Aaaaa use more paragraphs, PLEASE

It does get better, but… it’s kinda like river rafting.

Coming from Windows, Linux can and does often feel like you’ve spent your whole life trapped in a box. Suddenly “that thing that’s always annoyed you” is something you can turn off, replace, or improve with very little effort. I remember for example that when I switched back in 2000 I was blown away by a checkbox in the KDE PDF viewer. You could, in the basic settings, with no special hackery required, simply uncheck the box labelled Respect Adobe DRM. Suddenly, my computer was actually mine.

Using Linux these days is still just as amazing. You go from an OS that spies on you, pushes ads into your eyeballs, and has some of the worst design patterns ever, to a literal bazaar of Free options. It’s different for everyone, and that’s sort of the point: Linux is “Free” in all senses of the word, as you can make your machine do whatever you want.

It takes some time to get there though, and a lot of it is hardware unfortunately. A lot of the machines out there are built exclusively for Windows and the companies that make these things hide a lot of their inadequacies in their (proprietary) Windows drivers. So, when you try to use not-Windows, you end up using drivers written by people who had to reverse engineer or just do some guesswork to get that hardware working. This arrangement works very well for both Microsoft and these budget hardware vendors because it provides lock-in for the former, and a steady market for the latter.

The reality is that if you want to make the switch to Linux, you’re more likely to have a hard time if your hardware choices fall in this camp. For example, some times it’s just easier to buy a €12 USB WiFi or Bluetooth adapter that you know works with Linux than it is to rely on the chip that came with your laptop. It’s better now than it once was, but Nvidia cards, the occasional webcam, and a few WiFi devices have presented as problems for me in the last few years.

My advice is to embrace that “patience and stubbornness” and temper it with an honest pricing of your time vs. the cost of replacing the problematic hardware. When buying new stuff, look up its Linux support online before buying anything. You’ll save yourself a lot of pain.

In cases when you really want to dig in and understand/fix your problem (because it’s Linux, you’re allowed to understand and fix things on your computer!) then I recommend looking at the Arch Wiki and even using Arch Linux since (a) that’s the basis for most of the information there, and (b) Arch tends to favour “bleeding edge” stuff, so you’re more able to install the latest version of things that may well support your hardware.

I know it’s probably not the answer you were hoping for, but if you stick it out, I promise it’s worth it. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now and I’m never going back. Windows makes me so inexplicably angry with it’s constant nagging, spying, and inadequacies, I just can’t do it.

I stopped reading at “secure boot was enabled so I had to reinstall my BIOS.” There’s nothing about that statement that makes any sense.

I used Windows growing up, switched to Linux in highschool on my personal machines, and was forced to use Mac for nearly 10 years at work. In my experience, they all have problems, and the worst part is always early on. After you’ve used them for a while and have gotten familiar/comfortable, the problems get easier to deal with, and switching back (or on to something new) becomes more daunting/uncomfortable than dealing with what you have. So in that sense, yes, it will get easier.

Also, as hardware ages, you often see better support (though laptops can be tricky, as they are not standardized).

Keep in mind, when you use Windows or Mac, you’re using a machine built for that OS and (presumably) supported by the manufacturer for that OS (especially with custom drivers). If you give Linux the same advantage (buy a machine with Linux pre-installed, or with Linux “officially supported”), you’re much more likely to have a similar, stable experience.

Also, I’ve had better stability with stock Ubuntu than its derivatives (Pop!_OS and Mint). It might be worth trying an upstream distro, to see if you have better stability.

Your wifi issues with mint were probably driver related. Ive found especially for newer devices Linux mints kernel is too old and doesn’t always fully support hardware. If you have access to Ethernet or USB hotspot you can likely download and install the newest kernel and fix that issue.

Mint is recommended for a reason, it’s a traditional Linux experience, it’s stable, and it looks familiar to newbies. Plus, lots of us Linux nerds use Debian/Ubuntu (what mint is based on) so it’s easier for us to help you.

