Switch to Linux Mint

[Harrison]

I bought my son a new Acer Nitro gaming laptop for Christmas, so suddenly had his older HP Ryzen 5 laptop spare. The copy of Windows 11 installed was playing up a bit (he messed it up with Minecraft mods) and I initially was going to reinstall it. But we have enough Windows PCs and Laptops to sink a ship, so I decided to put Linux Mint on it instead.

This PC is fairly up to date with an M2 HDD and with built in AMD Radeon Graphics that's good for Linux (Linux still has a few issues with NVIDIA GPU as they don't make them opensource, although Linux Mint does have built in NVIDIA support out of the box).

As is standard with Linux you install the last stable release, not the latest one. In this case Linux Mint 22.

After burning the install image to a USB stick it took about 10 minutes to format the drive and install the OS, to the point of logging into the desktop for the first time. Compare that with Windows 11. Last week I had to fix my wife's laptop which was taking 30 minutes to boot into Windows 10. I replaced her ageing HDD with an SSD and it took about 1.5 hours to install and go through all the hand holding welcome screens and pointless setup rubbish. Linux Mint has none of this junk. It asks you to set an admin password and then loads.

After install I checked hardware drivers (habit due to Windows installs) and it didn't need any. Everything was up to date and working. It even found, installed and had the networked Brother printer setup and ready to go seconds after booting. In contrast my wife's laptop after the lengthy install still had lots of ! in the device manager list and I had to spend another hour going through the HP website's drivers to randomly find the right ones. The mouse 2 finger scrolling still isn't working! It is in Linux out of the box!

Mint even worked out of the box to the extent than Bluetooth was working and asking if I wanted to pair my headphones, the Wifi was already connected as it had asked for the password during install. I even plugged a spare HD monitor into the HDMI port and it just worked instantly as a second screen.

Anyway, my point here is that Linux has come a very long way in the last 20+ years. If you are not a gamer (but I will come back to that in a minute) and you don't specifically need to run Microsoft Office or some propitiatory software from companies such as Adobe and Autodesk, then there really isn't a good reason to stick with Windows.

Linux Mint especially is designed to be as much like Windows as possible to make the move less painful. It has far more customisation than Windows allows these days, and as standard it comes with quite a lot of software preinstalled. Thunderbird mail is far easier to use than Outlook, LibreOffice works almost the same as Office and can go everything the average user will ever need. And every web browser is the same. And if you need to access any Android apps install Chrome browser and the webapps are already there. I use this for the notes app Keep which I have on every device.

Many also hear Linux and instantly think Commandline. For years you can happily use Linux, especially Debian forks suck as Ubuntu and Mint without ever having to touch the commandline. But it is powerful. And some installs such as for servers only use the commandline as it's all that's needed. If you want to go further then yes it might be needed to directly install something from GitHub, but on the whole most programs are in the Mint application repository and many program makers now directly cater for installers directly from their websites that use .deb installers that work like a Windows .exe installer.

Now for gaming. Linux was always the OS with limited game support. The odd game was released but not many. Steam has always had some games with native Linus versions. And Wine was an option to try and get more working. But this all changed when Valve released the Steam Deck. It came with the Linux based Steam OS and a compatibility layer called Proton. Valve put a lot of work into this and are still constantly working on both Steam OS and Valve. Over 19,000 games on Steam are now marked as fully Steam OS compatible, and this means Linux compatible.

And Valve have now shared all this hard work with the Linux Steam client. When you install Steam on Linux is automatically comes with the Proton compatibility layer installed. So you can install and run the same games that work on the Steam Deck. Obviously there will be differences because unlike the Steam Deck the hardware a different Linux distro is installed on might be quite different, such as amount of ram, cpu power, storage, GPU etc. but that's true in Windows too.

So anyway. I've not fully installed a new Linux distro to use as a desktop replacement in some time. I first played around with Linux over 20 years ago with Fedora 4. That showed promise but still needed a lot of messing around to get most things to work or setup and run. Now Linux is far more mature. More stable than Windows. If you want to try it out Linux Mint Cinnamon is a very good place to start, and you don't even need to install it to try it. Just make a Mint boot USB and boot from it. It boots straight into a full Mint install for you to play around with.

