I have been using Linux exclusively for many years now and I distro hop frequently with Fedora and Mint being my two most frequent distros.

I bet my wife that if she uses Linux for a month she will not want to return to Windows. So here is my question. What is the best way to setup Linux Mint so my wife will feel at home and not struggle? Her typical use is web browsing (Vivaldi so it will be the same), Office (she will be using Libre instead of Microsoft), email (gmail so the same), and multimedia playback.

Is there anything extra I can do to make it more enjoyable for her? We've been married a long time and she is finally agreeing to give Linux a shot so I don't want to waste this opportunity.

I haven't seen anyone talk about this, and since I managed to get it working, I wanted to share a tutorial on how to install Linux Mint on the AMD BC-250 APU machine:

1. Install the operating system the standard way.
2. First boot fix: After rebooting, you might be unable to boot into the system and see a screen with errors. What fixed it for me was temporarily booting Linux Mint using the nomodeset parameter:
   • During boot, edit the GRUB entry (press e).
   • Find the line ending with "quiet splash".
   • Add nomodeset at the end so it looks like: "quiet splash nomodeset".
   • Press Ctrl + X or F10 to boot into the operating system.
3. Update the system: Once booted, open the terminal and run: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade Then restart your PC.
4. Done: After restarting, the PC should boot completely fine without needing nomodeset. You don't even need to install any extra drivers, and games will perform normally.

One final recommendation: Be careful when installing programs that modify system graphics settings. Doing so might trigger the error from step 2 again, requiring you to boot with nomodeset to undo or fix the configuration changes (this happened to me with some complications while installing MangoHud).

Disclaimer: I just wanted to share my personal experience getting Linux Mint to work on my AMD BC-250, which I now use daily without issues. Please note that I am not responsible for any damage that may occur during the process. I'm just a Computer Science student sharing my experience for anyone looking to run Ubuntu-based distros on this APU machine. Have a great day!

I'm running this off a live usb drive. This is my first time ever using linux.

So a few days ago I started to receive this error. I checked to see if it had anything to do with me disabling Secure Boot so I turned it back on and it did not seem to fix the issue. I am still able to boot into mint like normal so it is not causing any serious problems for me but I would like to get rid of this error if I can.

JPG files aren't previewed in an Android phone connected through the MTP protocol. They're only previewed in the local ext4 partition and an NTFS mounted one.

Copying them to the desktop mitigates it, but it's not viable as a long-term solution.

Hi I just switched to linux mint and wanna clean up a bit - to which i noticed that there are so many apps that easily could just be included in the settings instead of filling up the app list
Is there anyway to do this or at least hide them?
(Also the amount of visual/virtual keyboard apps and settings is crazy)

Ok I will try to describe it best I can: I formatted a drive to ext4 in linux mint 22.3; format completed ok. Named the partition, and mounted the drive . Checked the properties of the drive to find that the 8tb drive was only 7.5tb unused with 400.8GB of space already used. How can a drive that is fresh format of the entire drive into a single partition already be using 400.8GB of space? None of my other drives do this.... I am really confused.

specs: drive is WDC WD80EFPX-68C42N0 8TB

Disks app shows as disk is OK. Smart shows no reallocation, no unreadable sectors, no errors that stand out. 1 year of smart power on so not that old. I have done the format a few times now and end up with the same 400.8GB of space being used before I do anything with the drive each time.

Any suggestions or enlightenment out there?

I was playing on it just fine literally 12 hours ago when I went to bed and woke up I booted it up and was met with this please help

edit: ill edit this as I try stuff I just wanted to post on reddit in case I missed any easy fixes, I was able to boot into the previous update so ill try stuff in that

Is it normal that my GPU is running so Hot while installing a game with Q4Wine?

Im trying to get the neofetch to display tomoko instead of the mint logo, i set jp2a and chafa as my image backend and i used realpath to get the source for the image in question, but the mint logo still appears, and chafa and jp2a display the image just fine when used. Is there a fix to this

after being unjistifiably banned from the discord server by some mods for typing 6 words in caps i decided to throw away my linux sticker and uninstall it from all my devices. good riddance. ain't no tear shed after it.

Intel Pentium system if that help

Linux Mint 23.3/Cinnamon

I usually don't let kernel updates go through unless there's something really important... but today I was distracted, and the system installed a new Linux kernel release, 7.0.0-28.

apt upgrade showed errors compiling the VirtualBox dkms modules, and the next time I rebooted, I got a nice pink screen... kernel panic.

So I rebooted again, selected the previous kernel from the grub menu, and everything went back to normal (that's why the pink screen is better than the BSOD).
At this point, I removed the 7.0.0-28 kernel update and put it on hold to avoid any future incidents.

