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!

  • neidu2@feddit.nl
    761·
    7 months ago

    Again: Hallelujah, another soul saved!

    So now it’s basically down to this: Keep using it for whatever you would normally do in windows. And if you’re having issues, try to sort it out.

    And then one day you’ll suddenly realize how long it’s been without Windows, and that you don’t really see a reason for going back any time soon.

      • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
        72·
        7 months ago

        Welcome to freedom and perfect mental health.

        The best part will be never having to download an exe or msi file to get stuff to work. Just look for the software you want, install, have at it.

        I’m sorry, it just brings me so much joy when I read stories like this one.

          • Grunt4019@lemm.ee
            14·
            7 months ago

            Most people just use a package manager the vast vast majority of time. People don’t typically compile from source or figure out different file types.

            • msage@programming.dev
              1·
              7 months ago

              I did have to compile Wifi dongle driver, since I moved and didn’t have cable in my work room. That was annoying as hell.

              At first I thought I missed a driver in kernel compilation, but then my SO had the same issue in Mint. Luckily I was prepared.

              But yeah, I have more sanity with Gentoo than I ever did with Windows. The other commenter probably hasn’t used Linux or something.

              • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
                6·
                7 months ago

                Makes me wonder what the heck it is that is not what you want/need 50% of the time. Must be a pretty peculiar set of software.

              • LeFantome@programming.dev
                2·
                7 months ago

                Well, it all comes down to distro when it comes to package selections and availability.

                I can say though that in the last year or so I have found 100% of the software I needed in the repositories and that includes at least a dozen proprietary applications ( including some that require registration and / or licensing such as Burp Suite Pro and JetBrains Rider ).

                Everything I have installed came to me in the same package format ( or was automatically converted to it by the package management tooling - all the same to me ). A single command updates everything.

                That is without resorting to Flatpak which I am sure provides a pretty good selection to other distros as well ( at the cost of a second package format ).

          • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
            22·
            7 months ago

            1 script, 36 package apps plus 31 FlatPaks installed in one command. Any other thing I need or want, it’s just there via CLI or any program installer such as Discover.

            Having said that, and being positive that over 90% of any Linux Distro users would be dumbfounded by reading your comment, I choose to assume you’re just trolling and let you be moving forward. Have fun googling crap in Windows.

      • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
        3·
        7 months ago

        I went from “Hey Mint’s nice plug-n-play”, to failing at installing Arch, to hopping to Manjaro then Endeavour for a short while, to installing and building my own Arch+i3+rice, to end up returning to Mint because it just works

        Idk I think I’m too smooth brain for Arch, but I’m trying to get into NixOS now, it seems really cool!

        • LeFantome@programming.dev
          2·
          7 months ago

          I love Arch but think I have too much of a koala mind for Nix.

          One of us must be smarter than they think they are.

  • Meltrax@lemmy.world
    12·
    7 months ago

    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@lemmy.worldOP
      7·
      7 months ago

      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@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        7 months ago

        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@lemmy.world
        4·
        7 months ago

        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@lemm.ee
          4·
          7 months ago

          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.

  • plactagonic
    11·
    7 months ago

    Which flavor did you choose? I am now rocking basic mint with XFCE on my older machine and LMDE on newer.

      • azimir@lemmy.ml
        14·
        7 months ago

        That’s the Mint classic option and a great one. It’s an easy mainline go to for users with all the basics baked in.

      • plactagonic
        1·
        7 months ago

        It is little bit more buggier but it may be the hardware and I can’t get it with xfce.

        I don’t want to mess that deep in the system, just get it to my favorite theme and leave it be. So it is basically out of the box experience.

  • TheCheddarCheese@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    7 months ago

    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.

      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
        5·
        7 months ago

        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)

          • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
            1·
            7 months ago

            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@lemmy.worldOP
              1·
              7 months ago

              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@lemmy.world
                2·
                7 months ago

                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.

        • MintyFresh@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          7 months ago

          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@lemmy.world
            2·
            7 months ago

            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.

              • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
                2·
                7 months ago

                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.

  • Iapar@feddit.de
    6·
    7 months ago

    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@feddit.de
      31·
      7 months ago

      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.

      • Iapar@feddit.de
        1·
        7 months ago

        Of course I did. I just didn’t made the connection that they where the reason for me not getting into bios.

  • capital@lemmy.world
    3·
    7 months ago

    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.