My wife asked me last summer to switch her, because she didn’t like the news she was hearing about “recall” and being forced to have AI.
She is far from techie, but is over a year on Mint with no issues.
She actually switched before me, because I was distro hopping trying to find the right one for me, so I dual booted for a while. But I am 9 months on a single distro and happy to be rid of Windows.
Which distro did you stay on? I was trying Manjaro but Plasma had random freezes and stutters all the time, XFCE felt like an unfinished product and GNOME was even worse than XFCE. Solus Budgie gave me only black screens, and most others also didn’t run well on my old machine. Linux Mint runs stable so far and looks stunning and it also runs my games better than Windows 10 so that’s a win.
I tried Manjaro for a while and had the same Plasma issues with KDE, which originate with the Nvidia drivers. Unfortunately, Manjaro is pretty poorly maintained and always manages to break itself within a couple months.
If you’re looking a for a super stable and reliable Arch-based distro, try Garuda. I’ve been running Garuda with KDE for over 7 months without a single issue.
Xfce is pretty polished; however, you need to theme it to look good. On the other hand, even some themes from the 2000s should just work, so there’s that. Either way, Cinnamon looks quite good, so if you’re happy with it, good for you!
My wife asked me last summer to switch her, because she didn’t like the news she was hearing about “recall” and being forced to have AI.
She is far from techie, but is over a year on Mint with no issues.
She actually switched before me, because I was distro hopping trying to find the right one for me, so I dual booted for a while. But I am 9 months on a single distro and happy to be rid of Windows.
Which distro did you stay on? I was trying Manjaro but Plasma had random freezes and stutters all the time, XFCE felt like an unfinished product and GNOME was even worse than XFCE. Solus Budgie gave me only black screens, and most others also didn’t run well on my old machine. Linux Mint runs stable so far and looks stunning and it also runs my games better than Windows 10 so that’s a win.
You don’t have to distro hop to switch desktop environments. You can install KDE Plasma (5.27 though) on LinuxMint.
I tried Manjaro for a while and had the same Plasma issues with KDE, which originate with the Nvidia drivers. Unfortunately, Manjaro is pretty poorly maintained and always manages to break itself within a couple months.
If you’re looking a for a super stable and reliable Arch-based distro, try Garuda. I’ve been running Garuda with KDE for over 7 months without a single issue.
Xfce is pretty polished; however, you need to theme it to look good. On the other hand, even some themes from the 2000s should just work, so there’s that. Either way, Cinnamon looks quite good, so if you’re happy with it, good for you!