I bet the others already gave a lot of good advice, but there is one thing I wand to emphasize. The way in which you install software matters more on Linux than on any other operating system. You are meant to install it through your distros package manager, which you will most likely use through the software management GUI of your distro. Do not download any executables from websites directly, unless you are absolutely sure that:
They are made to work on your distro
They come from a trustworthy source
You have complete and up to date instructions on how to install them
Sometimes you might need to add additional repositories to your package manager, the same rules apply there. You might also run into things called Flatpaks and Snaps, these are universal package formats and another great option for installing software. Flatpaks work out of the box in a lot of distros. Number one rule there is to stick to things that are marked as verified, unless you have a good reason to trust them. These universal formats might be integrated in the GUI software manager too, this varies across distros.
If you follow those rules and keep your system updated, I don’t expect you will have much trouble with Linux.
I moved a lot during my life, living in the 4th country now, stayed in each one for about 15 years. Therefore I had to find friends from outside of school.
Here is a list of how I found them:
20's:
through my cousin, he was a coworker with my future best friend
started a band with a friend and his cousin, then we kicked out the friend and got a better drummer. Through the band we met a ton of other musicians while playing life and became friends with them
I joined a IRC channel about writing HTML and CSS, once a year we met in real life. Over time I became closer friends with some of them and we visited each other semi regularly. We still hang in the same chatroom, over 20 years ago. Half of us moved abroad, so we can't meet IRL that often anymore, but we are still friends
after moving countries I made a house warming party and asked my (now ex) wife's brother to invite his friends, I brought 50 liters of beer from Germany to this party in Sweden. This group became my core group of friends even after the divorce
30's:
work, I became very good friend with one of my coworkers, we even started a new company together because I was the only one who wasn't afried to try it
university, yeah normal
one uni friend pulled me in to the company he worked for where there were very many super cool guys and I became friends with many of them. Even now like 7 years after we don't work together we still meet regularly for grill parties, etc.
40's:
after another move, to South Korea, this one is tough because I still don't speak the language, but after we got our son, my fiancé opened a public group on the Internet for couples who have a small child and one of the parents is a foreigner. Many of them don't quite fit me as friends but we still meet some of them for play dates and so on so our friendship is growing
I was on the playground and there was another foreigner dad and we started talking about the kids and everything else, then we exchanges phone numbers and are meeting regularly and it's fun because conversations are easy, so he is the clothest thing to a friend I have here. But I have no idea how it would go if I need help in some bad situation, etc. because we didn't have any yet.
So yeah, this is kind of where I found my friends outside of school. Perhaps it can be some inspiration for you.
adjustable tension springs and locking mechanism for varied stick cap types (Xbox Elite series 2 does most of this but uses magnetic caps which would interfere with the TMR sticks so ball bearing connections or other option would be preferable)
Adaptive haptic triggers (PS5) which can be toggled to hair trigger mode via switches (Xbox Elite series 2)
multi-touchpad on face (PS5)
analog face buttons (DualShock 2 controller had this but only a few games utilized this… the best example was the PS2 era Metal Gear Solid games)
customizable “per-button” color assignment / micro OLED or e-ink screens so button graphics can be swapped (PBTails new controller does the per button RGB color assignment)
USB-C / 4 wired connectivity + charging
baseplate contact-charging (PS5 controller has these so you can set them on charging docks)
hot swappable battery pack + AA battery holder pack or ability to not have a battery on at all when connected via USB-C (Xbox 360 controller had this)
swappable non-magnetic Zinc-alloy faceplates (PBTails new controller has these)
removable back triggers with dedicated button assignments (like the Steam Deck’s L4/5 and R4/5 buttons; not just cloned face buttons like Sony and XBox do)
integrated microphone with hardware toggle (PS5)
proper “separate keys” d-pad… not the mushy type
touch-sensitive surfaces for every button and stick (Meta / Oculus Quest controllers do this)
per-finger-joint touch sensitive grips for each finger segment (Valve’s VR controllers did this)
the ability to separate the halves of the controller so that each hand could hold one half independently and have them track similar to most standard VR controllers (think combining the switch controllers and Quest controllers)
NFC communication (Amiibo-stuff for example)
If any single controller did even half of this, they’d easily be the GOAT.
I found Linux Mint good enough for 99% of things, and most problems can be solved without a terminal.
Problem is you’d still need to know enough about Linux (just like with windows) to troubleshoot. For example, the files app was causing an error when plugging in drives, I need to figure out that the files app wasn’t call files, but nemo, it’s config lived in a hidden folder called .config in my home folder, and in .config I could delete my configuration to fix my issue.
In my view Linux is about Windows XP or 7 in terms of usability, a bit of a learning curve, but one worth learning.
A few modern improvements which makes using Linux easier.
Use Flatpaks where possible, it’s platform agnostic and usually supported by the actual devs.
AppImages (think portable exe for windows), are another option, but to “install” them you’d need an app called Gear Lever.
Check with an apps developer before installing, flatpaks can be packaged by anyone, and they might loose support (steam for example is installable via Deb not flatpak).
I think user friendly distros (like Mint) are very user friendly if you’re just doing simple things like web browsing or using Steam. Mint (and other distros) have a realy nice software centre that can install a lot of software with a single click from flathub.org , which removes a lot of headaches that there used to be with installing software.
However, when things go wrong (which they do sometimes because computers are complicated), you may have to troubleshoot and play around with the command line.
… But that’s honestly happened a lot with Windows in my experience as well. Only with less command line and more running esoteric exes.
Honestly, given that most Linux distros are free anyway, you may as well try it out and see if everything works. Worst comes to worst, you find something doesn’t work and end up installing Windows over the top of it.
Depends what you use and how you use it. With how I use my computer, I have issues on Windows that require terminal input to solve and are more confusing than many of the Linux issues I face, but the way I use Linux also requires terminal. Some applications just work better or only on terminal whether you’re on Windows or Linux and some debugging steps will inevitably take you down the dark road of decade old menus and terminal commands.
Day to day basic tasks though? It shouldn’t need any special knowledge, provided that you don’t follow the wrong online tutorials like I did when starting out. For example, Firefox was out of date so I looked up how to update Firefox. The package manager did not have a new version and I didn’t think to manually go into settings and refresh the repository (stores auto update, right? Well, no actually…). Basically I ended up trying to install via a .deb package from their website… it didn’t work and I felt Linux was dumb. What I should have done was update my OS and package manager first or simply sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade (yes this is terminal, sorry). My point is, sometimes you have to realise the question you are asking is flawed and not the system.
Not only did I accidentally break up your marriage 12 years ago, I’m also incredibly abrasive, smell like I’ve not showered in several days, and when I visit your house I always remove the toilet paper roll and make sure to put it the opposite direction when I put it back into the holder. And I hissed at your cat.
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