Linked is the laptop I bought today off amazon. It’s got pretty good reviews and it’s a solid upgrade from this ddr3 mechanical hdd msi I’ve been using since 2013. What spurred on the purchase is that I got a bsod a couple weeks back, explorer keeps crashing, and the drive for the last 3 days has been running at 100% nonstop.
I do plan on either doing something with linux mint or perhaps downgrading to windows 10 (since I have an actual copy of it at home).
Hope this works out! I really, really, needed an upgrade badly.
High reccomend the linux route Windows will slow that thing down to a crawl but on Linux it’ll run amazing.
Man I can’t wait to finally have a fast operating system. Opening apps on this thing takes fucking forever.
When you get mint installed it will be a transition. If you’ve never used the terminal before start learning how. It can be intimidating at first but once you get used to it you’ll never want to go back.
When you get mint installed open you terminal and type:
sudo apt install needrestart unattended-upgrades apt-listchanges tlp powertop
Let that run and put in your password. It’ll install some quality of life things and battery optimizations.
Then after that run sudo tlp start this will turn on tlp which is a battery life optimizer.
After that run sudo powertop it will open a menu hit tab until you get to tunables and there will be a list of things that say bad or good. Go through it with arrow keys and hit enter to switch them on and off. These are more battery life optimizations. They will not always persist after a reboot sometimes I find they do but they typically aren’t meant to I think.
You will have access to the app store i forget what mint calls it. But you should have flatpaks in there. Flatpaks are going to be sandboxed versions of programs that work on any OS. They contain all their own dependencies are are partially isolated from the rest of your OS so are more secure.
To manage the permissions of these look for something called flatseal this will give you a GUI where you can manage permissions.
Other useful programs:
LibreOffice: This is your office suite and is free and open source
LibreWolf: Secure and private web browser a fork of firefox
Ungoogled Chromium: A Chromium fork that removes all google services. For when something won’t work with firefox.
Parabolic: A youtube scraper utility. Put links in and it’ll download videos/mp3s for you.
Quod Libet: Local music file player
FreeTube: Watch youtube without an account and without ads
Organic Maps: Download offline maps and use it like a google maps but without the privacy nightmare
Authenticator: 2FA manager for timed codes.
Random things to know:
Cinnamon is the Desktop Environment you’ll likely be using. You can look up tips for it specifically. It’s relatively customizable. Should feel familiar to you coming from windows.
Mint is Ubuntu (Debian) based. That means it is going to use much of the same stuff Ubuntu and Debian do. You can find fixes for problems you’d have for Debian, Ubuntu, or other Debian based OS’s and they will generally work for Mint too.
Mint will give you the option in setup to do full disk encryption. If you do this make your boot is larger. Since you are new and I don’t want you to ever have to worry about an overflowing boot just make it 10GB and you’ll never need to worry about it. I’d also make root larger for the same reason. I don’t know how big of an SSD you have but do atleast 25GB in root and if you can try to push it more to like 50GB. Flatpaks installed for the whole system fill up root so having lots of root space is a good way to not have that be a headache later. This must all be done during the OS install process.
Also, making a Windows installer USB is a pain in the ass on Linux. Make one while on Windows and just toss it in a drawer. If you ever need to install windows on something for whatever reason (School, work, etc) having it already made will save you a headache.
I was looking up TLP to learn more, and the power top configuration shouldn’t be needed?
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I run both and not all of powertops reccomendations are turned on with tlp. So I’m not sure. It might depend on the tlp profile there are different profiles for it that have different settings.
Saving this thanks!
A 10 gig boot partition is really large, 10x the arch/gentoo recommendations. I have 4 copies of the kernel and initrd on my boot partition (which is just half a gig), plus all the other boot stuff, totaling some 157M. Even if we said you’d have twice that, and that your initrds or kernel were bigger, and that you had grub and it is bigger than systemd-boot… 10G is a lot. I dont think you need more than 5, and you’d still be on the safe side.
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And you can use the old one for low stakes fuckery. Experiment without fear