Was at the DMV for my license and realized all their stuff runs on Mint! Thought that was kinda silly

I'm in love already. Having a blast with the terminal. Still tinkering with it to get it set up exactly how I like. I'm having a blast with the learning process. I'll get around to doing some actual productive work.....eventually. I know people like to hate on AI, but it's been a total game changer for me in the learning process and figuring out terminal commands, etc.

I installed Linux Mint Xfce. This laptop was running Windows 10 which was eating the resources of this laptop. The specs are pretty bad [1] but it was still usable up until recently where everything took forever and browsing the internet was not comfortable.

Linux made it usable again and the resource usage drop substantially.

This was my second time installing linux. I'm still a beginner so any tips would be appreciated and let me know your thoughts on this.

If anyone is browsing reddit considering installing Linux on an old machine, do it. it really makes a difference compared windows.

[1] Specs
CPU: Intel Celereon N3350 2.4ghz
GPU: Intel Hd Graphics 500 0.65ghz Integrated
Memory: 3.66GB
HDD

It's been 9 days since I posted about giving Linux Mint a try on my old laptop, so I thought I'd share a little update with 4 screenshots of what I've been up to.

1. Ricing and music

I've been messing around with ricing, and while there's still not much going on, I've managed to get pretty close to the overall theme I had in mind. I also switched from cmus to rmpc for music and added cava to the mix. You have no idea how much of a pain that was to set up! But honestly, as someone who's never really been into the technical side of computers, I've learned SO much throughout this process.

The Linux community has also been amazing. Almost every specific question I've had so far has been answered with a clear and helpful explanation. It's been a great experience.

2. Comics

Another one of my hobbies is reading comics, and I've been using MComix for that. There are terminal-based alternatives too, but I find this one much more convenient.

3 & 4. GOG and Hypnospace Outlaw

Thanks to Linux, I've also gotten back to my GOG backlog and discovered a bunch of great games I'd been meaning to play. Hypnospace Outlaw is one of them, and I've included a screenshot in the fourth image.

Heroic Games Launcher is also a great alternative for GOG games, but since I don't have an Epic Games account, I didn't really feel the need to install it just for my GOG library. Installing GOG games is actually super easy anyway: you just download the game file, double-click it, and you're good to go!

A couple of extra details:

The wallpaper art is from Darth Vader (2017) #1, illustrated by Giuseppe Camuncoli. You can find it here.

The TIE fighter ASCII art in Fastfetch is from ASCII Art Archive.

I've also been learning a bit about X11 and Wayland. I'd like to stick with X11 on this laptop for as long as it's supported, since I don't want to spend money upgrading this machine. I'm hoping to switch my desktop PC to Linux around December, though, and give Wayland a try there with the newer updates.

I'm trying to get a little more comfortable with Linux every day before making the full switch, but even these first 9 days have already changed the way I use my computer for the better.

Linux didn't just give my old laptop a second life. It also gave me a new hobby. And I'm having a great time with it!

Thanks again to everyone, and thanks for this community!

Because i really like the effect kf this and I want to get it onto my windows/pages (its not for the nostalgia factor because ive never used windows 7 before)

Today I ditched windows (for good). The installation was fairly straight forward and there are things I need to learn more about in general.

I.e. flatpacks vs distro package (?), security updates, what settings to turn on/off etc etc.

I’ll take all the help I can get as I get accustomed to it. Any tips and tricks to stay safe and up to date, and applications I would need?

I already learned that IPV6 is not… supported via proton VPN? Can’t access web with proton vpn on and ipv6 toggled.

Thanks for convincing me to join you guys, I appreciate it!

I work at a company that provides Windows laptops with a ton of extensions and software installed. I don't even know why so much is necessary, but the experience has been terrible.

My laptop becomes extremely slow just trying to do basic development work. Opening VS Code, asking an AI agent to make changes, running a server through Command Prompt, opening Chrome to check the server, and keeping Jira, SSO, and email open can make the entire computer crash.

And even after closing everything, sometimes I can't get back to work immediately. I open just the agent and try to continue making changes, but the system remains unresponsive for a while.

The frustrating part? I barely have any files on that laptop. Just two cloned repositories for my projects.

After dealing with this frustration, I came home to my personal laptop, which was also running Windows, and realised I was fed up with seeing Windows altogether.

So, I completely removed Windows and installed Linux Mint. I've even done some personal styling with themes, icons, and other customisations.

