About a month ago, I installed Linux Mint on my laptop. This came following a long and agonizing period of constantly debating if, when, and how I should move to Linux, and man oh man I wish I had done that sooner.

Windows 11 being awful is something pretty much everyone online is aware of by now. The constant AI slop being pushed down each of our pores is one thing, but the fact many of the basic features just break is pretty alarming, especially for something as fundamental as an operating system. The siren song of the third operating system on the block has been one I’ve been hearing for quite a long time, but I always had something else holding me back. “It’s not the right time,” “I have school,” “there’s one project I gotta finish,” yada yada. Never the right time, never the right place.

Well, about a month ago, one of my friends asked me to install Linux on their machine. That was enough to finally make me do it.

His laptop came prepackaged with Windows 11 (to the extent that it has a COPILOT BUTTON), and he mentioned how the computer constantly sounded like a jet engine about to take off. “Linux is less heavy on my computer, right? Please for the love of god get this shit off mine.” I did not expect a non-programmer friend of mine to be the first one to make the jump, much less one of the artists who notoriously are bound to Adobe and their demonic whims, but so it was. He got it, told me how convenient it all was, and I went “fuck it, I want some of that too.”

Wow this operating system is nice. Not because it changed my life or anything, but because of all the things I no longer need to think about.

On windows, my laptop fans were on pretty much 24/7. On Linux? I actually thought I broke my fans because they would not turn on, until I found out my computer was running so cool they never needed to. Installing Windows on a new machine is a nightmare of missing drivers and arcane sections of the system configuration.¹ I installed Linux and everything just worked out of the box. I thought Linux was supposed to be the hard one, I was lied to.

I can’t even complain about games all that much. The one thing that holds people back from moving to Linux is compatibility issues with apps that just assume you’re a windows user, but since the release of the Steam Deck this is much less of a problem. To those who don’t know, the Steam Deck is a portable gaming machine that can run games right from your steam library, which made it very appealing to PC users. It also runs Linux, meaning that if you wanted Deck users to buy your game, you needed to make it Linux-compatible. Nearly my entire library runs on Linux now.

It really is this nice. I’m glad I started with Linux Mint, and I’m really glad I finally made the jump. All I need to do now is put mint on my desktop computer, and my transfemmification- I mean, switch to Linux will be complete. Just need to get thigh highs now.