From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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.
I went for it, kept what I wanted on an external hard drive and nuked the rest. No ragrets
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.
command thingy
They grow up so fast.
Haven’t played anything yet but I’m sure I’ll be fine.
<_<
Lol
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)
Minty got a fresh Mint :)
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!
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.
One of us One of us One of us! :)
I use Arch by the way.
I did too, never again. Fedora just works.
Which flavor did you choose? I am now rocking basic mint with XFCE on my older machine and LMDE on newer.
Cinnamon I think
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.
I'm happy for you!!! Happy to hear you're enjoying your freedom.
Welcome to the penguin party! 🐧
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!
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
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.
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.
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 😅
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.
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 https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=370633
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)
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.
Rufus is great for Windows. I don't really recommend it for Linux. It's needlessly complicated.
Use Balena Etcher or Ventoy instead.
Or for that matter just use dd or preinstalled tools.
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.
Welcome to the Club!
I hope the update to 24.04 works well
I’ve been through a few on regular Mint and the Debian edition and they have been very smooth.
Yeah I didnt haha, thats why I mentioned that.
If you do, I made a post about how to circumvent it manually.
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.
Next on the list: get into tabletop RPG, but not DnD.
I can recommend Pathfinder and Shadowrun.
As soon as I find the time will do the same thing. Congrats!
