in a fully Linux world is that you can ditch NTFS. None of my computers or disks use it. It’s all ext4 or btrfs, and then ZFS on my media server.
I am in the process of doing exactly that, as I migrate data and applications into my Linux build I will repartition that space to ext4.