As a backend developer, my journey from being a MacOS lover to a Linux Mint (Cinnamon) fan
Helllllooooo Hellooooo Hellooooo Everyone! 👋
Today I’m going to share my journey from being a hardcore MacOS lover to a Linux Mint fan. I will tell you the kind of problems I faced and how I set it up slowly along with the status of where I am currently
I’m working as a programmer and I was using Mac for the past 6 years. One thing I can definitely say is that Mac is an awesome machine, it’s really hard to get rid of once you get used to it as it comes up with flawless hardware and software combination. It is undoubtedly a very powerful machine👌👌
Why and how my journey started with Linux
I recently did a job change and returned my Macbook Pro to the previous organization. Now I have an i7 machine with 8GB ram which is still quite good for me as I work on backend stuff majorly. It looked good initially to start with a Linux machine from scratch (When I had to decide what OS I need to work on)
I was definitely not aware of the challenges I was going to face 😂. After getting this new machine, I started looking for operating systems. Windows was definitely not a choice 😏 (na) so only Linux was left as a choice that has multiple distributions. I heard pretty much good stuff about Ubuntu and it has awesome community support, so I installed it. But I found it too fancy for my needs. This is how it looked.
To be honest, I didn’t like it much and it was quite UI heavy. Especially after using a simple OS like macOS, it was very hard to adapt to this kind of funky UI. I used it for a few days, then decided to find a lighter and simpler version, but I needed a version with good community support. So I did some more study and found that there are more Ubuntu-based Operating Systems available like Kubuntu, Lubuntu, etc but I didn’t like their UI much, for some reason it looked like windows UI to me 🤔. After some more googling, found Linux Mint, which seemed pretty matching to my needs. It requires around 1GB ram to run. The good thing is community support. I Went to their download page and found Mint also has 3 editions 😳, which was now the new challenge for me 😄. Again got some help from Google and found that Cinnamon is the one most related to my needs.
I downloaded and installed this OS and this is how the fresh desktop looks like
It’s pretty clean and easy to use. I Installed all the required stuff from the “Software Manager” which comes preinstalled with the OS and started exploring it.
I didn’t find the cursor very smooth. Especially after using Mac's awesome touchpad 😢, so decided to purchase a mouse to make it work better for me with a gaming keyboard. It was too hard initially, especially confusion of control and command key, keyboard layout changes. I was missing that UX but later I found it was not UX, it was an addiction of Mac. Mac has awesome software available like Sourcetree, OpenEmu, Sequel pro, iTerm, and the kind of optimized user experience without any crashes. Here is what I did to manage that part.
Touchpad -> I started using a mouse and it works well.
Command and control confusion -> It took a week to settle that down with the new keyboard layout.
Sourcetree -> Could not find such replacement, now I’m fully on CLI. I face no issues now.
Sequel Pro -> I’m using Mysql Workbench now, it’s heavy but does the work
iTerm -> Unreplacable, but I’m now pretty much used to the in-built terminal of this OS. It’s pretty nice and runs smoother than iTerm
OpenEmu -> Unable to find such an amazing all in one emulator but using a different emulator as per the needs.
In around a week of time, I got used to the mouse, but getting used to this Mechanical and Gaming Keyboard took around two to three weeks. Still miss Mac’s butterfly 😉. This mechanical keyboard is noisy and I am worried if a day my neighbor complains about me making a lot of noise with the keyboard 😂. Jokes are apart, now I’m pretty much used to this setup.
All set now and I started using this operating system and started exploring side by side. It has been months now and I’m very comfortable with this machine. I don’t miss Mac anymore 😂. It may take a month to get comfortable with this OS if you’re coming from MacOS. Here is the latest screenshot of my desktop.
I am thinking to write a separate article around the setup of Cinnamon like this. It will become a long article otherwise. One thing I would like to highlight is, Linux Mint Cinnamon is highly customizable and very flexible. Some major customizations are mentioned below.
— You can move, resize, customize the taskbar. They call it panel.
— You can add more than one panel in a workspace.
— You can add applets
— You can choose the theme of the taskbar and windows as per your convenience.
— You can add widgets
— You can easily disable any fancy stuff like animations etc.
— UI is so clean, I just love it.
It looks so pretty even in a different theme
One thing I definitely like to mention is, Cinnamon has some bugs in UI which you may notice during usage. But you will slowly start living with it. Remember, running open-source software isn’t an easy thing. That organization is running a complete Operating System without much financial support. That is something to appreciate and salute. They’re making our life easy. 🙏
So, if you are also a mac lover and want to move to Linux. I’m pretty sure that this article will help you. But keep in mind that it may take around a month to get used to Linux. Feel free to get back to me if you have any queries related to the setup. I would love to help you!
Bye Bye!
