Awesome move. Welcome to Linux. Mint is a great daily driver. It just works. And when something goes wrong, you have the ability to poke around and see in detail what is happening, and fix it with the help of the excellent Linux community.

Not to mention the clear advantage of Linux not spying on you or serving you ads.

Enjoy your new OS!

It feels like I no longer have to play tug of war with microsoft with owning my own device.

It gets real funny when you use Linux for 6 months+ and then install windows in a virtual machine. The amount of shit you have to click no or skip on is astounding.

Welcome aboard! :)

Please pay very close attention to how Mint expects you to manage software. I haven't used Mint in a very long time, but they should have new user docs that cover this. This is my advice for any distro (though there are some commonalities) - noobies can save themselves a LOT of headache if they take some time to be sure they understand how that distro expects users to manage software.

My second piece of unasked for advice - Mint-specific forums will be much more useful for any support questions you have than general Linux forums during the time when you are getting your feet wet. There are a lot of things that are the same between distros, but enough differences to make distro-specific advice valuable for new folks.

I wish you nothing but success!

I run Mint on my main PC. The final push was the near daily prodding to subscribe to 365 or use OneDrive or some shit. It's annoying at best and coercive at worst when the system changes my settings without permission.

For the trouble I've had on Linux, it's far less annoying, and it keeps getting better while Windows seems hell bent on getting worse. Thanks to Steam Deck all my games work with minimal tweaking. Works hard. Plays hard. Isn't annoying. It's hard not to love when it feels like it's my computer again.

I'm still running Windows 10 on my main PC because I have ~40 niche software needs and I haven't had time to research Linux alternatives. But I'm running Linux on a number of the other machines I manage.

Speaking of which, is there a free software you'd recommend for video capture on Linux?

Welcome to real freedom from big tech. :)

It feels that way because it is

After the initial learning curve when starting in Linux to solving advanced problemas that may or may not occur (will depend on Nvidia/exotic hardware/DE updates), you find it's easier to solve these because there are questions and answers in the internet, than finding another way to remove Edge, Cortana and restore the look and feel of windows 7 after every major update in windows

I came here to say pretty much the same thing, but found your post instead. I just made the jump this week. I'm running a Legion 5 Pro with 2 SSD's, so I left Win11 on its drive and installed Mint on the other. They seem to be playing well together - no conflicts so far.

I'm pumped on how simple it actually was! I wish I'd have done it sooner...MS has been really irritating me lately so I finally went for it. Loving it so far!

Welcome! My main piece of advice to you is use your package manager and don't just download software from your browser like you would on Windows. Installing software with a command line package manager is the superior way to do it—nothing to do with being a leet hackerman/woman using the terminal, it is just an easier way to keep all your software centrally up to date without having to individually update each one separately, and it's faster to do in the terminal rather than bother with the bloat and slowness of a GUI. Generally, Windows teaches you a lot of bad computer habits you should try to unlearn. I think installing software from the web is the biggest Windows-based mistake I made when new to Linux.

I think more generally learn to use the command line, a lot of things they have guis for (eg burning an iso, mounting or formatting a drive, version control guis, etc) are completely doable from the command line and it's faster and more reliable to just use Unix commands for these things than to rely on a potentially buggy or slow gui program.