20th of July, 2026
From MacOS to Mint

Around the start of this year my Macbook 2013 started to seriously give up the ghost. Not hardware failures—though the screen is busted—but the OS is now so old that I couldn't get my password manager working, and likewise a bunch of critical websites flat-out wouldn't work in the latest version of any major browser. Lo, a miracle: I got a large itch.io payout all of a sudden, an old one from early 2025 that disappeared into the aether when I tried to get it out of the platform, and I suddenly had enough money to buy a new (well, refurbished, 2023) replacement laptop. But, what OS to use? Over a decade of MacOS' limits drove me away from Apple and I wanted no part of where Windows is going, leaving Linux as the only major contender. There's more Linux distributions than any sane person can conceive of at one time, so I just picked one of the beginner-friendly distros I kept seeing people recommend: Linux Mint.

Some people get a lotta flak for being excessively pro-Linux and not knowing when to shut up, but they might have a point. Even if they still need to shut up sometimes.

The Good #

The simplest and best thing I can say about Mint is It Just Works™. I had to do a little setup to prep the installer flash drive, but once I booted up the machine with the drive connected I found that It Just Works™. Even better than MacOS or Windows, actually, because I didn't have to create an account or connect my debit card or prune any LLM agent bullshit or deal with any advertising at all. Occasionally, for the first week or two, and much less often than expected, I needed to do some personal customisation in the terminal or manually create a config file somewhere, but, really, It Just Works™.

(Caveat, I did this on a relatively new laptop, a refurbished machine from a few years ago that might not have been used much before I bought it. If your hardware's much older, or even wearing down, then you may not have as easy a time of it.)

More than works, it looks good too. Not mind-blowing, not ultra-fashionable, but good. The default desktop style is straightforward and well-ordered and feels like it matured over time instead of being the product of regularly ditching designs for some new fad. That's fine. I don't want my UI to forcibly change every year or two. I don't want my app icons abstracted to the point of uselessness. I don't want the performance + accessibility blunders of Apple's “Liquid Glass”. I want something that works and will continue to work, and if I wanna change it later, I have the freedom to do that on my own terms.

Okay but who cares how it looks, what's important is: can you run shit on it? Also yes. The built-in Software Manager app is great—a straightforward, no-ads, no-bullshit app catalogue that hooks into a few reliable sources of free software, lets you install with one click, and regularly scans for updates that it sends to Mint's built-in Update Manager. To be clear, that “free software” includes stuff like Discord, Steam, and ProtonVPN as well as open-source standards like VLC, OBS, and Blender. The only wrinkle's when there's more than one version of an app. Sometimes there's two: a “System Package” version and a “Flatpak” version, with System Package supposedly being better (smaller, more reliable). Occasionally, there's even more—I've seen this with open-source software that was abandoned once before someone new took up the mantle of development years later. Luckily, it's always been clear which one's up-to-date.

The first honest-to-God shock I had with Linux was actually with Windows software. Coming from MacOS, I knew about wine, which lets you run Windows .exe files on other operating systems. Coming from MacOS, I was expecting wine on Linux to be shaky, unreliable, and rough as hell. Turns out it's so much better on Linux than on (my last version of) MacOS that it's honestly liberating. Mint came with wine pre-installed, and many .exe files just run when I double-click them, no problems at all. I came into Linux thinking I'd only be able to use Linux software. It turns out I have access to so much more than I ever would on MacOS.

(That's not to say wine's perfect. I have a few .exe games from 15–20 years ago (The Manipulator (2008), suteF (2010)) that run real slow despite how simple they are. Maybe they're built for specific old graphics library or drivers that don't come pre-installed on Mint. Or… maybe they just don't play nice with wine, or with the graphics card itself. Still, most problems I've had running stuff with wine have been five-second fixes: add “.exe” to the end of the program filename, add the wine command to the app's menu shortcut, really basic stuff.)

Overall, my experience with software on Linux has been more straightforward than on MacOS, which condescends to you and screws with you for trying to run anything not downloaded from the official App Store.

Steam-based games just work #

One special case I should mention is Steam. A lotta games there nominally only work on Windows or SteamOS—but SteamOS is just Valve's own custom version of Linux, and Valve's “proton” software that helps run games on SteamOS is just Valve's own custom version of wine. I didn't really get how easy it'd be to run a huge range of Steam-based games on Linux until I actually tried it. Yet again, It Just Works™… most of the time. A few things came up during testing, but I can count the games that had problems on one hand:

This compared to the dozens upon dozens of games I've tested that work fine… I know I'll probably run into more problems in the future, but the ratio looks good and proton's getting better all the time.

