- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- linux@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- linux@lemmy.ml
The Linux Mint team has just released Linux Mint 22, a new major version of the free Linux distribution. With Windows 10’s end of support coming up quickly next year, at least some users may consider making the switch to Linux.
While there are other options, paying Microsoft for extended support or upgrading to Windows 11, these options are not available for all users or desirable.
Linux Mint 22 is a long-term service release. Means, it is supported until 2029. Unlike Microsoft, which made drastic changes to the system requirements of Windows 11 to lock out millions of devices from upgrading to the new version, Linux Mint will continue to work on older hardware, even after 2029.
Here are the core changes in Linux Mint 22:
- Based on the new Ubuntu 24.04 package base.
- Kernel version is 6.8.
- Software Manager loads faster and has improved multi-threading.
- Unverified Flatpaks are disabled by default.
- Preinstalled Matrix Web App for using chat networks.
- Improved language support removes any language not selected by the user after installation to save disk space.
- Several under-the-hood changes that update libraries or software.
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I switched to Mint for my new PC a few months ago. There are a handful of games that don’t work on it, but they’re few and far between.
I switched my main gaming computer to Mint after testing it on a laptop. Being away from Windows is awesome. You know how everything always wants your attention on Windows? Your antivirus proudly announces its existence. Windows wants to know if it should remove some printers? Some PDF software needs updated RIGHT NOW. There’s a license change please acknowledge this 20 page document. Animated attention grabbing everywhere. I always think FUCK OFF when presented with this bullshit.
You know what - Mint doesn’t do that. I’ve not been internally shouting at my own computer since I went that way.
It is serene.
How has your gaming journey been so far? Games and general programs are the main reason why in still on Windows
This is a great time to switch. I have Bazzite on a 2015 laptop and a Steam Deck with SteamOS, and I’m working on migrating my main gaming rig. 95% of my games run well, and the few that don’t are often tiny indie projects. Most general use apps have Linux equivalents or Linux versions.
My recommendation is to try a few distros in VMs and see if you can set them up how you’d do it for real. Then, try out a few Live ISOs to identify any glaringly obvious hardware compatibility issues you might need to solve (rare, but it happens).
Try the common recommendations like Mint or Pop!_OS, and check out gaming-focused ones like Bazzite and Garuda.
Steam + Proton works for most games, but there are still rough edges that you need to be prepared to deal with. In my experience, it’s typically older titles and games that use anti-cheat that have the most trouble. Most of the time it just works, I even ran the Battle.net installer as an external Steam game with Proton enabled and was able to play Blizzard titles right away.
The biggest gap IMO is VR. If you have a VR headset that you use on your desktop and it’s important to you, stay on Windows. There is no realistic solution for VR integration in Linux yet. There are ways that you can kinda get something to work with ALVR, but it’s incredibly janky and no dev will support it. There are rumors Steam Link is being ported to Linux, nothing official yet though.
On balance, I’m incredibly happy with Mint since I switched last year. However, I do a decent amount of personal software development, and I’ve used Linux for 2 decades as a professional developer. I wouldn’t say the average Windows gamer would be happy dealing with the rough spots quite yet, but it’s like 95% of the way there these days. Linux has really grown up a lot in the last few years.
Thanks for the detailed reply. VR isn’t a deal-breaker for me currently but your last paragraph is great, most of the videos I’ve watched have echoed that sentiment of “It works great… Most of the time”
I do want to give Linux a try when I have some time over for trouble shooting and fixing. I feel like a Mac person when I say that lol, “I just want it to work”
I switched to Linux Mint a couple months ago and use Steam a lot. I’ve tried at least 10 games and all worked perfectly.
But I don’t do competitive multiplayer. Those are more likely to have issues with anti-cheats. Although I did try Hell Let Loose and Helldivers very successfully and those are both major online titles.
Check https://protondb.com if you’re worried about a specific game’s compatibility. I’ve had silver rated games work perfectly though.
I’m with you. Bricscad was the best cad I found and it genuinely wasn’t a great experience. Very laggy but it has all the professional tools and workflow I’m used to.
