I recently installed the latest version of Linux Mint because I was sick of Windows with Microsoft thinking that because I had installed Windows it owns my PC, automatically 'fixing' things that were better off not running, as these were things that trawled my hard drive and absolutely destroyed the performance of the PC for long periods at a time. The two things that come to mind when dealing with this is 'Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser' (the Microsoft Telemetry thing) and 'Windows Update Medic Service'. Both these things trawl my hard drive, I've watched them do it. Why 'Windows Update Medic Service' would be going through the jar files of a program that I unpacked to a completely non-windows directory I have no idea. These programs doing this is one thing, but Microsoft tries to prevent people from disabling these services from running, I actually have to break windows enough so that it actually runs well. That is why I realised that when I run Windows I really don't own my PC and installed Linux.

Experience installing and setting up Linux.

* Installing Linux was trivial, scary to shrink an NTFS partition in the installer, but after a long time it finished and worked really well. Tried Windows built in NTFS resize before this but even with almost all data removed from HDD it wouldn't lower the more than something like 300MB off of a 2.7GB partition.

* The basics worked without configuration. Graphics were fine even before installing drivers, internet was autosetup out of the box.

* There was still some basic stuff that needed searching the internet for to deal with, such as sound volume. The sound was really quiet even putting it to max volume on the desktop. Thing is the graphical control to change it was separate from the master volume, which was set to almost 0%. To change this I needed to run the 'alsamixer' command line program.

* Fonts look different, for some reason the way they were rendered made them look skinnier. Played with the rendering settings and then just accepted it.

* I was hyper sensitive to programs and games running differently and thought that some had problems on Linux (such as micro stutter in a game). But then I compared and they had exactly the same problem on both Windows and Linux. Ended up installing the much newer XanMod kernel distribution before I realised it was my perception and not my Linux install that was the problem.

So the setup worked to a point, having a desktop with internet connectivity was no problem and required no actual setup that I remember. Other things like sound required required me to use the terminal to set it up correctly. There was some other stuff I had to change which I had to search the internet for quite some time for, I wouldn't have been able to do it without looking stuff up on answer sites. Not the smoothest setup for getting stuff working correctly, but not too bad, and it is stuff I don't have to worry about after initial setup. Some of the issues with sound may have been because I was using a USB sound card which I think is not that common. Anyway that is my recent experience, Linux didn't run perfectly out of the box for me, but it was manageable. That was just the setup, running it is very nice, very snappy, and it doesn't have stuff that grinds my hard drive for no good reason.