I love Mint. I’m a Linux noob but took the plunge this year and installed it. Its not 100% plain sailing but it is close enough and worth it for the simple unintrusive OS interface that Microsoft has obliterated.
It’s so weird, because Ubuntu used to be the beginner distro. I started out on it and was hooked. The level of polish and out-of-the-box readiness was really welcoming to my old mac brain.
Ubuntu would actually still be a good beginner distro imo if it wasn’t for the way they implemented their custom stuff. Even the distinction between apt and snaps is enough to scare away beginners.
What version of Firefox does it install? I tried Ubuntu, but the Snaps are having real trouble with my N150 CPU in the mini PC I bought. Cannot do hardware video decoding at all, despite the CPU being more than capable of it.
Well, the Snaps are one of the things they took out. Flatpaks are enabled in the software manager by default though.
I believe everything that comes preinstalled, including Firefox and LibreOffice and such, is installed the traditional way as if you did “apt install firefox.”
I installed LibreWolf and like it. It’s just firefox with telemetry removed and some privacy hardening out of the box.
Yeah that’s my plan. My processor won’t even support Windows 11, so that’s not an option. (I used to think it was a TPM2.0 issue, but checked more recently and it’s not. They just even more arbitrarily decided my processor is too old, while also claiming Windows 11 has the same or lower overhead than 10!) I’m also not far away from needing a hard drive, RAM, and GPU upgrade. So I figure some time reasonably soon I’ll build a new PC. That one won’t be getting Windows on it, unless I discover a game or something that I can’t run on Linux.
I haven’t met a single game yet that isn’t running, but I’m not into AAA games anyway. Worst case you just resort to dual boot (don’t forget, always install Windows first) or VM.
Amusingly, just a couple of minutes after posting that comment, I went to the aoe2 Reddit to check if I was missing some details about a recent patch (for details related to this Lemmy post I had just made). And one of the first posts I saw was this one complaining about that very-much-not-AAA game failing to run recently.
The games in that franchise are like 90% of my gaming tbh. They all get great scores on ProtonDB, but the use a kinda weird hybrid of your Steam account and your Microsoft/Xbox account for syncing player details, and one of my concerns is the Xbox account might not work correctly.
Worst case you just resort to dual boot (don’t forget, always install Windows first)
Yeah, dual booting was definitely the plan. I didn’t know you need to install Windows first though, that’s…disappointing. And frustrating. My plan was to install Linux, stick with that for as long as I can, and if I later decide I need Windows for something, install it then.
or VM
Could be a good option. Dunno how smoothly these games would run in a VM, but worth a shot, and much better than needing to dual boot, if it does work smoothly.
Is not strictly necessary to install Windows first, it just makes it easier, because Linux will setup the bootloader for you. Windows in the others hand tends to nuke everything that was installed prior, so you would at least need to repair the bootloader. To be completely safe you can just disconnect the Linux drive, while Windows is installing. Definitely a path, if you want to go for Linux only for now.
VM is a good method once it is set up, but needs more initial tinkering with the passthrough, depending on your hardware. I don’t know how those Kernel level anti cheat things work. Otherwise the game shouldn’t even know it’s in a vm.
Don’t dual boot. Instead, invest in two drives and dedicate each to each os fully. Way less headache and far more control. Easier to keep windows oblivious of Linux existence so it doesn’t fuck with it.
Isn’t that still dual booting? Unless you have two PCs (even if you somehow rigged both PCs up in the same case with separate power buttons), you need a bootloader to choose which drive to boot off of. And unless I’m mistaken, two drives is not going to look notably different to the bootloader from two partitions on the same drive, is it?
Taking 10 as far as I can go then just installing Ubuntu.
Check out Mint. It’s based on Ubuntu but has Canonical’s controversial stuff removed, plus an added layer of polish.
I love Mint. I’m a Linux noob but took the plunge this year and installed it. Its not 100% plain sailing but it is close enough and worth it for the simple unintrusive OS interface that Microsoft has obliterated.