Apps - Photo editing and 3D CAD are the main areas I’ve struggled with on Linux
Yeah, I feel that. Paint.net is the sole reason I still fire up my Windows VM every now and then.
The closest you can get is Pinta and even then, looking at the surface things may seem very similar, but the workflow is totally different (it doesn’t even have overscroll god damn it!) and the plugin scene is deader than dead. I wanted to code a proper replacement based on Pinta, but I haven’t got the motivation or time for that.
If I wanna edit an image, firing up a VM is still genuinely faster than trying to work with Pinta or GIMP or any other opensource alternative for that matter. Krita has surprisingly been pretty good at replicating the workflow, but it still falls short.
Thanks for the link! Will definitely check out my top played games, unfortunately I play a lot of multiplayer games like Dota, Hunt, CS and War Thunder.
Photo editing and 3d modelling is something I do a lot which is a deal-breaker for me personally. Blender works on Linux afaik but stuff like substance painter/designer, Houdini, plasticity etc I don’t know
I don’t know about Hunt, but War Thunder and Dota have official Linux clients.
Not the person you asked to but my gaming experience has been stellar. If you use Steam you don’t have to do anything, it all works out of the box. If you don’t play those multiplayer games with kernel level anti cheats you’ll be fine.
I was expecting a bad time and was extremely impressed. Gaming in Linux is amazing.
Some of those with anti cheat even work, I’ve been playing Helldivers 2 with no issue
Last I heard, Destiny 2 could be running fine, their anti cheat supports Linux, but Bungie still bans people for trying
I have a dual boot, mint and Bazzite. Bazzite is great for gaming
If in the future you don’t want to dual boot you should check out CachyOS. I use that as my daily driver right now and it’s great for gaming.
I’ve found I prefer Fedora over debian builds for gaming, and Bazzite also includes literally everything needed for gaming of any kind already installed. Also it being immutable is really good in particular in case a game causes system issues. Bazzite also has great Steam Deck integration and desktop interoperability if needed, and can install emulators from the get go, along with many wine configurations for older Windows games.
It’s also nice to have my work space divided completely from my gaming one, and a debian build is great for productivity programs like audio mixing, 3d printing, and art, since there’s more stability and support vs bleeding edge like fedora.
Hence my dual boot set up (with separate ssd’s).
Now I just have to get around to writing a script to clean up the grub menu, street going through making it look pretty.
Things with kernel anti-cheat aren’t going to work unless they have a Linux version. So no Helldivers, Valorant, Apex Legends, etc.
Other than that, I have yet to find a game that doesn’t work under Proton. They’ll tell you it’s Windows-only until you go into the game’s steam compatibility settings and set it to Proton Experimental and then it just installs and runs no problem. Even things I didn’t really expect to work, I booted and played Trepang2 under Proton just last night, not a problem in sight.
Along with Helldivers 2, I can confirm Apex Legends works as well. Valorant as far as I’m aware is a definite no-go though.
Just adding on, ProtonDB is a great resource for checking game compatibility!
Thanks to you and jettrscga for letting me know! I think that may not have always been the case, I seem to remember Helldivers pretty specifically didn’t have Linux support when I was last playing it. Or maybe I’m just crazy.
Apex I for sure just assumed wouldn’t work, without trying, because of aforementioned kernel anti-cheat. Good to know I was wrong there even if I don’t like the game that much myself.
Helldivers 2 works on Linux by the way. It was the first game I installed on Linux and I have almost 100 hrs on it. I haven’t tried the others you mentioned though.
That serenity is why I enjoy running Arch with basically nothing on it. My OS doesn’t do shit and I love it
I like the way Linux handles updating software better.
On Windows, every app is installed separately so each app is internally responsible for its own updates. So you sit down to do some work, open up your productivity software and “Autodobe After360 requires an update to continue. [Yes] [Yes]” This isn’t impossible on Linux but it happens much less often.
As you say it doesn’t throw itself under your wheels as often as Windows does.
You can do a lot with
chocolateyorwinget, but they can’t update system software. Linux package management is just better.
