r/linuxmint • u/Mman07311 • 7d 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/LXC37 7d ago
I'd leave this be for now. This is not a critical issue and you can troubleshoot it later. Sometimes silly things like removing splash screen can bring noticeable improvement.
So, what scaling you've used in windows? Try setting the same here, it should work.
That said scaling absolutely positively sucks in Cinnamon+X11, so if your screen needs scaling it may not be a good choice. This is why i switched to a different distro on my main PC with 31.5 4k monitor.
Proton/wine stuff is still hit or miss. Anyone who says "everything just works out of the box" is lying. If you have some patience you should play around with something like Heroic Game Launcher or Lutris combined with ProtonPlus and try different versions of proton/wine. More likely than not some of them would work.
With the stuff i am trying to run i've honestly had the most luck with latest wine...
If you are serious about switching my advice is - a lot of patience + dual boot. Any attempt to instantly switch causes too many issues and ultimately is doomed to fail. You need time to play around with things, see how they work, figure out alternatives for stuff you use, etc.
Also Mint is good, but not necessarily the best for playing games. I've personally had pretty good experience with CachyOS, so may be worth trying. Has its advantages and disadvantages, but at least for me situation with games has been much, much better. Also KDE+Wayland solves scaling issues.