Switching to Linux for the first time!

[Mandrake]

With Microsoft killing off support for Windows 10 in two months' time, I finally took the plunge this week and set up a dual-boot with Windows 10 and Linux Mint on my nine-year-old home computer. Despite working perfectly fine and having plenty of free space left on my hard drive, the fact that I bought my PC nearly a decade ago means that it is not officially supported by Windows 11. Although it's technically possible to force an upgrade by manually bypassing these restrictions, I realised that I had far more reasons not to do so:
[*] Nearly everything that Windows 11 offers can already be done on Windows 10.
[*] I do not care about any of the gimmicky AI crap that Microsoft keeps pushing onto their users, most of whom did not ask for it.
[*] I'm sick of Windows automatically downloading and installing massive updates every other Tuesday without informing me beforehand before it starts consuming CPU/RAM.
[*] I'm tired of having to constantly disable hundreds of settings to reduce (i.e. not eliminate) the amount of data that Microsoft collects on their users.
[*] For political reasons, I no longer wish to support Microsoft or be dependent on their ecosystem.

Since I still needed to future-proof this PC and didn't want to stay on an insure operating system for the next several years, I decided to switch to Linux as my "everyday" OS. I chose Mint as my distribution since it was beginner-friendly, has a UI similar to Windows 10, and a large enough userbase that can provide technical support. Ultimately, all I needed was something that would allow me to browse the internet, check emails, type documents, watch YouTube videos/films/twitch streams, and occasionally play video games.

I also wanted to keep my Windows 10 partition for compatibility reasons (mostly for any video games that won't run correctly in Linux for whatever reason) and to access my existing personal documents. I found the Easy Linux Tips Project blog was incredibly helpful because it provides step-by-step guides on how to install Linux Mint either as a solo OS or as a dual-boot with Windows. Something which I wish I could have done differently was install Mint onto a completely different harddrive so that I didn't have to worry about having multiple partitions on the same drive, but it seemed like a waste not to use the hundreds of remaining GBs of space on my C: drive.

The main problem that I encountered during installation is that even though I had successfully installed Linux Mint to a separate partition, my PC would always boot into Windows 10 and the BIOS provided no option to select/add Ubuntu at all. I suspect that because my PC came pre-installed with Windows 10, the firmware has been locked down HARD, both for security reasons and to discourage nerds like me from installing a different OS. Hours of troubleshooting later, I discovered that for some reason GRUB wasn't being installed correctly and my EFI firmware always prioritised Windows Boot Manager over Ubuntu. In the end, I managed to fix the problem by running this console command in Windows 10, effectively hijacking the WBM boot entry so that it always runs GRUB instead:

Code: Select all

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} path \EFI\ubuntu\shimx64.efi

Another weird bug that I found was that whenever audio played after a short period of silence, the audio will always slowly fade in for the first 0.5s or so (as if somebody was turning the volume dial up). This was pretty annoying when playing videos and meant that I couldn't hear notification sounds. Fortunately, I managed to find this blogpost that explained how to fix it - apparently, Pipewire suspends itself after five seconds of inactivity by default, ostensively for power saving. (Weird decision, considering that not everyone will be running Linux on a Thinkpad!)

My desktop, with some shortcuts and a weather widget

Now that I'm able to boot into Mint and have set everything up, I've been having a great time! It basically does everything I want out of a modern PC and has helping me to slowly rediscover my love for computing. There's no crapware, and nearly every pre-installed app and settings menu has been useful. It doesn't take forever to boot up and it doesn't run hundreds of random applications on startup. It doesn't consume lots of CPU/memory when idle and it doesn't constantly write stuff to the harddrive so that the fans keep whirring. It's not silently collecting data and sending it to third parties. Best of all, this computer feels like it belongs to me again, rather than being a joint-ownership with Microsoft. If anyone else is thinking of making the switch to Linux, I strongly encourage you to take the time to do so!

My Firefox browser, showing the Critter Time homepage

[JarylGaren]

Welcome to Linux, I hope it'll serve you well!

I've been kinda thinking of giving Linux Mint a try too, namely on my mini computer that I currently have SteamOS on. I'm currently rocking Bazzite on my big gaming computer, because that's where I wanna play all the big games like MonHun Wilds or Horizon Forbidden West, and bazzite comes with pretty much all of the gaming-related drivers and such installed by default, so generally games have been pretty "download and just go" for me.

