Can’t recommend channels or guides of the top of my head, but maybe search Linux Mint beginner guide or something. Linux Mint is recommended everywhere for people who are new to Linux and should have plenty of guides and answers
this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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Linux mint, alright I'll give it a go
User name checks out. Have fun with Linux Mint!
Since you chose Linux Mint—good choice btw—something to keep in mind is that Mint is based on Ubuntu. While you’re learning and searching the interwebs for how to do x, y, and z, if you don’t find an article or guide specifically about Mint, try searching the same phrase replacing “mint” with “ubuntu.” There’s far more content out there about Ubuntu than Mint, but since Mint is based on Ubuntu, 9 times out of 10 the same solution on an Ubuntu forum works in Mint.
Good luck!
Ty, great advice
It's often useful to specify the version though. The current version of Linux Mint is 21.3 Virginia and based on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, where the first part, Jammy, is the codename of the Ubuntu release. So "Mint 21.3", "Mint Virginia", "Ubuntu 22.04", "Ubuntu Jammy" or even "Debian Bookworm" should be helpful when querying a search engine.
As I'm German and the German Ubuntu-Community has a really good unofficial Wiki which is really helpful for setting things up or just rummage around, I can't say much about the English pendants for Mint or Ubuntu.
Yeah, I'd say ideally you should be able to run mint and just figure out what you need to do with minimal difficulty.
My partner started using mint recently and the two biggest annoyances for her are having to enter her password all the time to update anything, and minor windowing differences, especially going in and out of fullscreen games. I think both of those are just a matter of getting used to how it's done differently outside of windows.
IMO the thing that could use some attention is their package manager. There are several warnings and failures that I think have been unnecessary.
ex 1. Almost every update will ask if she's sure she wants to resolve some package conflict in some default way. This is not a question a normal user is equipped to answer, and only makes the user uneasy about what's happening.
ex 2. When she initially installed, the welcome wizard had her run a speed test to rank her repo sources, and she picked a nearby university that seemed like a good choice. Then a few days ago at random, it became inaccessible I guess, and now her package update fails to update Firefox specifically. I need to help her sort that out, haven't had time.
These are the kinds of errors I expect to see on arch occasionally, but on mint I feel like it should always figure out what the best option is for the user and just do it. If it needs to let the user know it did something, fine, but don't present it ominously. Just put the system in a good state so that it'll keep working, that's all a normal mint user wants you to do.
In the update settings she can reset her apt sources back to "default". It's not too hard and there's a gui throughout the process (from memory).
The package conflicts is an interesting one, if you have the time to post one of these on lemmy I'm sure someone will suggest a fix. It's probably a apt install --fix-broken or something simple (hopefully) but I'm sure we could work it out.
Totally agree that these are annoying issues though. See if you can use Nala, it's a TUI front end for Apt and it's got some nice user changes like if you run upgrade it updates and upgrades. It also has a fetch feature which finds nearby sources, so you're always downloading from the closest/fastest source.
It might be that it is just asking weather to replace modified configuration files by the default new config file provided by the updated package or keep the old, modified, one.
You learn by using it.
Which means you want to do something on Linux. You don't know how to do it, then you ask or search for the answer and then you know.
Just be patient and it will come naturally.