- Jan 23, 2021
- 234
I am not saying Mint was bad, but I will say it was more of a situation where I could not get some things to work like I wanted. I used Firefox in Mint for a long time but wanted a backup/secondary browser, I had used Vivaldi in Windows before so thought I would try it in Mint. Vivaldi worked ok except for one thing, I listen to Pandora a lot when I am online and Vivaldi kept throwing an error saying it could not play the audio. I spent a long time googling a solution, nothing I found worked. I did find there were a lot of other Pandora users with the same problem though. I also tried Brave, thinking Pandora might work OK with Brave in Mint, but I never got that far with it. Brave would not install any extensions, no matter what I tried. I think both problems were due to Linux not allowing me to manually update either browser.
There were a few other things that maybe were not that hard to do but still took more work and more computer skills than what I have. The Mint Forum was a big help but I finally just went back to Windows if for no other reason it is more familiar. If I have a problem in Windows I generally know where to look to fix it or at least get started fixing it. With Mint I had to go online looking for the sudo apt xxx whatever command lines before I could even get started. That was a pain and I am not good enough or familiar enough with the terminal to get anywhere with it.
I use Media Monkey to play my own MP3 collection, but it is not available in Mint. I read too many bad things about Wine to try to use Media Monkey in Wine. I did look at Wine a time or two anyway but it just didn't make any sense to me. I did really like the Lollypop music player in Mint, and I wish it was available in Windows. The newer Windows Media Player is similar to Lollypop but it's just not as loud as Lollypop. There were other things in Mint that threw me off. I am kind of a hands-on user in Windows, I like to check my task manager and C drive properties pretty often and doing that in Mint was very foreign to me. I did eventually come to sort of understand the Stacer monitor and System monitor but still never really understood what was being reported beyond just the most basic functions.
I am not completely set against Mint or any other distro. I may come back to Linux someday, and really put in the effort to learn it, especially depending on what happens with Windows 12. Then again, Windows 12/24H2 might wind up being a whole lot of nothing. It's hard to say right now. I just put a new 1TB ssd and a 16GB ram stick in my laptop recently and am very happy with how everything is working in Windows. For now I will just leave well enough alone, and hope that MS will do the same.
C.H.
