Linux Mint 22 released: An attractive option for migrating away from Windows | Windows 11 system requirements block millions of PCs from upgrading, while Linux Mint continues to work on older hardware

How has your gaming journey been so far? Games and general programs are the main reason why in still on Windows

I like the way Linux handles updating software better.

On Windows, every app is installed separately so each app is internally responsible for its own updates. So you sit down to do some work, open up your productivity software and "Autodobe After360 requires an update to continue. [Yes] [Yes]" This isn't impossible on Linux but it happens much less often.

As you say it doesn't throw itself under your wheels as often as Windows does.

That serenity is why I enjoy running Arch with basically nothing on it. My OS doesn't do shit and I love it

Plasma is quite nice now.

I ran a dual-boot for a month and a half when news about Windows Recall broke, but unfortunately, my Nvidia setup experienced a lot of bugs and proved to just be too incompatible.

So, when I upgrade to a new computer later this year, I'm going to make this machine a Linux-only machine with a different distro, and then have my other PC for all my gaming needs.

I use Plasma on Mint. Love my setup

I’m really inexperienced with Linux but I’ve become interested since getting a steamdeck which uses KDE for its desktop, which I’ve enjoyed—so how do KDE and mint compare?

Mint boots SHOCKINGLY fast, like sub 2 seconds, on a couple of systems I have. Its basically as fast as “booting” one of my old Commodore computers!

You can put Plasma on Mint, I'm running that right now myself

When I rebuilt my PC I was planning something similar, got two nvme drives to dual boot, but started with Linux Mint... And never wound up installing Windows on the other, never felt the need, so I finally last night formatted it for more room for all my games

Agreed. I managed to get my grandpa onto Linux using Mint on his old computer. He said the interface resembled classic Windows and was up and running in less than five minutes. I just had to show him how to use the software manager and that's it.

It's all about finding the distro that works for you. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

that's generally how it works with Mint. you install it, use it for a week or two and then move onto a distro that better suites your needs. Mint is a fantastic introduction and sure many will stick with it for awhile I think most move on from it fairly quickly.

I've tried dozens over the years and I keep finding myself going back to kubuntu. It just works

It may be worth doing more distro hoping. It sometimes takes a few to get it right for your needs/use case.

I know for me, at least with gnome, toggling between performance, balanced, and battery saver modes dramatically changes my battery life on Ubuntu, so I have to toggle it manually to not drain my battery life if it's mostly sitting there. I don't know if Mint is the same, but just throwing out the "obvious" for anyone else running Linux on a laptop.

I'd try fedora or pop os. I never really liked mint personally

That's most likely a driver issue. I don't know if this is something that's easily fixed. Linux is better on open hardware.

How much does it play and what about a GPU in terms of compatibility?

I'm curious about these, do the surfaces still require the use of (or benefit from) custom kernels?

Eh, depends how much older. My daily is a Thinkpad x201, and while I love Linux Mint, every once in a while I get curious about other distros. However, as many times as I've tried, there's a bunch of distros whose LiveUSBs just won't boot (for example Pop! OS).

Not entirely true in my case, I've got an old Inspiron 530 that I have been trying to figure out what to do with. Well it ran Vista from the factory so that's worthless now, so I figured I'd try putting Linux on it. Every single distro I tried installing just wouldn't get past the splash screen. Mint, Ubuntu, Arch (GUI and manual installer), Pop_OS, ChimeraOS, nothing. Trying different USB media writing methods did nothing or made it not even show as a bootable device. Finally got Xunbuntu to work on it and even that took 3 attempts to install.

I've got a more recent HP that was originally Win 7 that did have a much higher success rate and an old Acer laptop that straight up will not boot Linux without a high amount of errors or just completely borked graphics even with multiple distros.

But I'm also an idiot so it's probably me.

I didn't realize that LMDE existed until I read your comment. Now that I know it does I'm going to try it as an alternative to LM 22. I gave LM22 a spin yesterday and I don't like some of the changes, particularly around the Online Account manager. It's not quite as fresh as LM22 but it is using a newer Kernel than 21.3 which would be nice.

Let me preach you the gospel of

bazzite.gg

A user friendly, steam OS like distro specifically made for gaming. About as difficult to set up as a new smartphone, and comes with all the goods needed for gaming preinstalled, like steam, wine (lutris), and various other compatibility features.

It is also an immutable distro, which essentially means you can't break your system*. If you mess something up you can simply roll back to an earlier configuration.

