After complaining yesterday about seeing too much Linux content in the Fediverse I went out and bought a laptop for Linux.

https://lemmy.zip/post/5406272

After complaining yesterday about seeing too much Linux content in the Fediverse I went out and bought a laptop for Linux. - Lemmy.zip

Turns out the reply in my thread telling me the best way to combat not caring about Linux is to care about Linux was absolutely correct. I picked up a laptop, installed Linux Mint Cinnamon, and I’m already obsessed. I haven’t had this much fun with a PC in a long time and it’s just a cheapo Dell Inspiron 3520.

The longer I spend on Lemmy the more tempted I am to give Linux another try (had an old desktop with Ubuntu 10+ years ago, but never really got the hang of it fully, can’t remember the exact details but not everything worked properly).

What holds me back is I’m in the middle of an engineering degree, I need to be able to collaborate easily on documents with word, share folders with OneDrive etc because that’s what everyone uses. Even signing into the uni’s portal-type thing is managed through your MS office account and authenticator app. And also I don’t have a lot of spare time to fiddle around getting things to work and ironing out wrinkles, even if that only needs done one and it’ll be fine in the long run…I need to be able to get on with my work reliably (maybe over Christmas I will have a bit more time to do setting up stuff).

Can anyone convince me ask these worries are unfounded? Can you still easily interact with the MS universe, or are there ways around this?

My poor wee laptop is already full to bursting with MATLAB, stm32 ide, etc so I don’t think I’d be able to partition and dual boot…

I had a similar issue and honestly I would just recommend worrying about it later. Don’t force it, just try it when you have some free time.

I started off with dual boot to play with Linux and jump to windows when I need it. Then eventually to full Linux once I realized I never actually needed it to do all my work.

I recommend Linux mint as its the most similar to windows and is built for new Linux users. I tried Ubuntu first and the experience was pretty bad, but I learned much quicker in mint and had a much better experience right away.