It’s so weird, because Ubuntu used to be the beginner distro. I started out on it and was hooked. The level of polish and out-of-the-box readiness was really welcoming to my old mac brain.
Ubuntu would actually still be a good beginner distro imo if it wasn’t for the way they implemented their custom stuff. Even the distinction between apt and snaps is enough to scare away beginners.
yeah, it started out as THE beginner distro, but as other distros got better for beginners, it didn’t, and instead canonical did weird bs
What version of Firefox does it install? I tried Ubuntu, but the Snaps are having real trouble with my N150 CPU in the mini PC I bought. Cannot do hardware video decoding at all, despite the CPU being more than capable of it.
Well, the Snaps are one of the things they took out. Flatpaks are enabled in the software manager by default though.
I believe everything that comes preinstalled, including Firefox and LibreOffice and such, is installed the traditional way as if you did “apt install firefox.”
I installed LibreWolf and like it. It’s just firefox with telemetry removed and some privacy hardening out of the box.
No snapd on mint at all.
Yeah that’s my plan. My processor won’t even support Windows 11, so that’s not an option. (I used to think it was a TPM2.0 issue, but checked more recently and it’s not. They just even more arbitrarily decided my processor is too old, while also claiming Windows 11 has the same or lower overhead than 10!) I’m also not far away from needing a hard drive, RAM, and GPU upgrade. So I figure some time reasonably soon I’ll build a new PC. That one won’t be getting Windows on it, unless I discover a game or something that I can’t run on Linux.
I haven’t met a single game yet that isn’t running, but I’m not into AAA games anyway. Worst case you just resort to dual boot (don’t forget, always install Windows first) or VM.
Amusingly, just a couple of minutes after posting that comment, I went to the aoe2 Reddit to check if I was missing some details about a recent patch (for details related to this Lemmy post I had just made). And one of the first posts I saw was this one complaining about that very-much-not-AAA game failing to run recently.
The games in that franchise are like 90% of my gaming tbh. They all get great scores on ProtonDB, but the use a kinda weird hybrid of your Steam account and your Microsoft/Xbox account for syncing player details, and one of my concerns is the Xbox account might not work correctly.
Yeah, dual booting was definitely the plan. I didn’t know you need to install Windows first though, that’s…disappointing. And frustrating. My plan was to install Linux, stick with that for as long as I can, and if I later decide I need Windows for something, install it then.
Could be a good option. Dunno how smoothly these games would run in a VM, but worth a shot, and much better than needing to dual boot, if it does work smoothly.
I can’t comment on aoe2 specifically but Halo Infinite (through steam) and Minecraft both use my Microsoft account just fine on Linux Mint.
Is not strictly necessary to install Windows first, it just makes it easier, because Linux will setup the bootloader for you. Windows in the others hand tends to nuke everything that was installed prior, so you would at least need to repair the bootloader. To be completely safe you can just disconnect the Linux drive, while Windows is installing. Definitely a path, if you want to go for Linux only for now.
VM is a good method once it is set up, but needs more initial tinkering with the passthrough, depending on your hardware. I don’t know how those Kernel level anti cheat things work. Otherwise the game shouldn’t even know it’s in a vm.
Not something that matters to me anyway. I don’t own any such games currently, and don’t intend to change that.
But thanks for the tips re the bootloader!
Don’t dual boot. Instead, invest in two drives and dedicate each to each os fully. Way less headache and far more control. Easier to keep windows oblivious of Linux existence so it doesn’t fuck with it.
Isn’t that still dual booting? Unless you have two PCs (even if you somehow rigged both PCs up in the same case with separate power buttons), you need a bootloader to choose which drive to boot off of. And unless I’m mistaken, two drives is not going to look notably different to the bootloader from two partitions on the same drive, is it?
That’s also “dual booting”. The phrase never referred specifically to having two OSes on the same drive, just on the same machine.
Removed by mod
3-day timeout. Stop being a dick.
Ah yes, OP bad
sometimes OP is indeed bad