[*] I'm sick of Windows automatically downloading and installing massive updates every other Tuesday without informing me beforehand before it starts consuming CPU/RAM.
[*] I'm tired of having to constantly disable hundreds of settings to reduce (i.e. not eliminate) the amount of data that Microsoft collects on their users.
[*] For political reasons, I no longer wish to support Microsoft or be dependent on their ecosystem.

Those reasons (and Windows 10 updates BSODing a new laptop I got back in 2021 or so) are basically what made me want to switch to Linux too. Well, maybe not the last one at the time, but now it's like... I don't really feel comfortable using Windows 11 any longer because of that.

[Mandrake]

Another bug that I found was that whenever I woke up my computer from a suspended state (i.e. after 30 minutes of inactivity by default), my monitor would stay blank and state that it wasn't receiving a signal. Even though I could hear my computer whirring, I couldn't see anything unless I manually switched off the power and rebooted. Apparently, this has been a common bug with Nvidia drivers for years and I was easily able to fix it by by adding exit 0 near the top of /usr/bin/nvidia-sleep.sh.. Pretty amazing that you can immediately cancel out of this shell script that runs when your computer suspends itself and your graphics card will actually work better afterwards.

[Micolithe]

I set up a fresh Linux Mint partition back in June and haven't really looked back, I've had to boot into windows twice to get some configuration stuff I forgot about but otherwise I don't really miss it now that I've hammered out solutions to most of my pain points. Still some things don't really work, like the mic in port on my motherboard is lousy with interference on Linux and works perfect in Windows. Davinci Resolve is functionally fucking useless since it has no h264 support on Linux.

That being said I've been daily driving linux mint on my personal laptops for a long time and at work all our boxes are SLES 12.5 or 15 and one of the things I've been trying to do when I have time is get all the remaining boxes upgraded to 15.

[plumpan]

Davinci Resolve is functionally fucking useless since it has no h264 support on Linux.

I'm always amazed at people still making a fuss about h264 licensing in 2025. I think almost all of the patents are expired at this point, are people actually still going out throwing sueballs if you package libx264 with your software???? Sounds like there's no AAC support for the same reason. Fucked up.

Still waiting for an excuse to sit down and try editing in kdenlive. I normally can get by with, erm, raw ffmpeg.

Glad to hear things are mostly going well for everyone though! My whole "wow new windows is crap I need to bail" moment was during the 10 beta and I can't ever imagine going back now. It's like when you stop drinking soda and you try one again and it just tastes awful.

[natosaka]

Still waiting for an excuse to sit down and try editing in kdenlive. I normally can get by with, erm, raw ffmpeg.

ffmpeg my beloved. Yeah same, I usually use ffmpeg for everything I can. It's normally just faster to do simple things in ffmpeg than to use a full fledged video editor. Man, last time I used KDEnlive was... probably 15 years or so ago? It kept crashing constantly when a load was placed on it, which I guess was a common complaint at the time. Is it still like that these days?

[plumpan]

Man, last time I used KDEnlive was... probably 15 years or so ago? It kept crashing constantly when a load was placed on it, which I guess was a common complaint at the time. Is it still like that these days?

No idea but I've not heard bad things. It seems worth trying.

I think one thing that people don't realize about Linux is it actually moves along pretty quickly. It's gotten so dramatically better in the last 10 years, and again the 10 years before that. Windows and OSX Mac OS tend to be about the same, maybe some nice features or maybe some antifeatures. Linux overall tends to just get better, with exceptions of course but overall it tends to be good. Even just 3-5 years can see some big improvements.

The flip side is because it's a ton of disparate parts you have to have some understanding of how they all work together. Things like "Hey BTRFS still has some big issues maybe don't use that" and "snap works great most of the time but it can also be a complete shitstorm if you're unlucky" kind of stuff.

Anyway that's getting off topic.

[natosaka]

BTRFS actually has become stable last I checked, but it used to be... a gamble to use. It's actually better in some ways that ZFS as it has better built in error correction that's technically less of a gamble than ZFS is, because ZFS works great with ECC memory, but if you have normal memory, there's a risk your data can get corrupted if a bit or two gets hit by a solar flare or something... not sure how often that happens, but I know it's possible.

How do I know this? I have a NAS that runs ZFS and I learned all this later after telling my friend that my NAS was using ZFS and has non-ECC memory. But honestly it mostly works fine. I've never had an issue... so far.

But I might give KDEnlive a try again if I ever need something that can't be done with ffmpeg.

