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:
- Performance is better, pretty much across the board.
- As a developer, access to better scripting is really nice.
- 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?
- After falling back to the 6.8 Kernel, there are no issues with Radeon 780M graphics. Yay!
- The main apps that I use run the same, or better, in Linux Mint.
- 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.
- 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.