I hope Clem enjoys his successes on the backs of the many contributors he’s ostracized over the years.
Could you elaborate on this? I’m still distro shopping and know basically nothing about Mint’s development history.
Sure he’s burned bridges with me and other people I’ve talked to. They have a habit of reverting people’s work and have a lot of back door conversations. Just because it’s open source doesn’t mean it’s collaborative or that anyone has any input in the actual result, regardless of how much work they contribute towards it themselves.
They also cut a lot of corners and do sloppy work, and when called out on it, that’s when they start ostracizing people. They work in bad faith in many situations with outsiders.
Which is fine we all like different things but what I said was true, take it or leave it, and you guys can fanboy downvote me and I can move on and not actually care either way.
For the people that really care about this distribution, they’re only doing a disservice to themselves by being in denial about Linux mint disappearing tomorrow if a single person goes away, because that’s the state of things.
Thanks for the explanation. I’m sorry you had a bad experience working with them. Unfortunately, bad management and petty people problems don’t go away just because it’s open source. :(
Can it run steam and autocad?
Also amd gpu support. I had to abandon mint 5 years ago because of poor driver support.
Latest kernel is probably what you need if things work on other distros. There’s a menu in the Mint update manager you can use to change to a slightly newer kernel and I would always advise that if it doesn’t cause any other issues. Newer kernel usually means more and newer drivers.
Mint is ultimately based on Debian, but with a lot of newer software, although it’s “stable” under the hood. That’s why Mint is popular on personal home computers. The idea behind it is that it should give you all the updates you need, but not too often or in a way that breaks things. If your computer works on one version of Mint, it would hopefully never break from an update, but packages don’t tend to be cutting-edge.
Steam is sort of an exception there. It works well on the vast majority of distros because Valve’s CEO is a bit unusual in that he prefers people to be using Linux and has done a lot to keep it working well. If you don’t use the flatpak for Steam (which I wouldn’t suggest), then it runs in its own kind of custom runtime container that makes sure it works as it’s supposed to in the vast majority of.
I’ve never used Autocad, so I couldn’t say too much about it. If a program doesn’t work properly it could be due to incompatible dependency packages with different behaviour. Autocad would also be a graphics heavy program (similar to Blender, but also like videogames) so drivers could come in there too. The updated libraries might help, or it could just be your graphics drivers again. You can also try the flatpak version instead if it doesn’t work, and vice versa.
If you can get your GPU to work on other distros, you shouldn’t have many problems on this new major version of Mint, so long as the kernel is new enough, which I think it would be.
If you have a specific, very new, AMD GPU, there are actually public records of what the developers of the Linux kernel are doing to support newer hardware. Most people don’t find these easy to check, but this would be a common question. There is a long wikipedia page giving a few of the most well-known optimisations, bug-fixes and hardware support improvements in specific versions of the Linux kernel.
By the way, there are lots of people on the official Linux Mint forums who are happy to answer specific questions about bugs or what’s improving in Linux Mint, as posed by community members.
I’ve been using Mint exclusively for quite a few years now (outside of Android) and had minimal issues, outside of poorly refurbished laptops I got for cheap (like one with a physically broken keyboard that spammed one of the buttons, which I was able to fix easily with a simple script I copied from the web).
Sorry if that was too long an answer, but what I’m saying is there is a good chance it will just work out if you try to install this new major version (though there’s some chance it might not). Also I believe they’ve decided to prioritise shipping a kernel with good hardware support now, rather than a more “stable” one (older/LTS) so a lot of more recent hardware will work, unlike 5 years ago.
Don’t be afraid of following a few CLI guides if you have to either. Any distro is good enough if you know a few terminal commands, and any distro can be perfect if you’re an absolute bash wizard.
Hope that helped.
My bad. Autocad is commercial software that mainly supports Windows, so you would have to see if you can set it up through Wine (popular for running Windows software on Linux).
Mint ships with 6.8 now
Technically Mint is based on Ubuntu (this release is based on Ubuntu 24.04 which released earlier this year).