It does get better with some of the more advanced distros. Perversely they are easier to run and maintain. The beginner distros try to hide the complexity to make everything more user friendly but these abstractions can be more confusing than the fundamentals they are hiding.

However there’s nothing people online can do if you don’t find linux interesting enough to do a deep dive on it.

That is not an ideal experience. However, hardware gremlins are not a universal experience either.

Others have pointed out that getting a slightly older laptop to put Linux on can give the tinkerers time to get the key drivers working, and avoiding bleeding edge revisions of your distro can help.

It is quite possible that my comfortable experience with Mint and Ubuntu over the years have been influenced by my low expectations of getting all the bells and whistles working the way they would in Windows. I like the software environment that typically comes on Linux and I don’t stress when Windows software (esp games) doesn’t work (though Steam makes a lot of games work anyway).

I did have to spend more time getting the bios and fingerprint reader straightened out on my latest laptop (Dell Inspiron), but Google and blogs walked me through it and the only remaining problem is that sometimes when the fingerprint prompt times out I have to use the password until I reboot.

To answer the main title question: it definitely can get better, especially if you’re using common hardware with maintainers working to improve the code to handle them.

I’m one of the people with a mostly smooth Linux experience on my devices (I have similar values to other nerdy programmers and naturally purchase more similar or popular computers/parts, and I haven’t really had brand new bleeding-edge computer parts, so that might give me better odds at a smoother experience), no weird audio/WiFi/GPU issues that you often see here. The only issues I have are so inconsequential they’re not worth mentioning. And I’ve used the two OSs you’ve used.

Seconding just installing something easy and pre-setup. Try a desktop variant of Bazzite (I like the gnome flavour) and see if most of your issues just disappear.

When I first moved to linux I used Mint for a week and then moved to something else. As always by EVERYONE it was suggested to me as a “starter” distro and I really wish people would stop doing that.

I, like you, had issues with it. Sound issues, Wifi issues, GPU issues, and doing personal research and digging the consensus was always “it’s an issue with Mint.” I was about to go back to Windows 11 cause I was like “none of this linux shit works”

THEN I decided to try a different distro, CachyOS, and suddenly the sound was fixed, the wifi didn’t randomly drop out, and my GPU worked flawlessly. I’ve distro hopped since then and those Mint/Ubuntu issues never came back.

Try something other than Mint. if you still have the issues go back to Windows.

Driver support will always potentially be an issue unless you buy laptops that are built for Linux, or are well vetted. This is because Microsoft has near total market control and Linux support is usually reverse engineered later if the drivers source is never shared.

Same thing for gaming – gaming support on Linux is mostly a bunch of ad hock hacks, because those games were never made to run on Linux in the first place.

So, if you want to commit to Linux, make it an informed choice. You will need to make some sacrifices. Or you could always just dip your toes and only use Linux for running a server or hosting a website.

In my limited experience, there are basically two flavors of Linux:

1. Latest software, everything’s available but it breaks a lot.
2. Doesn’t update frequently, might have to be cautious with third-party software but very stable.

As I’ve gotten busier, my preference for stable distros like Debian has grown. I think there’s also a lot of value in trying for due diligence the first time you install a distro. It’s much simpler to take the time and do it correctly than to try and fix it afterwards. Sometimes it takes a few attempts to get everything set up correctly, but it’s worth it long term.

What if you boot a windows installation, from an external drive or something? Does the sound come back?

Aight, almost every time It seems like audio is working but you actually hear nothing, getting alsamixer out and selecting each output channel and making sure it’s unmuted and full volume, on every sound device that shows up ( hit f6 I think to switch device to ) makes a difference. I’ve never figured out why it gets f’d up but I think it has to do with the service that saves and restores alsamixer state during shutdown and startup

As for the broken wifi thing, I had this happen to me on a recent mint install earlier this year. The solution was to plug in a ethernet cable and update, then wifi worked again and forever since.