[Harrison]

Just a quick additional thought regarding making a full move from Windows to Linux Mint. I mentioned those that need to still use Microsoft apps like Office and Teams. However I forgot about the Office 365 cloud versions. I had to log into my Microsoft account whilst using Mint just now to manage Tom's computer restrictions and once logged into Microsoft via the Chrome browser realised all the 365 apps were available. Quick click about and all worked fine in Chrome, even teams. I also have Microsoft Edge as an alternative if needed. I only actually installed Edge to test out Gamepass, bacause if you log into that on Linux you can use Cloud Streaming to play any game and that works really well. I use it on the Steam Deck and you don't realise it's not running locally. Just got 2 years Gamepass Ultimate via EE for renewing my fibre.

[Harrison]

I've been playing around a bit more with Linux Mint. I use the Heroic Games Launcher on my Steam Deck to load my GOG library to run the games in Linux. You can also add your Epic and Amazon Luna accounts so it adds all your games from all 3 into a single library. It then uses Proton and Wine to run the PC games in Linux. Works really well for none Steam games. You can also manually add games to it, just as you can in Steam.

Anyway I was going through a load of old physical PC games I still have and want to downsize and sell all the ones I also have as online digital versions. I was sure I had quite a few in my old EA Origin library but I hadn't logged into that in years. I had a laptop running with Mint installed on it and wondered if it was possible to even access the EA Origin library on Linux. I looked but apparently the Origin app was ended last year and replaced with the EA App, which happens to be Windows only. Quick Google and you can use Heroic Games Launcher to run it and access your EA games library.

So I found a quick guide to getting it working and it wasn't too complicated. Basically similar to manually adding a game to Heroic. Download the Installer, open Heroic and select Add game. Give the new entry a name and then navigate to the installer and run it. This didn't quite work fully and produced an error after an update. But I continued to the end of the guide, tried to run the EA App and got an error. The next bit of the guide was to fix such issues. Just had to go into the settings for the Heroic game entry and rerun the installer. This time it installed without an issue and the login page appeared.

So now I'm running the EA App in Linux, logged into my EA account and looking through the games I own on there. Far more than I remembered which is nice. The whole C&C collection, all the Battlefield games, all the Deadspace, Dragon age and Crisis games. And loads more. About the only games I remembered being in there were Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2.

So anyway, thats good that it worked. Another day I'm going to see if I can get the actual games to run from the EA App.

Why bother? Why not just start up one of my Windows systems? It's fun getting such things working and knowing it wasn't in Windows. I really do hate it these days and anything I can do in Linux instead is a big bonus.

[Tiago]

Last time i try linux, was like 15 years ago, cant rebember what linux was but i try 3 or 4.
I remeber i was able to install applications, run any type of software without any command line.
Even windows office apps. Major downside was games, back then it qas difficult to run demanding games.
Buy today steam as example have a lot of games for linux.
The only reason i still use windows is because i always buy laptops and the hardware i want always came with windows. And once again games.

[Harrison]

Linux has come a long way in the last 15 years. The difference now is you don't need Linux specific version of games to play them. Nearly all Windows games in Steam will now work perfectly in Linux and for older games actually better. This is thanks to something called Proton. Based on the older Wine (which is used to run Windows software in Linux). Valve developed this into Proton for the Steam Deck. This allows Steam OS on the handheld to run a large percentage of the Steam library's games. The other Heroic Game Launcher I mentioned above also uses the same Proton to make games run.

You wouldn't even know you were not running a native Linux game or that you were not in Windows.

For older games on Steam a lot of them have trouble installing or running in Windows. Especially games made before 2010. But it seems because on Linux you are using Proton to make the games run this issue doesn't exist as much. On my Steam Deck and in Steam on Linux Mint I've tested quite a few older games in the last couple of years and nearly every game just works. So actually to play older more retro PC games that came out when Win98, 2000 or XP were around it is a far easier solution. Trying to get some of these older games to run on Windows 10/11 can sometimes be hard as you need fan community patches or updated files.

I've also been going though my physical games and a lot of the older ones rely on "Games for Windows". Remember that? That doesn't exist any more so trying to install from the original physical media and run them they look for GFW and fail. Instead using online versions in Linux bypasses this issue. I've just been testing an old Space game that's now that well known, called "Tachyon The Fringe". It's available on Steam at the moment for just ?1.74 so worth a look. And it worked perfectly installing it from Steam. Even automatically let me use an Xbox 360 controller I have joined to this Linux Mint PC.

Linux Mint is the best Linux distro to try if you are coming from Windows. You can setup a live USB stick and boot the PC from it to test out Mint without even needing to install it.

[Tiago]

Didnt know that game stuff was not an issue anymore. That is great. One less reason not to use linux.