Mint decrapifies Ubuntu by removing things like Snap, I’m going to switch to Mint eventually - honestly maybe even later this year, maybe in December or something.
Ubuntu is based on Debian, although they made quite extensive changes over time. Ubuntu and Mint are very similar, but Ubuntu is owned by a corporation called Canonical that people have had a few concerns about the priorities of, whereas Mint is community ran.
Not sure about AutoCAD, but I have Mint installed to the expansion card drive on my Frame.work and have been playing a fair amount of Inscryption, FTL, and Stronghold Crusader on it through Steam, so I would say yes?
I would try to run autoCAD by adding it to steam as a game and set it to use proton and look what happens 🤔
Autocad AFAIK doesn’t run, I am trying to get something like nanocad to work, also any version of SAP2000, ETABS or Staad.
Steam & amd yes, autocad no
Too bad Linux can’t run all my games yet. If it could I’d switch in a heart beat
Let me preach you the gospel of
A user friendly, steam OS like distro specifically made for gaming. About as difficult to set up as a new smartphone, and comes with all the goods needed for gaming preinstalled, like steam, wine (lutris), and various other compatibility features.
It is also an immutable distro, which essentially means you can’t break your system*. If you mess something up you can simply roll back to an earlier configuration.
*you certainly still can, but you would have to actively try
I installed Bazzite earlier this month as a dual boot and have been very happy with it. A lot of stuff just worked on bootup, haven’t installed a single driver, and that’s including my AMD GPU, just installed a game, plugged in my controller, and it played. Most games seem to run better than Windows. Fullscreen mode is a lot less annoying to tab out of - there isn’t the annoying momentary black screen, tab just happens. OBS seems to finally be on the level of Windows performance, although some of my favorite extensions are Windows-only. That’s been something of an annoyance, a lot of stuff is Windows-only, but usually if I Google “[program] Linux” I’ll get a workaround or substitute. I still leave Windows installed because of anti-cheat nonsense, but I rarely boot into Windows anymore.
Kind of meandering but that’s my experience so far. Overall pretty satisfied.
Tried it this week, video signal would cut off as soon as there was a tiny bit of load on the GPU (like intro videos in a game would be too much)… I’ll have to experiment some more but you can’t blame people for using the option that just works when switching OS probably means troubleshooting for tens of hours…
Have you experimented with the Proton version? Video playback in games is commonly problematic, and sometimes switching to the GE version, Experimental, or a downgraded version will fix it.
Check ProtonDB and see if there’s a tweak you should make. I had to downgrade the Proton version in River City Girls to get video to work properly.
Yep, tried with Jedi: Fallen Order on the EA app via Lutris using Proton, same thing with Helldivers 2 and Pillars of Eternity on Steam, as soon as there was load on the GPU the display signal would stop (and it wasn’t just graphics not being loaded, it would switch to displaying my laptop input instead of my desktop display).
Weird. I wish I knew more about that stuff to offer you better suggestions.
What gpu do you have?
6650xt
I’ve got the whole day tomorrow to start over from scratch, I tried reinstalling to an external drive and I didn’t have a taskbar and wifi didn’t work, so clearly there’s something wrong somewhere…
Bazzite is a small distro that isnt very well tested on desktops, have you tried something like pop, mint, zorin or fedora?
I’m not sure what you mean by that, it’s directly built on Fedora which is probably one of if not the best workstation OS.
And it does a bunch of custom stuff that can break
Which of your games doesn’t work? Multiplayer?
Ive been willing to skip the like 2% of games I have that won’t play on it, personally.
Have you checked https://protondb.com?
Mint is mint! I’m using Debian Edition of Mint; according to the Mint forums the package backports for LMDE6 will be worked on after everything with LM22 is complete, and LMDE7 is for when a new Debian comes out.
I didn’t realize that LMDE existed until I read your comment. Now that I know it does I’m going to try it as an alternative to LM 22. I gave LM22 a spin yesterday and I don’t like some of the changes, particularly around the Online Account manager. It’s not quite as fresh as LM22 but it is using a newer Kernel than 21.3 which would be nice.
