Mint is up and running!

Thank you all who reached out, it really was awesome.

Was super easy, even my Nvidia cards driver was basically automated. Haven’t played anything yet but I’m sure I’ll be fine.

I opened up the command thingy a couple of times just to get some settings how I wanted them, but could have gotten by without it.

The biggest stumbling block for me personally was getting the thumb drive in order, then the hardware to boot from it. First you gotta use a thing called Rufus to format the drive correctly, not sure how or why, but you do.

And then I couldn’t get my laptop to load bios no matter what key/s I mashed at restart, but searching " advanced startup options" in settings brought me to a menu to reboot from my (now correctly formatted) USB drive.

The rest drove itself. Still some stuff to figure out with it but it’s doable. Very polished and user friendly.Thank you all again so much!

WeebLife,

I’m glad you had a better experience than I did. The past two nights, I was messing around with a live version of mint and had nothing but problems. The programs I installed from the software manager didn’t work and I couldn’t even get wine to work. I followed the instructions on mints site and wine kept having installation errors. I’m going back to ubuntu as I didn’t have these problems with that distro. Glad you’re up and running though!

Macaroni_ninja,
@Macaroni_ninja@lemmy.world avatar

As soon as I find the time will do the same thing. Congrats!

leadore,
@leadore@kbin.social avatar

Now that you have Mint, next time you want to make a thumb drive for installing a distro all you have to do is plug in a thumb drive, right-click the .iso file, and select Make Bootable USB Stick. (or from the Menu choose Accessories ‣ USB Image Writer)

And here's a nice intro to Mint for you. That site has lots of other helpful stuff too. Enjoy!

lemmyvore,

right-click the .iso file, and select Make Bootable USB Stick

And most of the time it will even work!

I kid, I kid… kind of. My outcomes when making bootable sticks from ISOs over the years have been very random.

azvasKvklenko,

I prefer Ventoy, because I can put however many different ISOs on it by just dragging ISO files to a folder, and I can use rest of the drive for regular file storage. But still it’s really sweet Mint has such option easily available!

andrewth09,

command thingy

They grow up so fast.

acockworkorange,

Next on the list: get into tabletop RPG, but not DnD.

DmMacniel,

I can recommend Pathfinder and Shadowrun.

acockworkorange,

Fate, Savage Worlds, or Traveller.

Pathfinder is just the GNOME classic of RPGs.

DmMacniel,

more like Cinnamon and GNOME Classic being DnD 3.5

acockworkorange,

Now we’re splitting hairs 😁

Barzaria,

I’m happy for you!!! Happy to hear you’re enjoying your freedom.

shrugal,

One of us One of us One of us! :)

999999999,
@999999999@lemmy.ml avatar

green ubuntu goes brrrr

Iapar,

I had the same problem on my laptop not being able to get into the bios. Turns out the reason is that the f-keys (f-1 to f-12) where not registered as such on boot.

They are also the keys for volume and brightness etc. So when I pressed f-11 on boot it registered it as “Brightness up” and not “f-11”.

The solution was to press “fn” + “f-11”. Then it registered as the correct key.

You have the option to toggle the default on that. So that you press f-11 and it registers it as such and “brightness up” is “fn” + "f-11).

For me that toggle was “fn” + “esc”. There also was a lock symbol on ESC so if ESC doesn’t work search for the key which has a lock on it.

That toggle was also an option in the bios.

So yeah, wasted an embarrassing amount of time figuring that out.

ChaoticNeutralCzech,

You’ve never used function keys? The dual function is annoying even inside the OS. I have to help several people with laptops and you can’t tell what mode they’re in, the user often doesn’t know either.

On laptops, you never know if the F-key behavior is defined by the OS, BIOS or keyboard driver. I just mash F2, F8, Fn+F2, Fn+F8, Del as often as I can (these are the most common keys to do the trick). You can reduce the options with a USB keyboard with just normal F-keys.

Some laptops don’t have a key you can hold to enter BIOS settings or boot menu (maybe to start booting before the keyboard is initialized?) and there is a reset button hole for that.

helenslunch,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

Rufus is great for Windows. I don’t really recommend it for Linux. It’s needlessly complicated.

