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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   2645 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 27, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So Linux Mint runs on most normal hardware (Intel/nVidia/normal SSDs/screens)?

Yes. The Mint installer also acts as a pretty good liveCD/liveUSB, so you can test out basic functionality without having to do an install at all, if you want to verify this for your specific hardware.

Most Linux distros fall into this behavior now -- even Arch has pretty good hardware support just with the absolute minimal install -- so I'm really recommending Mint more for its interface and new user experience.

The only gotchas I'll caution about for normal hardware:

  • For nVidia GPUs specifically, Mint will default to the fully open source ('noveau') drivers. These work well enough for casual use, but they are less performant than the 'nVidia Open' or proprietary drivers (or even the community-clone NVK). Mint has a specific driver manager tool that it will wave at you in the New User Experience screen, but you do have to click the button and reboot. AMD doesn't have this problem.
  • You may want to disable SecureBoot in your BIOS. Linux Mint can handle it fine, but Microsoft Updates have broken Linux installs using it in ways that made getting the data out hard before, and I wouldn't be surprised if they do it again.
  • If you want to dual-boot (which is good way to work!), installing Windows then installing Linux will result in an EFI partition that is 100 MB. This is probably too small. Easiest way to fix this is to use GParted from the liveUSB environment; it's available from either apt-get or from the package manager. You'd want this tool anyway if you're trying to migrate an existing full-drive Windows install so that the disk has two partitions, but it's a lot easier to modify EFI from Linux than from Windows. Won't always be an issue, but it's a lot easier to fix early rather than after you're comfortable with your system install.
  • WiFi and Bluetooth drivers can give rare problems. It's now more at the 'check if anyone has had a problem' rather than 'check if someone's gotten it to work' stage, but especially very old (>5 years) Realtek USB wifi is prone to annoying. Printers used to fall into this category, but in the last couple years I've found it better at handling printer drivers than Windows (uh, sometimes to an aggressive degree; one Mint laptop autoinstalled a business printer at a commercial airport I visited). Audio can sometimes require rare pipewire (audio service) restarts to unfuck it after a big config modification, though I haven't had that problem in around six months now.
  • Mint (for now) runs using X11, which doesn't handle different refresh rates on multiple monitors well, or HDR at all -- you can make it work, but it won't be pretty. You can switch to Wayland in Mint, but without the >550 nvidia drivers there's a serious flicking problem in some games. If you're running a 240hz HDR monitor for gaming and a 60hz monitor for reference material, it might be worth looking at something like Pop!_OS or KDE Plasma, both of which prioritize Wayland support a little higher. This will probably get fixed enough in the next year or so that Wayland becomes either default or an easy swap option in Mint, though.

The big problems tend to be about more specialized stuff: VR headsets (especially WMR headsets), sound mixer boards, drawing tablets. Or about specific software, especially commercial software that phones home regularly, like DaVinci Resolve, Photoshop, so on.

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