It just works.
I’m kind of shocked how easy it was to set up. I used ventoy to make a bootable iso of Linux Mint Cinnamon on my Mini PC (Ser5 Pro), and I had zero issues with anything. Ventoy even plays nice with secure boot.
Where’s the setup?
There really wasn’t any. I booted into Mint, synced my keyboard/trackpad combo and my earbuds then was off to the races. It detected all my hardware including my Elgato HD60 X without any steps. The only thing I had to work around was downloading the deb build of Discord Canary to enable audio output in Discord streams since it was only recently added to Discord’s dev/beta build (Canary).
Speaking of which Elgato’s capture software doesn’t support Linux (shocker), so I simply installed OBS, pointed the audio/video to the capture card, and it worked. Easy.
My Use Case
I have the aforementioned mini PC mainly to be jockied by a capture card for streaming Nintendo Switch to Discord. Aside from that I use it as a productivity machine in my living room for internet browsing (omg webtv!) and Kodi. The Ser5 uses an AMD Ryzen 7 5850u with integrated graphics, 16GB DDR4, and a 500gb M.2. All of the ports, HDMI audio out, etc were automatically detected by Mint.
Conclusion
Linux Mint feels premium compared to Windows 11. It’s snappier, more modular, and offers a Linux GUI that’s familiar/easy to use. Plus now I have the benefit of no preinstalled spyware or bloatware. Feels good to actually own my computer.
Thanks for reading!
Next stop will be your privacy journey which would completely break your chains towards Discord which gave you trouble.
A better way to word this is “Next will be your privacy journey which will send you down an inifinte rabbit hole that you consumes you”.
Lol no but seriously, it’s a fun rabbit hole, but can get out of control if you’re not careful.
If you go to deep you’ll get paranoid lol. Atleast that is my experience.
But also be proven right several times a year when data leaks & corporations are shown again to be evil.
Oh for sure. Fuck these big companies. Unfortunately some offer services that just can’t be beat yet by open source/privacy companies.
This is sometimes true, but I would rather have a slightly worse UI and/or have to use 2 applications for more specific tasks than trading off data just to have everything under one bloated umbrella.
Been there lol. I think it’s a common thing for privacy newcomers. Not focusing on threat level and instead trying to optimize every bit. It got me too.
Once Revolt gets screen sharing.