You certainly can. I think part of this perception comes from this idea that you’re stuck with the same desktop environment or utilities that came with the system, whereas on Linux you can completely reinstall things you didn’t even know were options from the Windows World.
For example, I can run Gnome and use the KDE connect application if I want to.
To some users, if the system doesn’t recommend the use case or hold your hand through it, they confuse that with being impossible.
It’s valuable to see comments like this, though. You could claim it’s ignorance on the part of the writer, but a better takeaway is that Linux doesn’t do a good job of explaining how it works. This could have been prevented with some kind of post-install documentation explaining exactly what you just posted, for example. The “New To Linux” experience is really not great if you don’t have online communities or external-to-the-OS resources to reference to find out things like this. I went quite a long time after making the switch before really understanding that the desktop environment is largely independent from the OS and how the two relate.
On that note, having multiple desktop environments available to “demo” on the live USB pre-install would help massively. Hearing “Oh, there’s X desktop environments to choose from!” isn’t useful if you don’t know what the difference is or which one you prefer, and online resources aren’t particularly helpful if you’re coming to Linux from another OS. Fuck anyone who installs, say, CachyOS that has what, like 15-20 options? rather than 3 for Mint.
And there is an extension for GNOME shell called GSconnect using kdeconnect protocol. But I understand there’s none called Linux mint so it’s not as easy for discoverability.
You certainly can. I think part of this perception comes from this idea that you’re stuck with the same desktop environment or utilities that came with the system, whereas on Linux you can completely reinstall things you didn’t even know were options from the Windows World.
For example, I can run Gnome and use the KDE connect application if I want to.
To some users, if the system doesn’t recommend the use case or hold your hand through it, they confuse that with being impossible.
You can run kde connect on Mint Cinnamon without problems too
It’s valuable to see comments like this, though. You could claim it’s ignorance on the part of the writer, but a better takeaway is that Linux doesn’t do a good job of explaining how it works. This could have been prevented with some kind of post-install documentation explaining exactly what you just posted, for example. The “New To Linux” experience is really not great if you don’t have online communities or external-to-the-OS resources to reference to find out things like this. I went quite a long time after making the switch before really understanding that the desktop environment is largely independent from the OS and how the two relate.
On that note, having multiple desktop environments available to “demo” on the live USB pre-install would help massively. Hearing “Oh, there’s X desktop environments to choose from!” isn’t useful if you don’t know what the difference is or which one you prefer, and online resources aren’t particularly helpful if you’re coming to Linux from another OS. Fuck anyone who installs, say, CachyOS that has what, like 15-20 options? rather than 3 for Mint.
And there is an extension for GNOME shell called GSconnect using kdeconnect protocol. But I understand there’s none called Linux mint so it’s not as easy for discoverability.