And honestly, I'm enjoying Linux so far. 😌

Edit: Used AI to format this post, but the thoughts are entirely my own.

Moving to Linux Mint

This is my story of moving to Linux Mint after decades on MS Windows. I'm not a zealot and not a Windows hater. I started my career with Unix, and had a mostly good experience with MS operating systems, especially after NT 3.1 (the first version) came out. Strangely, I still remember a lot of details about Unix, especially scripting.

My machine is a ThinkPad P16s Gen 2 AMD (16″) Mobile Workstation, with Radeon 780M graphics. This machine is my daily driver and has pretty respectable specs, despite being nearly 2 years old.

The main reason I considered moving off of Windows 11 were serious bugs associated with the graphics card (AMD Radeon 780M). One of the CPUs would run at 100% and run the fan pretty hard whenever the system shut down the monitors after a period of idleness. And Windows 11 was apparently not able to put the system in an idle mode after a period of inactivity.

I had previously installed Linux Mint on another older Thinkpad with great results, so I decided to give Linux Mint a try on the daily driver.

Preparations

Step 0 was to look at the Lenovo-supported Linux distros for my Thinkpad:

Lenovo's List of Supported Linux Distros

Linux Mint wasn't on Lenovo's list. But I persevered because of my positive experience with Mint on the other Thinkpad.

Step 1 was to check out the Linux Mint preview from a flash drive. I verified that multiple monitors worked (and that I could run with my main laptop display turned off). Sleep mode seemed to work. My wireless keyboard and mouse worked. My USB CD/DVD drive worked.

Everything seemed OK, so I backed up everything (with read-back verification).

Step 2 was to prepare for the installation. I used balenaEtcher to create an ISO image of Linux Mint. I verified the ISO's checksum.

CertUtil -hashfile filename.iso SHA256

Step 3 was to install Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon. I did not chose to dual boot. I had heard that Windows 11 tends to clobber the dual boot settings.

Installing and Configuring Linux Mint

The installation went very smoothly and was pretty fast, compared to Windows. And unlike Windows, I didn't have to spend lots of time de-enshittifying the OS by disabling advertisements and news headlines, etc. All my drives were formatted with ext4. The main drive was fully encrypted, naturally.

I enabled the firewall after installation. I set up Timeshift, even though I use custom backup scripts to do backups.

I installed my favorite apps that were available for both Windows 11 and Linux: Libre Office, VLC, JetBrains IDEs, Thunderbird, svn, VirtualBox, GIMP, DropBox, and my own apps.

I did notice a lot of issues with my graphics card (which Windows 11 had problems with). The main problem was flashes which reminded me of watching an analog TV station a long way away. There were also problems with the monitors automatically powering down after a period of idleness. They would go dark, and then they'd power up again and display the screen saver.

I was able to address the above problems by falling back to version 6.8.0-147 of the kernel. This version is somewhat old, but will be supported for years to come. And it doesn't have issues with the graphics card. No artifacts or flashes. The system is able to idle the CPU properly.

I did have to change two settings on the monitors to get them to power-down when appropriate. I set them to take input from a specific source (HDMI or Display Port). And I turned off "Input Auto Switch" off.

I used the wonderful Windows app "EAC Exact Audio Copy" to rip CDs to FLAC format. I figured I could run it from a Windows 11 VirtualBox VM. I was able to do so, but it was awkward and the AccurateRip feature didn't work. Fortunately I found "fre:ac" which does a great job ripping audio CDs to FLAC format.

I had to configure GRUB to display readable fonts on my main 4k laptop screen. By default the text was almost microscopic. I had to magnify them with my phone to read them.

sudo apt install grub2-theme-mint-2k
sudo update-grub

I was able to mount a networked drive connected to my TP Link router. I use a script to do this. I tried to get it to automatically mount, and have not been successful yet.

As a software developer, I had one website deployment script, and several application build and packaging scripts that I had to convert. That was straightforward and fun even, even with my rusty shell scripting skills.

Ext4 on Magnetic Hard Drives

I use three external USB magnetic hard drives. I formatted them all to ext4 format. When I started using them I noticed that the performance was abysmal. I learned that Linux formats the drives in a few seconds, and then can spend hours updating their inode tables, which caused the temporary performance issues. Now I know to format such drives, and leave them for a few hours, and verify that they are truly idle before using them.

The background process that zeros the inode tables is named "ext4lazyinit".

Note: I won't recommend formatting external drives as ext4 if you intend to use them on Linux as well as Windows 11 systems.

