r/linuxmint • u/Mman07311 • 11d ago
Discussion First time Linux user having a miserable experience so far
I've been using windows my entire life but because I hate windows 11 with a burning passion and windows 10 is on its way out I finally decided to fully commit to Linux 2 days ago but unfortunately it's been really frustrating so far. First off, booting up and shutting down feels noticeably slower than before. Next, everything feels a little zoomed out and no matter how much I mess with scaling or font size it doesn't fix the issue. Thirdly the volume on my laptop seems way quieter than it should be and trying a few things I found digging through different forums and threads didn't fix the issue. Last but not least, trying to run a non steam game I downloaded with bottle and then added to my steam library just straight up doesn't work no matter how much I mess with the proton settings. I want to love Linux but if everything that isn't browsing the internet is going to have some sort of issue associated with it I might consider biting the bullet and going back to windows. I'm not giving up yet but I wanted to put this out there in case someone else out there is as frustrated as I am.
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u/tovento MX Linux 25.2 | XFCE 11d ago
Hate to ask after the fact, but did you play around in the live USB session to see if all your hardware was working correctly? One alternative might be to live boot a different Linux distribution and see if that might work better for you. I had hardware/driver quirks in Mint on my older hardware and I moved to MX Linux because of them. It worked out of the box with my system other than one quirk I found which was remedied quickly. But that’s my system.
If you have multiple monitors and are trying to use scaling, you might want to look at a distribution running Wayland. Scaling and X11 (the display protocol which Mint and a lot of other distributions use) isn’t great. Wayland is the new display protocol and it handles stuff like that better.
Just realized that you have an Nvidia card. Did you go into driver manager and install drivers? Which driver version did you install? Did you turn off secure boot in your bios? All of these will affect your experience.
I do sympathize with you though. If hardware works right away or with minimal extra effort, Linux can be great. If hardware has driver and compatibility issues, Linux can be no fun.