Okay so as someone who’s getting fed up with Windows and Microsoft as a whole, I’m interested in Linux.
I just wanna game and watch videos. Video calls n such with friends. Nothing too spectacular.
Now can someone who doesn’t work on computers for a living, or even isn’t a hobbyist programmer. Someone like me, who couldn’t write a line of code on their own, answer me how difficult would it actually be?
My biggest fear is that I’m convinced by all the tech nerds here who can of course run this no problem and don’t see why a beginner would struggle, and then my anxiety shoots through the roof while I have a breakdown because I just wanted to get home from work and relax and suddenly my PC is a paperweight.
Dead easy with Mint. I’ve been running it full time on my laptop for months now and my wife only recently came to find out it wasn’t windows when I was explaining Linux to her (and she’s not a technical personal - she’s the person who yells at TV remotes when they don’t work). Installation is super easy, much like installing windows - answer a few questions and off it goes. You can even install it alongside windows and pick what one you want to run on boot (I did this because of a couple windows-only apps I can’t ditch just yet). If you can figure out Lemmy, Mint will be a breeze too.
Do you sacrifice anything performance-wise by having the dual-boot?
After not even two years my beast pc I have for work has started giving me BSODs, apps crash, etc. Tried a bunch of stuff to troubleshoot hardware side, software side, short of buying new expensive parts like ram etc to test, or reinstalling the OS.
I do mostly video editing, sound editing, and Photoshop+Lightroom mainly, with some 3D, vector and stuff like that here and there. I think most of my software runs on Linux except the Adobe stuff. I’m curious to try Linux see if it would solve some of the problems but afraid that even the dual booting stuff would still be a pain if I need to switch between PS+LR to other tools a lot.
no perf. loss with dualbooting, just takes more space.
The other reply answered your performance question already, but to address your concern about switching between OS’s for different program needs - you could always run windows in a virtual machine on Linux and just use Windows and the needed Windows software that way without having to fully reboot into Windows. This is the direction I plan on eventually going someday with my own setup and using Tiny11 for a lightweight windows VM.
I’m gonna give it a go after this current job is delivered!
Any Debian based distro is not really good to recommend for newbies, I think most beginners should start with Nobara linux, OpenSuse or if the PC is just for browsing the web a immutable distro(OpenSuse MicroOS, Fedora kryptonite,Elementary os,… Etc).
Clarification: The reason I don’t recommend Debian is that the package manager break things frequently.
Not sure what you are saying here.
Regular Mint is based on Ubuntu. It is perhaps the most user-friendly distro.
LMDE is Debian based but includes all the same user facing tools and features.
I do not use Mint ( not a newb ) but it is a great distribution and great for beginners.
I recently gave thr debian based Linux Mint a try and I was pleasantly surprised.
I might ditch ubuntu for this.
Just curious, if you’re already using Ubuntu why try LMDE rather than the default version?
The default version of what?
Of Linux mint. The Cinnamon edition that pulls a lot from Ubuntu as well as Debian. That’s what got upgraded to version 22, along with the could other flavors. But Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) does not follow the same versions & release schedule.
Oh, like that.
Well, mainly because I’m getting a little fed up with how Ubuntu forces snap on to you. I just want to install the apt versions of programs but it won’t do that out of the box.
And I know you can change that and remove snap but I am a little done with always having to mod the shit out of my linux installations to get them to work the way I like.
Other than that I am pretty satisfied with how Ubuntu works out of the box and has pretty good hardware support. I was basically looking fot an Ubuntu without snap.
Ubuntu without snap is exactly what Mint Cinnamon is! You get to lean on all those popular Ubuntu resources and use apt and all that good shit.
It is? I did not know that! Thank you very much for enlightening me! I’ll be giving that a try now.
Glad to help! They do include flatpak stuff in the software manager if you use that, but they are marked as such.
I checked this morning and I have no flatpaks installed and snap/snapd itself isn’t even installed on my system.
Mint’s ok other than that ubun taint Years ago it was a one man show, not as much now?
I came & went from Mint 2010, I don’t remember specifics, something about network sharesMy criteria is corporate or community?