Installing and Configuration Apps

I installed TLP to limit battery charging to 80% (to extend the lifespan).

sudo apt install tlp

I noticed that my BIOS configuration UI allows the laptop battery to be basically disconnected. That might also be a good setting for me. I don't often take that laptop out of my office.

I use Subversion still. I found "kdesvn" which is great.

For monitoring the system, the built-in System Monitor is nice. "Mission Center" is even better, for some things.

"KPatience" is a nifty game which offers multiple flavors of solitaire.

Thunderbird

I was able to move saved Thunderbird emails to Linux Mint after I realized that the Thunderbird versions had to match.

I had a similar issue with my Subversion repository. When moving a repository from Windows 11 to Linux, one cannot simply copy the repository folders and files. One has to dump the file on the Windows 11 system, and load that file on the Linux Mint system. I ran Windows 11 in VirtualBox to dump the repo, and then loaded it from the Linux system.

What to Do with the Old Windows 11 License Key? Nothing?

I kept my Windows 11 license key, since I expected to have to use it to create a VirtualBox guest system. I learned that this isn't really necessary. One can download a Windows 11 ISO from Microsoft and use it to create a Windows 11 guest in VirtualBox. If one never registers the guest system, it will eventually display a watermark on the desktop, and disable\ some of the customization UIs. No big deal for me. I only plan to use Windows 11 to test my apps.

Firmware Updates

I wondered how I was going to get future firmware updates for my system, and learned about "fwupdmgr". It was able to update my firmware. Of course I should have done that before the conversion.

sudo fwupdmgr refresh
sudo fwupdmgr update

FireFox

Of course I installed the following to FireFox:

Privacy Badger
uBlock Origin
Dark Reader

Also, I set browser.backspace_action to 0 to allow backspace to, um, go back. You can do this in the about:config page.

Desktop Launchers

I set up desktop launchers for some of the shell scripts I wrote. In some cases, I want the terminal to remain after the shell script completes (so that I can read any messages). Here's how you can do that:

In the Launcher UI, check "Launch in Terminal?". For the command, specify the following:

gnome-terminal -- bash -c "{file path of shell script}; exec bash"

Was it Worth It?

Was it worth the (substantial) effort? Absolutely! It took me multiple days to get everything set up properly, but I cannot imagine going back to Windows 11. I'm very pleased with the results:

1. Performance is better, pretty much across the board.
2. As a developer, access to better scripting is really nice.
3. It's great to get away from Windows 11's ads and telemetry.

And I'm confident that if, in the future, Linux Mint doesn't meet my needs, I have many other viable options from which to choose.

How are things different on Linux Mint?

1. After falling back to the 6.8 Kernel, there are no issues with Radeon 780M graphics. Yay!
2. The main apps that I use run the same, or better, in Linux Mint.
3. The performance of the built-in Files (Nemo) app is so much better than the Windows 11 File Manager. For whatever reason, the Windows File Manager would frequently stall while external hard drives slowly spun up. And it would take a long time to delete files from a very large folder.
4. Advice from this forum was good. Gemini was also good for finding answers.

Should You Switch?

Do I recommend that you switch to Linux Mint? Maybe, maybe not. If you are experiencing serious Windows 11-specific issues or annoyances, and have at least software developer-level skills, by all means give it a try. If you don't have any familiarity with Unix or Linux, I'd recommend converting only if you have access to an experienced user who can help you in person. Or just start with a computer other than your daily driver.

I hope the above is useful to some of you.

I did a fresh install and wiped Windows. Going to give it a good month and see how I feel. That being said, this alone made me feel good about the decision. Both pictures are just my PC idling with a web browser open. I know that Windows fills in unused ram, to make things smoother, but I just don't like seeing that 70%

I'm just going to spend the day configuring/customizing and learning.

If anyone has any resources/YT videos I should check out please send them my way.

:)

I am using Mint at home on both desktop and laptop for programming (C# using Rider), hobby game development (GDscript with Godot), music (VLC) and some gaming. As such, I am happy how it performs.

However, recently I have started working in a company where they hand to us M1 Mac laptops and it is the first time I had to work professionally on Mac. Some corporate additions made it a bit sluggish and behaving weird at times. Mind you this is only for us devs and we use Rider, docker, git clients, VPN and MS Office as mandated by corporation. Then again I am tempted to start using online version of MS Office instead.

