I'm trying to switch away from Windows 8.1 because Windows 10 is just too much. Decided to start with Linux Mint in a VM.
Installation was smooth and easy. Went for Cinnamon because it's the recommended one. Coped with having a Japanese keyboard and English (not American) locale. Installation was very quick. On first boot a window appeared with some info, one of which was drivers. That offered to install an Intel microcode update so I went for it.
Set screen resolution. Mouse wheel seems laggy, need to look for mouse options later. First thing is updates. The update icon is in the tray area it seems. At first it wasn't doing anything... The output window said that updates were inhibited for some reason. I refreshed it a few times and it found some updates. Selected a local mirror.
Updates installed quickly and relatively easily. Only hitch was when it asked about some Gnome config file that had apparently been changed and did I want to overwrite with the one from the update. I have no idea, the diff output didn't really help so I just went with the updated file. Looked like it was just resetting some default apps.
After that it says my system is up to date (no reboot, much better than Windows) but there are two updates marked as level 5 red security updates... So not up to date? For some reason I have to manually select them, because why wouldn't I want level 5 red security updates..
I seem to be getting asked for my password a lot. Isn't once when I open the update app enough? Reminds me of the bad old days of Windows Vista with UAC prompts every 5 seconds for fairly common tasks.
The font rendering in the little "details" terminal window is crap. Linux has historically had bad font rendering... But most of it looks good. The high DPI support is a bit limited (only 1x or 2x scaling, nothing in-between) but it does at least seem to work reliably in my limited testing. No support for monitors with different scaling settings though (e.g. you have a laptop with 4k display and plug in a 2k external monitor), and lots of stuff seems to use bitmap graphics that look bad zoomed in.
Installed open-vm-tools, not sure if it actually did anything. Clipboard sharing doesn't seem to work.
Trying to get Japanese input to work is a real pain. I installed it as an input language, but it seems that I need to manually start Ibus. Found some instructions but they were out of date. The Ubuntu wiki says load it and press CTRL+space to activate, but it doesn't work. Tried changing it to CTRL+space in the prefs, didn't work. The IME switching key and the kana/roma switching keys don't work. Found a forum post that detailed how to make the daemon auto-start and suggested a restart may be required to make it work. Still did not work.
Gave up with the IME for now, but I need to get it working.
The mouse wheel is very slow. Should be easy to fix... But apparently it needs some hacking around with the command line. Can't be bothered right now... I mean, it's a basic preference. Pick this up later.