It took my old laptop dying on me for me to finally ask my geeky neighbor to install Mint on another laptop I had around.
It’s been a few hours and Omigod. Why did I waste so much time? It works. It’s easy and intuitive. It makes sense. There’s no bullshit.
I still have to make Antidote talk to Libre Office, but whatever. The rest feels good and natural.
So please whoever is here because you’re contemplating switching: do it yesterday.


consult https://distrowatch.com/ if your interested in what different distros might have to offer.
When I feel it’s time to spread my wings. I’m still stuck on Libre Office freezing whenever I ctr-tab between windows. Baby steps, unfortunately.
One day you’ll use Arch, btw
Try OnlyOffice (the appimage). It’s more compatible than LibreOffice for MS formats. Alternatively, consider downloding the LibreOfficeFresh appimage, which is the latest version (Linux Mint’s is 2 years old). When you download an .AppImage file, you right click it, Properties, and you mark it as executable. Then, run it. Always download appimages from the developer’s source site, not from third parties.
AppImage may be up-to-date now, but it has no self update mechanism, so a Flatpak is a better choice IMO
Not sure what an appimage is, but I picked OnlyOffice in what’s called Logithèque in French, and maybe Software manager (or “repository”) in English? Main menu / Administration / Logithèque.
After an in-depth trial of at least 4 minutes, I can say I love it, and it works fine.
You now have the unending gratitude of a random French woman.
Sounds like the distribution’s “package manager,” or rather, one of the GUIs for it. (Not sure which one because I don’t know what distro you’re using).
In order to understand what things like “AppImage” and other types of “packages” are, I think it helps to know the history.
TL;DR:
Since GNU/Linux is a Free Software OS, in the beginning, everybody had to compile their software from source and manage the dependencies for it manually. This sucked, so Linux distributions started curating the software and “packaging” it to reference its dependencies (that’s why they’re called “distributions” in the first place, BTW). The package manager (e.g. Debian’s dpkg/APT and Red Hat’s RPM) can recursively check for and install all those correct dependencies before installing the program you actually asked it for.
But even that wasn’t good enough (apparently) because it happened on a per-distro basis and because (generally speaking) all the software on the system shared the same version of each dependency, so all the software had to be kept updated in lockstep. So now people have come up with systems like Flatpak and AppImage that are designed to work across distros, include the dependencies with the apps themselves so they aren’t shared with the rest of the system, and in some cases also run the program isolated in a container for better security.
Bottom line is, now there are several ways to install software, with various tradeoffs:
One last thing: GUIs for this stuff started out as interfaces for the distro’s package manager, but are increasingly designed to work with universal packages as well. With the command line it’s generally obvious what kind of package you’re installing (because you’re typing a different command entirely), but with the GUI you have to pay close attention if you actually care whether you’re installing a dpkg or a flatpak. Also, if you see an app listed twice, that’s probably the reason why.
I’ll try it asap. Libre Office freezes every minute or so, actually, and not only when I change windows. It’s unusable as is. Thanks for your advice.