*you certainly still can, but you would have to actively try

Ive been willing to skip the like 2% of games I have that won't play on it, personally.

Which of your games doesn't work? Do they happen to be multiplayer?

Have you checked https://protondb.com?

Oh, there's an upgrader? I've been looking for upgrade instructions since it was first announced released but all I've found is them saying they'll put out instructions next week

It's solid. I game all the time on it. I don't do much else on my home PC. Watch videos and movies. It's solid enough that I have abandoned Windows completely. I still deal with it with my work laptop, but I don't give a shit. It's not my money there.

I've got an older Latitude that I've nearly maxxed out on a shoestring budget, it runs LMDE 6 and is my dedicated Linux machine. I use it for online study, Zoom sessions, content consumption, and some Python here and there, LMDE is rock solid and hasn't given me any fuss at all.

Unless LM22 has undergone some significant changes, I would say LMDE 6 doesn't feel "modern" but it feels polished

Also can't run 4k at 60hz on my system at least. That's a total nonstarter for me.

Just curious, if you’re already using Ubuntu why try LMDE rather than the default version?

Switching to Linux is almost always going to involve accepting that you may need to use alternative software compared to what you're used to. If that's unacceptable and you have mission critical work that can only be done on Windows compatible software, you may be better off staying put.

I was not successful running Solidworks under Linux and it even detects when it is running in a virtual machine and refuses to install completely!

Finally I have found an alternative that suits my needs, that has free account for hobby purposes: on-shape.com it's web-based, works flawlessly under Linux and Firefox. Workflow is very similar to Solidworks, and version-control is simple and nice.

Some people have run solidworks on Linux with limited success. Granted I have never personally done it, from what I understand they used wine which emulates windows anyway. So it depends on how much time you are willing to sink to get things working.

Supported until 2029 (so 5 years) vs 10 years for Windows 10 + 3 years with ESU

This is a false comparison for most users.

For enterprise customers, Microsoft has released three or four versions of Win 10 they will support for 5 or 10 years basically to run things like ATMs or MRI machines or shit like that. You know how a lot of machinery still in use today relies on like Windows 95 because that's what was relevant when the machine was built, the software that ran the machine doesn't work on anything newer, and the machine still works? That's the kind of thing we're talking about here. If you have an MRI machine that runs on Windows 10 the OS is feature frozen and depending on which version may be supported until 2027 or 2029.

For us normal Home or Pro users, Windows 10 spent most of its life receiving mandatory twice-yearly feature updates. If you've got a normal PC that you use for productivity or gaming, you had no choice but to install those updates which often changed things about how the system looked and felt. If you wanted to keep Windows 10 Home edition version 20H1 from 2020, you either had to disconnect the machine from the internet or pull some other weird shenanigans. In this way it's more similar to MacOS and how they've been maintaining "version 10" for 25 years now.

Will continue working on older hardware after 2029… So does Windows 10 after the end of support?

I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to either force Win10 machines to upgrade to 11 or else brick themselves next October. They've done it before.

Linux Mint, like Ubuntu above it, releases on a 5-year LTS plan. They release a major (stable, feature-frozen) version every 2 years, with three minor "point releases" released approximately 6 months apart which contain some feature updates and such. Unlike Windows, these are optional. Someone somewhere is running a fully up to date and patched version of Linux Mint 20 Ulyana from 2020 and can continue to do so until next April. So if you need an older version of the software, or just like how it was in 2020 and don't want slight changes to the UI every 6 months, you can stick with it for 5 years and still get bug fixes and security patches. After those 5 years it will continue to run but the update utility will nag at you that you're out of support and it's time to upgrade. Meanwhile, the upgrade to Mint 21 or 22 isn't as onerous as the upgrade from Windows 10 to 11. The UI isn't as drastically different, it's not suddenly full of telemetry or dark patterns, the system requirements aren't vastly greater, etc.

There are the FOSS ones, but when I've swapped people over from Windows or Mac and they want something familiar, I give them WPS Office. It's pretty much a drop in replacement for Word/Office.

I want to say I'd put them on LibreOffice, but it's too fucking weird and buggy for someone coming off of Office.

I've used OnlyOffice (FOSS, really modern) and Softmaker Office, which is a proprietary German alternative with native Linux support. It also has the best docx compatibility of the Microsoft alternatives.

