First Impressions with Linux

The following was experienced on August 18, 2022.

Today I had some time to kill, so I decided to try out Linux in a virtual machine. I had previously tried various distro but I never made it past the installation screen (the thing would just soft lock).

I heard that Linux Mint was similar to Windows and beginner-friendly, so I tried that distro.

The installation process took forever. I'm not sure why but something about the UI scares me. It's so bland... It's definitely up there with Windows 10 as far as soulless UI are concerned.

My experience with Linux was very laggy, but I do not blame the distro for this. I assume that this just a product of running the system within VirtualBox. My computer is also not the greatest when it comes to power.

Anyway, once I was in, the first thing I wanted to do was change the resolution. There the first problem happened. There was no way to exit the setting window. I had to shut down the OS to get out. This is not very good UI design.

Another thing that irritates me is how there is no way to minimize everything at once. On windows there is a button near the time section that allows assessing the desktop quickly. There doesn’t seem to be any equivalent for this on Linux. So far the user experience is not great.

To conclude my test, there was one thing I wanted to do: running a simple Windows application in Wine. At first I was very confused, the distro present Wine as a normal application. I thought the thing was just failing silently. After a bit of googling, it turns out you need to run via a terminal command. To my surprise, this was fairly straight forward.

I was able to run the application just fine (albeit at 2 fps due to power constraints). On a final note, I am slightly concerned about the way applications are downloaded on Linux. Using the package downloader itself was easy, but I find it strange how every application seems to have 500 dependencies each. Not to mention that everything appears to be hosted at one place. This sounds like a nightmare for Linux archivist, but I probably don't have the full picture there.

Overall, my experience can be summed up as "it works I guess". The UI of Linux Mint needs a lot of work, though.

Written by manpaint on 19 August 2022.