Sounds like a you issue if you had trouble with Mint. Right click the desktop -> display settings and oh look, 4 monitors to easily configure. Sounds kind of silly without more information doesn’t it?

My hardware at work is all Dell stuff so good chance it’s their fault. But it still doesn’t affect the Linux side.

In windows I can only use 3 monitors. If I open up the laptop to introduce a 4th screen in windows, a pair of my monitors will Be duplicating the dang image.

In Mint I tried the same and it just worked, 4 individual monitors without issue.

My work laptop was your standard Dell with windows and M365. I am now able to dual boot Linux, which is what my computer boots into by default now.

I can honestly say that in the current day, Linux Mint gives a much smoother experience on the same hardware. It even supports multiple monitors better.

I will grant that I’m a computer nerd like plenty of others here, so there may be some speed bumps that didn’t even register for me. But everything from installation, to daily use, to updates, is SO much smoother and faster.

Unfortunately many of us have been taught that being a good person and a good citizen equals being productive and accumulating resources. Things that are quantifiable and external to the actual person and their relationships.

Being productive and accumulating some resources can be good activities to spend time on, but they are practical necessities and not defining characteristics of existence.

Layers of protection. It’s worth it when we’re talking about life and death safety.

I’m not sure if I saw it in the same place, but I saw the same recommendation long ago and have stuck with it ever since.

I don’t rely on it for changing lanes though. It absolutely helps situational awareness, but I always turn and look.

If he got the cinnamon version, that is indeed the default Ubuntu based one. I use the same thing.

One of the biggest draws of regular Mint IMO is that it leverages the advantages and resources of Ubuntu but it removes the parts that many people don’t like.

As an American, this line short circuited my brain:

Police there still carry guns on the regular

I live in a quiet but growing suburban town that’s closer to rural areas than the nearest city. When I walk my kid to elementary school (how European of us, lol) the police officer working as a crossing guard for the kids still has their gun, taser, bulletproof vest, and all their other gear on.

And it’s not a school-specific thing. You just never see cops without their weapons here. Armed and armored is just part of the uniform, essentially.

I’m good with cinnamon myself, but you can totally install KDE on mint instead. It is just Linux after all.

When I do a search for mint kde, this is the first result and has step by step instructions. It looks like it can be as simple as apt install kde-standard or kde-full.

https://linuxiac.com/how-to-install-kde-plasma-on-linux-mint-22/

I’m tempted, and I may mess with it some day, but honestly after tweaking some settings I’m pretty happy with how my cinnamon desktop performs.

That’s the proprietary app container system pushed by Canonical who maintains Ubuntu. That’s as opposed to something more widely accepted like flatpak. I’m not an expert on everything Canonical has done to piss of the FOSS community, but I think snaps are the biggest one.

And in regular old Linux Mint Cinnamon you don’t have to deal with that, and you can still lean on Ubuntu’s apt repositories.

And when Mint is right there too.

I have Ubuntu packages all through my system and I don’t need to care about whatever BS canonical is up to. Worst case scenario is I switch to LMDE one day.

My first was Sun Solaris Unix, but now I’m a middle aged engineer who wants to fix company product issues rather than personal workstation issues, and Mint rocks my socks.

The mundanity of my computer working seamlessly every day is right up there with the mundanity of my car starting every morning, as far as how much it bothers me, lol.

But there’s nothing wrong with messing with your car’s engine or your computer’s OS, obviously. Some people are just in a place where they want to do that and some aren’t.

The regular version uses a lot of Ubuntu resources but doesn’t have snaps either.

Yeah, honestly it’s worked fine without any fiddling around. If it makes a difference, I tend to do things like let mint use non-free components if necessary, and I know I do have the “play drm stuff” option turned on I’m Firefox, even though the privacy and security stuff is all strict.

It’s just a Dell laptop with a discrete nvidia gpu in addition to the embedded Intel one. I think it works fine though with either the open drivers or the closed nvidia ones, but I don’t know if it touches that gpu.

I get to dual boot at work (I run mint btw) and the only reason I ever boot into windows every week or three is to make sure it doesn’t get so out of date that it gets booted from the network.

I guess it’s time to stop that shit! Having windows available is not worth the risk of messing up my work machine. Hell I’m tempted to nuke that windows partition and double the size of my /home partition!

Though I will give Microsoft credit that m365 stuff, including video calls in Teams, work great using the web versions in Firefox. That’s even with the security and privacy stuff cranked up. I only white listed those sites for cookies and local storage for convenience.

This needs an extra top panel with the dude just chilling with no makeup, maybe reading a “clown makeup for dummies” book. The caption is “my last Windows machines are barely working but they know what happens if I have to ‘fix’ anything.”

That’s where I’m living right now. The PC I use all day is already Linux.

GSUS

As opposed to G.E.C.K. OS.

A ton can change just based on your mindset. There’s a lot of that subject in stoic and (secular) Buddhist philosophy. It’s not sticking your head in the sand, but rather practicing being more in control of your mental state while processing the things you need to process.

For instance in Buddhism one of the three poisons is attachment, or sometimes called greed. Having high expectations of other people and relying on their actions to inform your mental state is just setting yourself up for failure.