Thank you all who reached out, it really was awesome.

Was super easy, even my Nvidia cards driver was basically automated. Haven’t played anything yet but I’m sure I’ll be fine.

I opened up the command thingy a couple of times just to get some settings how I wanted them, but could have gotten by without it.

The biggest stumbling block for me personally was getting the thumb drive in order, then the hardware to boot from it. First you gotta use a thing called Rufus to format the drive correctly, not sure how or why, but you do.

And then I couldn’t get my laptop to load bios no matter what key/s I mashed at restart, but searching " advanced startup options" in settings brought me to a menu to reboot from my (now correctly formatted) USB drive.

The rest drove itself. Still some stuff to figure out with it but it’s doable. Very polished and user friendly.Thank you all again so much!

  • neidu2@feddit.nl
    3·
    1 month ago

    Again: Hallelujah, another soul saved!

    So now it’s basically down to this: Keep using it for whatever you would normally do in windows. And if you’re having issues, try to sort it out.

    And then one day you’ll suddenly realize how long it’s been without Windows, and that you don’t really see a reason for going back any time soon.

      • JJLinux@lemmy.ml
        2·
        1 month ago

        Welcome to freedom and perfect mental health.

        The best part will be never having to download an exe or msi file to get stuff to work. Just look for the software you want, install, have at it.

        I’m sorry, it just brings me so much joy when I read stories like this one.

        • helenslunch@feddit.nl
          1·
          1 month ago

          perfect mental health.

          JFC dude, seriously?

          The best part will be never having to download an exe or msi file to get stuff to work.

          LOL Because Googling a website, clicking the download button, and clicking “next” on the installer is so much harder than compiling from source code or trying to figure out how to install one of the 34 different Linux filetypes…

          • Grunt4019@lemm.ee
            2·
            1 month ago

            Most people just use a package manager the vast vast majority of time. People don’t typically compile from source or figure out different file types.

  • Meltrax@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 month ago

    If you happen to care, what you were doing with the program Rufus was creating a “bootable media”. Think back in the day when you had to buy a Windows CD and insert that to install or update Windows. This is kind of the evolution of that. An operating system installer can be loaded into a thumb drive (some utilities even let you put many on one drive, and then you can choose between them) and then you tell your computer to read from the USB drive first (which you did via the BIOS boot menu configuration) and instead of booting up your installed Windows, it gives you the option of installing whatever is on your USB drive.

    This is fortunately often a pretty painless process, creating the USB boot loaders isn’t hard, and virtually every single Linux distro out there can be installed in this way.

    Glad you’re enjoying Mint, and excellent choice for a new Linux user. If you like it, you’ll never need to change to anything else.

    Welcome!

    • MintyFresh@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      1 month ago

      Ya I was wondering why I couldn’t download it in that state already directly to the drive. But I suppose there was already some formatting that needed to be stripped down before it could function as a boot strapper or whatever it’s called.

      Seriously thank you all for reaching out. I thought like maybe one person would begrudgingly link me a copy of Linux for dummies, but you all were so helpful!

      And it really wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I have memories of messing with Linux in like… 04 or 5 maybe? The ease of use has come a long way, applications are just working without fuss. 10/10

      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 month ago

        I think a better analogy is “remember when you had an iso that you had to burn onto a DVD to be able to boot from it? Or to be able to have the CD player recognize it instead of just writing the songs into it?, sort of the same thing”.

        What you downloaded is a binary image, i.e. the sequence of 0 and 1 needed for a computer to boot into Linux, now you need to feed that sequence directly to the computer, but the computer only knows how to read it from a thumb drive directly, not from a file inside the thumb drive, so you need to write that sequence bit by bit in order on the thumb drive. Back in the day we used Nero for dvds, Rufus does the same but to a thumb drive.

        Fun fact in Linux you can use dd which unlike what most people say doesn’t stand for Disk Destroyer (although certainly lots of disks were destroyed by it), which is an application that does binary writes. Hell, in Linux you can actually do cat image.iso > /dev/sdb and that should work, that is essentially print the output of the file image.iso and write it into /dev/sdb which should be the second disk plugged to your system (first one being /dev/sda).

        Cool, I started using Linux back in 04, but I think not that much changed, I think it’s mostly people who change the way they look at Linux, outside of gaming, for day to day use, Linux was very usable even back then.

  • TheCheddarCheese@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Setting up nvidia drivers wasn’t an issue? Well then I guess I was stupid or just extremely unlucky. I ran into so many driver issues on Mint it’s ridiculous.

      • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
        0·
        1 month ago

        I went from “Hey Mint’s nice plug-n-play”, to failing at installing Arch, to hopping to Manjaro then Endeavour for a short while, to installing and building my own Arch+i3+rice, to end up returning to Mint because it just works

        Idk I think I’m too smooth brain for Arch, but I’m trying to get into NixOS now, it seems really cool!

        • LeFantome@programming.dev
          2·
          1 month ago

          I love Arch but think I have too much of a koala mind for Nix.

          One of us must be smarter than they think they are.

  • leadore@kbin.social
    1·
    1 month ago

    Now that you have Mint, next time you want to make a thumb drive for installing a distro all you have to do is plug in a thumb drive, right-click the .iso file, and select Make Bootable USB Stick. (or from the Menu choose Accessories ‣ USB Image Writer)

    And here’s a nice intro to Mint for you. That site has lots of other helpful stuff too. Enjoy!

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      right-click the .iso file, and select Make Bootable USB Stick

      And most of the time it will even work!

      I kid, I kid… kind of. My outcomes when making bootable sticks from ISOs over the years have been very random.

      • themusicman@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 month ago

        You will be fine. I game on mint with an Nvidia card. Steam has a setting to fall back to proton for all games without native Linux, and for everything off steam use Lutris (install it from the website, since the package manager version is too old to be useful)