Use Balena Etcher or Ventoy instead.

possiblylinux127,

Or for that matter just use dd or preinstalled tools.

captain_aggravated,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

The little USB Image Writer utility that comes with Linux Mint seems to work great for everything but Windows. So I literally never have a problem with it.

TheCheddarCheese,
@TheCheddarCheese@lemmy.world avatar

Setting up nvidia drivers wasn’t an issue? Well then I guess I was stupid or just extremely unlucky. I ran into so many driver issues on Mint it’s ridiculous.

MintyFresh,

Probably a day late and a dollar short but here:

I was having issues until I turned secure boot off. I also have to have two graphical drivers running.

This page helped out forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=370633

Nibodhika,

No you don’t, they’re mutually exclusive, there are a couple of ways to check which one you’re running, from lsmod to check which module is loaded on the kernel to my favorite: glxinfo | grep -i vendor

First of all don’t run random commands from the internet without understanding them. Now to what that command does, glxinfo prints a lot of output about what’s being used to render OpenGL, you might need to install mesa-demos, mesa-tools or something else if glxinfo is not installed by default. Then the pipe, i.e. the vertical bar | says to grab the output from the left command and feed it to the right command. grep is used to filter an input, and the -i flag tells it to do it without being case sensitive, i.e. Insensitive. Then vendor is the text you’re using as a filter. Long story short that command shows information about the vendor used to render OpenGL.

If it says Nvidia you’re using the proprietary driver (which you should use from your other comment). If it says Mesa you’re using the open source drivers (which should be “fine” but will have very bad gaming performance)

MintyFresh,

glxinfo | grep -i vendor server glx vendor string: SGI client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI Vendor: Intel (0x8086) OpenGL vendor string: Intel

so this means im using my proccesor and not gpu to render shite?

Nibodhika,

From our other reply you should be fine, this is a prime laptop so it will use the CPU for everything unless you specify different z that’s by intent to preserve power since Nvidia cards consume lots of it and otherwise your battery would last an hour or so, windows does the same, the difference is that Windows tries to guess which apps need it and on Linux you have to be specific about it.

MintyFresh,

Ty!

Nibodhika,

Quick test you can run to confirm this is lspci | grep nvidia and lspci | grep nouveau one of them will display something and the other nothing (hopefully), nvidia is the name of the properietary driver, nouveau is the open source one.

MintyFresh,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/017508da-0352-4bd7-b09c-222a47eca7aa.png

this seems to imply it ll switch the gpu on or off depending on load

Nibodhika,

Ok, prime laptop, run the following then: prime-run glxinfo | grep -i vendor if prime-run doesn’t work there are others like optimun, I’ll check which one is the correct for mint and reply back.

MintyFresh,

sam@sam-ROG-Strix-G531GT-GL531GT:~$ prime-run glxinfo | grep i vendor grep: vendor: No such file or directory

prime-run: command not found

Nibodhika,

Yeah, there might be an nvidia-prime package or something, either that or the command in mint must be different. Quick Google didn’t helped me and it’s after 1AM for me so my brain is not helping either, hopefully someone else can help you, if not tomorrow I’ll be back.

But everything looks correct, Nvidia settings only works if the Nvidia driver is installed, now all you need is to figure out how to tell Mint to run things with the Nvidia GPU and you should be good to go.

beelzebot,
@beelzebot@ruhr.social avatar

@MintyFresh My Problem was, what when i play Dota 2 (Steam Flatpak) my Systems crashed multiple times. I didn´t find the error so i installed Fedora again.

CodeGameEat,

I haven’t tried it so i dont actually know what im talking about, but i feel like installing steam through flatpak is asking for trouble.

possiblylinux127,

Flatpak should be fine but there could be a little overhead.

