25+ yr Java/JS dev
Linux novice - running Ubuntu (no windows/mac)
My daughter is very Linux curious but she’s not going to want to learn anything about it. She just wants to play games and chat with friends. I’ll probably switch her when I upgrade and pass my current computer down.
Probably depends on the speed of your usb pen and port. If you know for a fact that everything USB side is 3.1, USB will be faster. Otherwise eMMC will be faster. If everything is USB3.1 gen 2, USB looks to be around 3x as fast. Gen 1 is about 25% faster.
What I found in a quick search:
If any part of the USB chain is 2 or lower, it’s slower.
I’ll keep these thoughts in mind for the future. I’ve yet to try Linux on a laptop in any capacity and some of those concerns are not anything I’ve had to give thought to. I do use a pair of UHD monitors but not noticed lack of scaling supposty but that could be because they are the same DPI or maybe I’m just so used to scaling issues in every other OS I’ve internalized them.
Ubuntu isn’t bad by any means, Mint just feels more comfortable to me. I really should experiment with some other distros but as I said I don’t turn on my computer to fuck with things that are working for me. Most of my experience with anything but Ubuntu and Mint is two decades ago.
I don’t really get the whole Wayland vs X11 but I think I did try installing Wayland on Ubuntu once and it was… unfamiliar. I was troubleshooting an issue that turned out to be a bad ram stick and it left me with a negative impression of just about everything I tried because everything would crash so damn often (go figure), so I probably need to try that stuff again.
I did install /home to a separate partition to make distro hopping easier and then just… never did.
Mint is Ubuntu-based and I find it very natural to transition to from Windows. More natural than Ubuntu, despite me being slightly more familiar with Ubuntu from work.
I’ve never found it to suck, but I don’t get on my computer to fuck around with the OS and make things just exactly the way I like them. I automate some scripts to save myself typing for things I commonly do, and I do gaming, browsing, and development. I’ve yet to find Mint wanting. It makes more sense to me than macOS.
That’s just a static image, mate. You need speed.gif
It’s mostly The Sims with mods along with whatever meme games she’s hearing about on YouTube. There’s no concern about rootkit anti-cheat or anything, and so far my experience has been almost anything on Steam will run in Linux without having to do anything. She’ll run into performance issues with her current hardware before she hits any games that aren’t compatible.