Libreoffice, onlyoffice and ms office online mean that unless its a big part of your job, you dont need ms office

Depends on your requirements. I am mostly able to get along with LibreOffice and I tried Collabora, though both suck in their own way. Winedb says that Office 95 and 2013 have "Gold" rating. Maybe I will try later next week to install the 2013 version.

"Stuck with"? I find open source alternatives far less infuriating to work with than anything Microsoft produces.

I ran OpenOffice (Libreoffice) around 2008 for two years (can't remember exactly, but when I experienced Vista for the first time, I said nope and wiped my drive. It was fine back then, but those little incompatibilities drove me crazy

Latest kernel is probably what you need if things work on other distros. There's a menu in the Mint update manager you can use to change to a slightly newer kernel and I would always advise that if it doesn't cause any other issues. Newer kernel usually means more and newer drivers.

Mint is ultimately based on Debian, but with a lot of newer software, although it's "stable" under the hood. That's why Mint is popular on personal home computers. The idea behind it is that it should give you all the updates you need, but not too often or in a way that breaks things. If your computer works on one version of Mint, it would hopefully never break from an update, but packages don't tend to be cutting-edge.

Steam is sort of an exception there. It works well on the vast majority of distros because Valve's CEO is a bit unusual in that he prefers people to be using Linux and has done a lot to keep it working well. If you don't use the flatpak for Steam (which I wouldn't suggest), then it runs in its own kind of custom runtime container that makes sure it works as it's supposed to in the vast majority of Linux distros.

I've never used Autocad, so I couldn't say too much about it. If a program doesn't work properly it could be due to incompatible dependency packages with different behaviour. Autocad would also be a graphics heavy program (similar to Blender, but also like videogames) so drivers could come in there too. The updated libraries might help, or it could just be your graphics drivers again. You can also try the flatpak version instead if it doesn't work, and vice versa.

If you can get your GPU to work on other distros, you shouldn't have many problems on this new major version of Mint, so long as the kernel is new enough, which I think it would be.

If you have a specific, very new, AMD GPU, there are actually public records of what the developers of the Linux kernel are doing to support newer hardware. Most people don't find these easy to check, but this would be a common question. There is a long wikipedia page giving a few of the most well-known optimisations, bug-fixes and hardware support improvements in specific versions of the Linux kernel.

By the way, there are lots of people on the official Linux Mint forums who are happy to answer specific questions about bugs or what's improving in Linux Mint, as posed by community members.

I've been using Mint exclusively for quite a few years now (outside of Android) and had minimal issues, outside of poorly refurbished laptops I got for cheap (like one with a physically broken keyboard that spammed one of the buttons, which I was able to fix easily with a simple script I copied from the web).

Sorry if that was too long an answer, but what I'm saying is there is a good chance it will just work out if you try to install this new major version (though there's some chance it might not). Also I believe they've decided to prioritise shipping a kernel with good hardware support now, rather than a more "stable" one (older/LTS) so a lot of more recent hardware will work, unlike 5 years ago.

Don't be afraid of following a few CLI guides if you have to either. Any distro is good enough if you know a few terminal commands, and any distro can be perfect if you're an absolute bash wizard.

Hope that helped.

Autocad AFAIK doesn't run, I am trying to get something like nanocad to work, also any version of SAP2000, ETABS or Staad.

Steam & amd yes, autocad no

Not sure about AutoCAD, but I have Mint installed to the expansion card drive on my Frame.work and have been playing a fair amount of Inscryption, FTL, and Stronghold Crusader on it through Steam, so I would say yes?

It's a good distro and it is a lot harder to break on accident, but there are a lot more minor kinks than fedora workstation. It can also get confusing for newcomers on the somewhat regular occasion that you need a non-flatpak package.

their os-tree package manager sucks it somtimes will refuse to uninstall stuff

WiFi, BT and touchpads have IME always been wonky AF with Linux, and they still are. I had massive issues with my last thinkpad, and was never able to get BT or touchpad working consistently, but my "new" one (it's 6-7 years old) works just fine without a single driver issue whatsoever.

Dead easy with Mint. I've been running it full time on my laptop for months now and my wife only recently came to find out it wasn't windows when I was explaining Linux to her (and she's not a technical personal - she's the person who yells at TV remotes when they don't work). Installation is super easy, much like installing windows - answer a few questions and off it goes. You can even install it alongside windows and pick what one you want to run on boot (I did this because of a couple windows-only apps I can't ditch just yet). If you can figure out Lemmy, Mint will be a breeze too.

Could you elaborate on this? I'm still distro shopping and know basically nothing about Mint's development history.