I try to switching from windows 10 to linuxmint to get more performance, and I don't what is this, help me pls

If I don't want the calendar events do I have to use a 3rd party Date-Time app?

I cannot find my 1tb drive in steam (wine). I am running proton steam.

It's the best screensaver why does this not exist😭😭😭

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.

New to Linux and my goal is to repurpose an old MacBook and have it act like a home server and have it run jellyfin on it. It's latest OS version was Monterey which is my main reason for wanting to move to Linux as Jellyfin will probably stop offering support to Monterey in the near future.

I have been booting mint from a USB drive and sometimes it loads to the desktop great, sometimes it doesn't load at all. I can't load in compatibility mode because I don't have access to my keyboard and mouse and I can't try the nomodeset edit because the ctrl+x just types out a literal x and I don't have F10 or esc keys because I have a Touch Bar (I have ordered a wired mouse and keyboard that have yet arrived)

I noticed that when the desktop does boot normally, if I don't touch it for 5 mins or so, I can click around without much issue. If I start to click around in the first 1 or 2 mins it will soon just go black.

I recently pulled up terminal and found out Unloading the AMD driver failed with "Module amdgpu is in use". I think that means the AMD driver is still active and when I tried to turn it off the screen just went blank again but the laptop didn't shut off or restart which makes me think the screen was being driven through the AMD GPU, so detaching it cut the display. The session was probably still be running behind the black screen, but I couldn't use it.

I tried this on Mint 22.3 Xfce and then thought to try it with Cinnamon but similar issues with the desktop loading then producing a black screen if I interact too quickly.

My laptop specs:
Intel HD Graphics 530
AMD Radeon RX 460/560D / Pro 450/455/460/555/560

Is it possible Mint just isn't compatible with my laptop? What else can I try to get this running?

I am an old Linux mint user and i am willing to help anyone in his problem on the comments

Write me your problem and i am here to help

Hey Minters!

I ported NFS Most Wanted Black Edition (2005) to run natively on Linux Mint as a real Linux binary (Vulkan + SDL3), no Wine / Emulator needed.

Tested on my ThinkPad X270 (i7-7600U, Intel HD 620, Mint 22.3 XFCE) and it locks at 60 FPS.

It's a .deb package - just install and select your own original Xbox ISO. No pirated files included, it's an open-source preservation project.

No terminal needed:
1. Download .deb from Releases
2. Double-click to install
3. Launch from Games menu

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.

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?

Hello,

I hope your having a chill but productive day. I am currently looking for YouTube Music player application that supports casting on Mint. I am somewhat a little confused where to post this but any advice would be greatly appreciate.

Thank you

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?

hola soy nuevo en linux estoy con linux mint xfce para streaming mi pc no es muy buena es una i5 4th y una rx 550 de grafica con unos 8gb de ram quiero recomendaciones para streaming (elegi usar linux por la gran cantidad de personalizacion que puedo realizar) ya personalice y me acostumbre un poco a lo basico no se si me recomiendan algo que pueda hacer para mejorar mi experiencia en juego con linux (juego cosas como los resident evils clasicos de la ps3 hacia atras)

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. Here is the script:

mount_nas_drive.sh:

#!/bin/bash

sudo mount -t cifs -o username={username},password={password},uid=1000,gid=1000,vers=2.0 //{IP address of drive}/{drive root folder} {drive mount point}

Scripting

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 have mint and my mic has some bad background sounds. I can onlu solve it bu decreasing my mic levels. I am not sure if my sound is lower. Also my friend said that he has a similar problem. Btw I have Lenovo Thinkpad

I love how Linux cares about our privacy, control over updates and just plain no bullshit. Of course it's not all rainbow and sunshine sailing but it surely gets the job done for me. ^..^

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.

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!