Tinker or work?
Bleeding edge or just works
KDE/qt or Gnome/gtk, there are a few DE’s forked from Gnome
I like the consistency across KDE apps of being able to have a custom toolbar & shortcutsI like community built, user friendly, KDE
Whatever you choose, install the meta package. You can add a DE, but you will have to chase weird crap & it will never be as good as a clean install
I like to install whatever I want to test on usb3 external nvme/sdd/hdd & use the Home [files] on the main machine or copy home as backup, best way to get the full effect of any distro
Just to be safe I like to have stuff from different parts of the linux world as backupsDebian MX just works, been good since they got over their init fixation, got all sorts of user friendly stuff, 6 month release cycle, enough community to keep it working
I just downloaded Spiral linux all the nice touches, but updates direct from debian, kind of like the various arch installers, but not quite so do it yourself
I don’t really like synaptic, the text is too small, takes too longArch
Manjaro
As much arch as you want
Very user friendly, big community, Pamac [best package manager], rolling releaseRed hat Suze is having weirdness from corporate again
I’m on Mageia, a long history of user friendly [drak tools], stable, just works
Very good community, 18 month release cycle, nice online version upgrade, rpm packagesI love mint, and Fedora Cinnamon is my daily driver. My only problem with cinnamon is that wayland support is still being developed, so it lacks 1:1 touchpad gestures.
Also can’t run 4k at 60hz on my system at least. That’s a total nonstarter for me.
Just did a timeshift then upgraded and it went perfectly. Had to disable a ppa but the upgrader even did that for me.
I only recently came over from Windows and am very impressed - most Windows upgrades go less smoothly than this.
Oh, there’s an upgrader? I’ve been looking for upgrade instructions since it was first announced released but all I’ve found is them saying they’ll put out instructions next week
mintupgrade utility name
Maybe dist update and dist upgrade will work, but I’m going to let them iron out the kinks, and upgrade when they offer an official path, after a Timeshift snapshot.
Right now I don’t feel like experimenting. For that I have VMs
I researched this a few years ago, but is their a way to get SolidWorks, SpaceClaim etc working on Linux? Or do I have to run a virtual machine with windows?
Some people have run solidworks on Linux with limited success. Granted I have never personally done it, from what I understand they used wine which emulates windows anyway. So it depends on how much time you are willing to sink to get things working.
Not to be critical of your input but wine is not an emulator (which is wine’s acronym), it’s actually a translation layer that converts windows calls into Linux on the fly, which can be a lot faster than emulating windows. Add to the original person’s question a quick Google led me to this project
Switching to Linux is almost always going to involve accepting that you may need to use alternative software compared to what you’re used to. If that’s unacceptable and you have mission critical work that can only be done on Windows compatible software, you may be better off staying put.
I was not successful running Solidworks under Linux and it even detects when it is running in a virtual machine and refuses to install completely!
Finally I have found an alternative that suits my needs, that has free account for hobby purposes: on-shape.com it’s web-based, works flawlessly under Linux and Firefox. Workflow is very similar to Solidworks, and version-control is simple and nice.
Doesn’t onshape originate from a bunch of SW engineers so that’d make sense!
Personally, I was paying for SW with a maker license but this year I’ve committed to Freecad, use realthunder’s fork that has the topo naming fix + modern ui workbench for a more familiar layout.
I would call it totally useable, workflow for me ends up the same or similar to solidworks, I tried fusion because that’s really popular but it didn’t click with me while freecad did. I won’t pretend it’s flawless and doesn’t have quirks but I’m willing to accept that for foss, need to spend a bit of time with it to get used to what it expects you to do but it’s really powerful once you do.
My main issue with mint has always been the reluctance to use a newer package base. Fortunately I think that’s changing since they’re adopting Wayland support and have their edge iso now. Currently running bazzite and it’s pretty rock solid with a couple quirks, but I’ve always thought about going back to mint when they start updating their package base.
ngl linux mint aint that bad but i dont like their desktop envoirment choices not saying cinnamon is bad its alr
