I certainly remember fighting with xorg.conf settings, graphics drivers, and kernel modules in the past. I haven't had to deal with troubles like that in nearly 10 years though.
Ugh. Like, literally every time someone talks about having problems with Linux this exact same sentence is said in response.
I'm pretty much always trying Linux these days on various devices and I still constantly run into issues. Constantly. It's great that you have zero issues, but please consider that a lot of us aren't so fortunate.
Some vendors are better than others at Linux support. I would suggest sticking to Lenovo or Dell if you'd like a smooth experience.
- My AMD zen4 CPU still isn't fully supported by Mint's shipping kernel (5.15.0-56). It works today (including sleep states). But it took a month or two to get a kernel which supported sleep states correctly. And I still can't see CPU or motherboard temperatures.
- My keyboard and mouse don't work over bluetooth. I think its the vendors' fault, but I bet they'd both work fine work on macos or windows.
- My speakers randomly get all garbled and weird sometimes. I've figured out running `sudo killall pulseaudio` fixes it (until next time).
- I like using Apple's "magic touchpad". But the driver is nowhere near as good as Apple's. Sensitivity is all wrong in linux. It registers accidental light touches as clicks sometimes, and it just feels janky. And application support for smooth scrolling is all over the place - some apps support it perfectly and others (Firefox, IntelliJ) interpret any tiny single pixel scroll on the touchpad as a multi-line scroll. I've reverted to using a traditional mouse.
That said, some things have been a delight. My old AMD 480 graphics card worked perfectly out of the box, with no configuration required. When I upgraded out my motherboard and CPU a few months ago, the computer booted just fine with no reconfiguration or anything. It just took it all in stride. (I've still never seen windows handle that so well.)
I'm not surprised some people have no problems with desktop linux. But YMMV.
While I find this true on Linux, I find it more true on Windows and OS X nowadays.
The difference is that with Linux, there is probably a workaround. If I have an issue with Windows or OS X (nee macOS) and it's not affecting a million people, I'm simply screwed.
That's what drove me off of Windows and OS X.
Trying Debian Stable versus a bleeding edge Arch Linux will likely give wildly varying degrees and complexity of 'issues'.
This experience pushed me straight into rolling release territory but I'd imagine most people would go to MS immediately, or even Apple if PC gaming is not something they do
You can transfer photos etc out of IOS on mint. For music and videos you can download VLC on IOS and then it has a magic feature where it opens a localhost website which you can visit on your PC and transfer everything across over Wifi.
I don't know why I never thought to try third party for music stuff, I will definitely check these out, thank you.
My music library is about 32GB now, hope those can deal with that.
It's technically no longer even there on macOS, thank God. It was becoming a sort of kitchen-sink dumping place, and I am glad that I can now manage my iPad through Finder (though I still wish I could just treat it like any other bulk-storage device, as I can on Windows, at least it's there). There are apps called "Music.app" and "TV.app", if I want to access my music and videos the Apple way, but I can and do just ignore them if I don't want to use them.
There are probably a multitude of other features that were in the old iTunes app that I never even noticed or have forgotten, but I think that a lot of users who used to be forced into using iTunes on macOS now can avoid both it and its replacements.
After fighting a long time to own my music, I have to admit I got tired of maintaining a library, and mostly listen on Spotify these days. But I never liked the library-based model anyway, and so (when still dipping into my own library, and especially when watching movies) prefer an app like VLC that accepts that I might occasionally just want to play a media file without making a library. (Same thing with Books: for some reason, Apple can accept that I might just occasionally want casually to open a PDF in Preview, but finds it impossible to believe I might want to do the same thing with an ePub. I still haven't found a good non-library-based ePub app for macOS; I wind up just using the one that comes with calibre.)
Thank you for the recommendation! Having to sign in is even less appealing to me than being forced to maintain a library, but it's good to have the option.
The only thing that was stopping me before was games, but games all work on linux now. Other than one or two that require specific anti-cheats that use 0days to hijack windows, there's basically nothing that doesn't run on linux now. In fact, a lot of my games actually work better because proton dynamically patches out bugs from the original windows implementations.
I don't think I've found any software or anything that I use that hasn't got a linux version. Windows is dead to me, I haven't used it since.