So that made me wonder: how would Mint perform? Apart from MS Office bundle that can be used online or with Feridion I think, I wonder how would Mint handle corporate network and such? Does anyone have such experience?

My brain just went down a rabbit hole. I noticed that the Min/Max/Close buttons behaved differently on different applications. Example the calculator buttons used the css transition in the them. But apps like Nemo did not. The buttons didn't fade in and out of color the same way. AI helped me understand why. Calculator is a gnome app made to work on Cinnamon and loads the window differently. This is all new to me.

Reading further into the situation seems to arrive on a battle between different distros and how things are done. Hence Xapps which are drawn the way Mint wants them to. Mint hasn't yet created all Xapps they need and Calculator appears to be one of them.

So I went back to the AI window. If those guys can clone Adobe and microsoft behavior I could certainly make a simple GTK3 calculator the Mint way, right? And for no other reason than just to see if I 'could.'

Here's what I have so far. I think adding one more mode for Currency conversion should finish it off. It's not just a direct clone of the packaged Gnome Calculator. It ended up being it's own. Feedback is appreciated. Linux users can be a tough crowd so maybe I'll receive some productive insight.

https://github.com/xlcheese/Xcalculator

Oh, and there's a hidden easter egg with a specific number that would make kids giggle with their calculators. Pressing = on that number triggers it.

So... I am very new to Linux mint, I just set it up.

I am basically all done with the essentials but I am missing something super important to me. The moving around of windows in specific places.

I am talking specifically about what Rectangle is doing on Mac and what windows integrated windows manager is doing.

Since I am on a super ultrawide 5120x1440 monitor. This is important since I need to move around my windows where I would please. I know Mint comes in some prebuilt window snap mode. But its not what I want. I want to customize it, is this possible?

I also tested the extension gTile which is sort of what I need, but its pretty mecky. I guess I can build a script for this?

Thanks a lot

​

Hi everyone! I'm a complete Linux beginner, and I just installed Linux Mint XFCE. I wanted to customize it, so I downloaded a theme/icon pack (I think it was a glass style) from XFCE-Look.

​Ever since I applied it, my desktop is completely broken:

​When I click the start button, an error pops up: "The Whisker Menu plugin has unexpectedly quit from the panel. Do you want to restart it?". When I click restart, the loop just repeats.

​Other icons/apps on the taskbar (like file manager) aren't working either.

​The taskbar itself keeps disappearing.

​How can I fix this and reset my desktop/panel to default without losing my files? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

This is an issue I used to have when plugging in my USB DACs, but now it happens as I'm using my computer.

I'm up to date on both OS and BIOS, tried multiple slots, multiple DACs, but I at random have this issue where my right channel or even both drop to almost nothing. Yesterday, my microphone dropped like this! The issue fixes itself when I swap away and back on output. Some people recommend using AI for troubleshooting, but Gemini has not been helpful in the slightest.

I put out this post to see if anyone else is dealing with this. I otherwise love Linux Mint to bits when it isn't acting up like this. Whatever information is needed, I'll reply with.

Howdy, I've been using a decade-old PC on win10 for the last few years and been intending to just wait to get a newer laptop in a couple months to convert it and the PC both to Linux, but various reasons have led me to think I aught to at least have it downloaded ready to install, and at that point I'm thinking I might just be smart to go ahead and install it soon. But I've got to ask a couple questions.

Firstly, system requirements? I know Linux is praised for being lightweight and all but I also know a potato PC nowadays is about half what this medieval hunk of metal has. How are the requirements on the three editions of Mint? Or more specifically how much do they actually use, especially the RAM and such.

And second is updates. I'm just curious how those work. Am I able to disable them, choose what gets added/changed, etc?

Also curious on the customizability, though I don't have any specifics on that front, just curious if there's interesting things that y'all'd like to mention.

And any other beginner things I may need to know, including what size of a USB stick I need since it seems like I need one of those?

I think it cause by an app update but i don't want to reinstall the whole os can someone help

Hello everyone😊!

I am going to upload a letter and 3 pictures taken with a digital camera using a form on a webpage.

1. What is the best way to remove all metadata from the pictures?
2. I will be using AI to write the letter and copy/pasting the text from Google Gemini. How can I remove all metadata from the letter before copy/pasting it into the form?

Thank you!

I see everyone here talking about Cinnamon or XFCE, which is fine and all, but i currently am on MATE and im wondering why i hardly see anyone else on it? is there any particular reason why? from what i can tell, XFCE isnt even much more lightweight than MATE these days.