Much like with Windows software in general, I dunno how well proton would handle bleeding-edge tech, but I don't play that stuff, so it doesn't matter to me. (There's also the fact that I'm running stuff on a 2023 laptop and not some high-performance beast. There's only so much that software can do…)

The Bad #

It's not all roses. Focus groups and design departments have less sway here, and that means some of the default apps that come with Mint have idiosyncrasies that may never get ironed out (fine, even good), issues that may or may never be fixed (bad). Not in some cutesy or kintsugi way—real problems. Not huge or insurmountable ones, though! Again, It Just Works™, but occasionally there's something small that doesn't.

Case 1: The start menu's editor lets you do things that mess up the menu. Not in any way you can't recover, but one time early on I did have to reset to the default setup. The culprits? First, you shouldn't ever add new menu groups or sub-groups. Repurpose existing ones, sure, but don't add new ones. Second, don't move around the default apps. Hide them, sure, but don't cut and paste them from one group to another. Finally, don't edit the desktop file that defines the menu. I just stick to adding/deleting menu items for new programs.

Case 2: Some of the built-in apps are a little half-baked, like the Drawing app (a kind of Paint equivalent). Honestly, it sometimes feels like the Mint devs had a checklist of “things Mint needs to be a Proper Operating System” and that included a simple art app, so they grabbed one that was compatible and that was that.

Case 3: Nemo, Mint's default file explorer, doesn't have a built-in keyboard shortcut for renaming files, only a context menu option. My workaround was to add a new keyboard shortcut, but there's no way to do that for just any key and function in Nemo's own settings. Instead I had to open (or create?) the shortcuts file ~/.config/nemo/accels/nemo and add the following lines:

(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/DirViewActions/Rename" "r")
(gtk_accel_path "<Actions>/DirViewActions/RenameSelectAll" "<Shift>r")

This adds two shortcuts, one that lets me rename one selected file using R and another that lets me rename all selected files using Shift + R. I didn't figure all this out myself—I searched around and I'm pretty sure I found the answer on the Mint forums, which are a solid resource.

I hope these show how small the issues are. Day-to-day stuff on Linux has been totally mundane. The biggest problems I've had were things like the time I had to restore my computer from a backup because I installed a second version of wine before I found out Mint comes with it pre-installed—a self-inflicted error.

External mics are much quieter #

I put this weird one apart at the end, because it's actually not a Linux issue—it's a non-Mac issue.

When I started testing my mouse, keyboard, tablet etc. with the new laptop, everything worked fine except my audio interface—I thought Linux had messed-up drivers because mic audio through the interface was super quiet, and when I turned it up, the quality was awful. The reality is trickier. I never knew this, but apparently Mac hardware boosts external audio inputs by ~24dB (very rough memory, it's been months since I last looked into this). I was able to work around this by tweaking the gain on the interface and using a gain filter in OBS, but it could be better and I dunno what to do about mic audio in other apps. Maybe I'll need an XLR dynamite mic booster or something…

The… Gone #

The best font editor I've used so far is MacOS-only. Glyphs was my mainstay for font design from 2021, beating out basically all free, open-source, or otherwise independent font design apps I tried. Unfortunately, it has a very small dev team who've decided to focus just on MacOS rather than spread their resources across two or more operating systems.

I know it sounds like this should go under “The Bad”, but I still have my old Macbook, and the old version of Glyphs I have there runs fine. If I need to edit a font in Glyphs specifically, I can.

On the other hand… I'm glad to have no reason to use Apple Notes again. I've never come across a program so eager to destroy input it's meant to save, forever. Even if my new notes app (Simplenote) has a few of its own quirks and a slightly less reliable cloud-sync, it's generally been safer, and, in my experience, notes apps are a “best of a bad bunch” situation.

I know it sounds like this should go under “The Good”, but I could've switched at any time even on MacOS—it's just, when I switched to Linux I had to switch from Apple Notes.

The Takeaway #

I guess the one takeaway I hope my experience gives is, for day-to-day things, utilities and games and that kinda stuff, a good, a beginner-friendly Linux distro does it all and without being beholden to shareholders and stock markets driven by world-killing delusions. It Just Works™.