https://explosm.net/rcg/megnsukpl

I was really rushed when I set it up. Maybe I missed something. It’s a Brother network laser printer. I think it’s the network printer that needs more handling but I really don’t know. I’ll put some more time in later. At any rate it was more CLI fiddling.

Maybe I just needed to go out and find Brother Linux drivers and install that way.

I’ve spent 30 years on Windows and I let it go almost 2 years ago for Mint.

The only real pain point I’ve found is on a hard power-off (loss of power, OS hangs) I often have to do some CLI drive maintenance using a bunch of commands I can’t fucking remember to save my life. ChatGPT always helps me out (so nice to just take a pictures of logs and error messages on my screen and have ChatGPT tell me what if anything is relevant), but I’m a power user of both computers and ChatGPT so I’m able to push back on ChatGPT when it’s wrong about something, getting side-tracked, or tells me to use tools that non-standard for my distribution. I’m not sure casual users would find AI as helpful, which means they have to call a professional (or relative) for help which can cost money.

Printing isn’t quite the same. Certain PDFs have to be printed to TIFF files before they will print. Some applications don’t offer my printer as an option, so for example I have to download a PDF that is open in Firefox and then print it from whatever the default PDF application is. I haven’t even attempted to set up the scanning functionality of my printer on this computer.

Games for the most part just work. I tend to buy everything off of Steam and I haven’t really had to mess with anything to get them to work on my computer. I did buy one game that isn’t on Steam and it took an hour or two of effort to get Wine working with it

90+% of what low-tech computer users use a computer for is just a browser. I spend probably 1% or less of my time in CLI, maybe 10-20% of my time in specific apps (VSCode, IntelliJ, Joplin, LibreOffice, Discord, Steam games) and almost everything else I do is in a browser.

Moral of my story, I suppose, is if Mint would auto-heal on hard power-off and you can browser and print just as easily as on Windows, I could recommend it to my non-technical folks.