CodeGameEat,

Was more thinking about running games in sandboxes, other than the overhead i could see some games not being happy with that

possiblylinux127,

It shouldn’t matter

Meltrax,

If you happen to care, what you were doing with the program Rufus was creating a “bootable media”. Think back in the day when you had to buy a Windows CD and insert that to install or update Windows. This is kind of the evolution of that. An operating system installer can be loaded into a thumb drive (some utilities even let you put many on one drive, and then you can choose between them) and then you tell your computer to read from the USB drive first (which you did via the BIOS boot menu configuration) and instead of booting up your installed Windows, it gives you the option of installing whatever is on your USB drive.

This is fortunately often a pretty painless process, creating the USB boot loaders isn’t hard, and virtually every single Linux distro out there can be installed in this way.

Glad you’re enjoying Mint, and excellent choice for a new Linux user. If you like it, you’ll never need to change to anything else.

Welcome!

MintyFresh,

Ya I was wondering why I couldn’t download it in that state already directly to the drive. But I suppose there was already some formatting that needed to be stripped down before it could function as a boot strapper or whatever it’s called.

Seriously thank you all for reaching out. I thought like maybe one person would begrudgingly link me a copy of Linux for dummies, but you all were so helpful!

And it really wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I have memories of messing with Linux in like… 04 or 5 maybe? The ease of use has come a long way, applications are just working without fuss. 10/10

CodeGameEat,

Linux is built by the community for the community. I think trying to help people move to linux is just in just in linux users blood 😅

Nibodhika,

I think a better analogy is “remember when you had an iso that you had to burn onto a DVD to be able to boot from it? Or to be able to have the CD player recognize it instead of just writing the songs into it?, sort of the same thing”.

What you downloaded is a binary image, i.e. the sequence of 0 and 1 needed for a computer to boot into Linux, now you need to feed that sequence directly to the computer, but the computer only knows how to read it from a thumb drive directly, not from a file inside the thumb drive, so you need to write that sequence bit by bit in order on the thumb drive. Back in the day we used Nero for dvds, Rufus does the same but to a thumb drive.

Fun fact in Linux you can use dd which unlike what most people say doesn’t stand for Disk Destroyer (although certainly lots of disks were destroyed by it), which is an application that does binary writes. Hell, in Linux you can actually do cat image.iso > /dev/sdb and that should work, that is essentially print the output of the file image.iso and write it into /dev/sdb which should be the second disk plugged to your system (first one being /dev/sda).

Cool, I started using Linux back in 04, but I think not that much changed, I think it’s mostly people who change the way they look at Linux, outside of gaming, for day to day use, Linux was very usable even back then.

Mesophar,

Dude, just have to say, your comments are so informative, helpful, and tailored to the individual’s question or situation. Thank you for being a part of this community! Your example makes the place better for everyone.

capital, (edited )

Also on Mint here after trying NixOS and then Zorin.

Note about Steam gaming: Steam seems to choose the experimental version of Proton (their compatibility layer) by default which exhibited very poor performance for me.

As soon as I forced games to launch with version 8 (latest stable) I was getting full frames on Fallout 4.

iAmTheTot,

Haven’t played anything yet but I’m sure I’ll be fine.

<_<

MintyFresh,

Lol

themusicman,

You will be fine. I game on mint with an Nvidia card. Steam has a setting to fall back to proton for all games without native Linux, and for everything off steam use Lutris (install it from the website, since the package manager version is too old to be useful)

Rai,

Does 144hz+GSync work on Mint or Pop!os? I reward it had issues, and I’ve also read it works so I’m confused.

acockworkorange,

You don’t need 144 Hz and GSync. Waves hand in Jedi mind trick style.

Rai,

Unfortunately for me… your powers don’t work on me. They’re a full necessity D:

lord_ryvan,

My 144Hz screen runs 120Hz on Mint T_T

But yes gaming (and the OS) happens at 120FPS. But it’s not 144, man…

Apparently some other Linux distros using Wayland have got this covered, Mint might in the near future

alvendam,

What’s going on with Lutris and Mint these days? Still need the Debian ppa from OpenSuse or did they start officially supporting it again?

themusicman,

They provide .deb files. I didn’t hunt any further than that

alvendam,

I see. Just checked their site. It appears that we still need the OSBS if we want automatic updates.

That is, if the method still works. I’m way overdue for actually sitting down and playing a game.

lord_ryvan,

Flatpak?

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