[plumpan]

I've still been hearing recent horror stories with BTRFS. I would very much like a modern COW filesystem on Linux without the hoops of ZFS but it seems like it's not here yet.

I'm not entirely sold on needing ECC for ZFS, I've heard the argument made both ways. But I got lucky and the old office PC I had laying around just happened to have ECC.

[Micolithe]

What I've found more important for ZFS is not overloading your SATA controller... 4 drives max.

I have a raidz1 with five drives, one is for parity. Apparently during periods of high activity (such as, oh, I don't know, downloading many tv shows at once) if you have all your drives on the same SATA controller you can end up with data errors.

Replaced two drives that had not actually failed before I figured this out. One PCI-e SATA card later I haven't had a problem since. Fucked up that they sell motherboards with six SATA ports.

[plumpan]

Adding that to my list of "Reasons why you should use cheap SAS drives", it requires you buying a (cheap) HBA that won't give you trouble if you throw a pile of drives at it. (Editor's Note: I've only ran drives through shelves, which while annoying at times will get you 12-24 drives connected via a single cable to your HBA, as it functions as a SAS switch.)

Can't say I'd suggest anyone run ZFS on Linux unless they were prepared for a project. I love ZFS to bits (is that a pun?) but it's a lot of legwork to prop up manually in Linux. Superb in Unix or when someone is doing the work for you (TrueNAS!) but not for desktop Linux.

And if you're setting up a NAS or otherwise a storage server... SAS drives baby. <$10/TB.

[Micolithe]

I'm actually sort of glad I'm rawdogging ZFS - it was terrifying at first, but now I have a way better understanding of how all this stuff works and was able to build my own monitoring that suits my needs.

[Mandrake]

After a week of using Linux Mint (Cinnamon Edition), I'm really happy that I finally went through with setting up this dual-boot system. I actually get excited when I switch on my computer now, knowing that I'm going to have a good session and won't have to wait ages for everything to finish loading up or for Windows to finish installing huge updates. I've only had to boot into Windows once or twice to access/edit a few important files, but I really love how Mint automatically mounts my Windows partition so I can view/copy any previous personal files across.

Here's some software that I've found especially useful:

[*] Thunderbird - I was very impressed by how easy it was to set up (you literally just enter your login details for the email address you want to use, and it does the rest for you). Really like how customisable it is and how quickly it boots up.

[*] Libre Office - Love how much it looks like Microsoft Office, and is compatible with Doc and Excel files. I had to manually download a bunch of font packages to improve compatibility, but I really like the default fonts that came with these programs.

[*] VLC - Essential for listening to music and watching DVDs. Seems to load faster in Mint than Windows as well.

[*] Steam/Lutris - Mandatory for gaming on Linux. Hopefully these platforms will do all the tricky stuff to get games running properly for me.

[*] Discord - Runs pretty well in Linux, although it is a bit annoying that there's a grey titlebar at the top of the window that's completely redundant and doesn't match the rest of the UI

[*] Back in Time - The default Backup Tool that comes with Mint is okay, but it doesn't seem to save my settings in between settings and in any case, all it does is create a rar containing everything in my Home directory. So every time it runs, I'm using up space on my external harddrive by adding new rars containing duplicate files. What I really wanted was a backup software that synchronises my Home directory with a folder on my external harddrive, and Back in Time is a simple application that does exactly that.

[*] QRedShift - I never actually used one of these programs that automatically adjusts the screen brightness and colours before, but I'm glad that I decided to install this one because my screen's much easier on my eyes during the evenings. Bit annoying that the RedShift applet offered by the Software Manager turned out to be no longer in development, but I was able to switch the latest version by running a single line of code in the command prompt. I have it set to a moderate 3500K at night times.

[Mandrake]

Two more programs that I've found useful!

[*] KolourPaint - The default Drawing program that comes with Mint left a lot to be desired (cropping is incredibly fiddly because it will crop the image inside the canvas, but not the canvas itself). Luckily I came across this open-source clone of Microsoft's Paint, which has been useful for cropping copy-pasted images/screenshots before saving them or uploading them elsewhere. I did encounter a graphics bug where all the buttons in the Tool Box had text labels because they were missing their icons, but I fixed this by running "sudo apt-get install breeze" to download them.

[*] Pinta - One of my favourite bitmap editors ever is Paint.net, which is only available for Windows, so I was pleased to discover that there's a clone which copies everything that it does. While it's less advanced than the more popular GNU Image Manipulation Program, I'll be using this for more complicated edits.