For those new to Linux, this might help you avoid doing too much s.e. queries.

sudo apt purge linux-image-7.0.0-28-generic linux-modules-7.0.0-28-generic linux-headers-7.0.0-28-generic

sudo update-grub

sudo apt-mark hold linux-image-7.0.0-28-generic linux-modules-7.0.0-28-generic linux-headers-7.0.0-28-generic

sudo apt clean && sudo apt autoremove

EDIT 2: Thanks for the suggestions about updating viltuabox, which may be also useful to others.
I was aware of this, but since other issues are known for this kernel version, I decided to first remove it, as it offers no benefit on my hardware.

EDIT 1: Sorry, I misspelled the title and it can't be changed... but it might be good for German speakers ;-)

At least I still have good old Windows for most games

I am facing this same problem but on linux mint.

Does anyone know if I can make video converters made exclusively for Windows like Movavi or Aiseesoft successfully work with Linux Mint and how?

I'm pretty new to Linux and I've tried multiple times to use it via Wine but never succeeded. Apps either don't install and demand Win11 components that I guess Wine doesn't provide, or they give an error trying to convert/save video. I know Handbrake exists but compared to commercial products it has confusing GUI and lacks many essential functions e.g. setting goal size of a converted file.

I want to put linux mint on my gaming PC as windows creates problems. Is it easy to use/user friendly? Can i get steam and Minecraft to work on it? Does AMD software adrenaline edition work? Will it not screw anything up majorly?

It's been like a month that Flatpak updates have been really slow, around 200-300 KB/s

In general I have problems with Fastly IPs. I'm located in Europe.

I tried using different ISPs in my region and also a VPN, but I got pretty much the same speed every time.

Anyone else having this problem too? any help would be appreciated.

I feel like there should be a mega thread (not from my post of course) of growing pains when you first move to Linux Mint with no experience. I dual boot from windows, so I’ll add issues with that as well

In no particular order:

1. It was only when I was 99.9% of the way of installing Linux Mint that I got told I needed to do something unless I wanted to risk my windows partition getting corrupted. I can’t remember if it was disable Fast startup, disable secure boot, disable hibernation, disable bitlocker (which takes hours), or something else, but it was a huge pain in the neck, and then because I’d started the process before, it kept failing for hours and saying it was unable to read the .iso file, so I reinstalled the .iso file to the boot flash drive, and reformatted it, and got another flash drive because my first one was old, and moved everything off that and reformatted that too… because that’s what the error message said, until apparently I stumbled across a random forum where I had to rename a random file in the usb boot drive because otherwise you get a bug (which is a pain because it’s already worked once, and it’s hard to research a problem when you are trying to boot the computer), and that bug only happens if you started the process before but aborted it, even if you aborted it they way they say you should??? It was honestly a terrible introduction to Mint.

2. Because of dual boot I had to mess with the authentication codes of Bluetooth devices so I could switch between Linux and Windows without having to forget and reconnect earphones. it was a pain tbh. I did everything through terminal the first time, the second time I think there was some software that synced them all painlessly, but you do have to make sure your earphones/bluetooth device are working with the Windows side first before you do the fix

3. My Linux only started with 2GB swap (default setting?). I didn’t know what swap was a month ago, and my cheap laptop was generally faster on Linux but then would completely crash when I put it under a bit of strain, and wouldnt be able to recover. now I have tried zRam and use zSwap and it runs better in every way, but I was at a loss early on

4. For dual boot, I didn’t realise how much it mattered where your partition was on your SSD when installing the Linux root and everything, I thought if I needed more space I could just delete more stuff from windows and expand the Linux partition. Not the case. now I had to create an extra random 100GB partition in the middle of my SSD whoch while not that bad is slightly inconvenient.

5. I like paint. it takes me 5x longer to do little things that I find easy in paint on Linux Mint, though I’m getting better and I can tell paint is worse… still a growing pain

6. had issues for the first several restarts where my WiFi just wouldn’t work sometimes. Sometimes yay, sometimes nay. I think if I’d been told to just try restarting twice before trying to fix it would have saved me hours, because it usually resolved itself. there was also useful advise about being able to piggyback off your phone’s internet using a cord to update drivers, which helped as my laptop can’t use Ethernet.

7. copy and paste into terminal requires SHIFT in addition to CONTROL+C/V. was super annoying when I was just starting, especially because it ruins whatever you were just doing and it takes a while to build the habit.

Im sure there were other pain points, but if I was recommending someone not tech savvy Linux Mint my first 3 points especially would be super painful if they ran into those issues, and the fixes aren’t easy or intuitiv. feel free to add your own pain points, but I would like it if there was a bit more of a ‘Newbie starter pack’ that can smooth the transition.

I tried installing Linux mint for the first time and it showed the Linux mint icon and the screen didn't display anything, they second time I tried it did that. (The reason I show the bitlocker recovery screen is that I got this dell latitude 7490 with a intel 7th or 8th gen i7 at a yardsale for $25 and it didn't boot windows after the first boot. I only could get this display issue visible on camera was with the broght blue screen)

An external display also didn't work to display anything on mint, anyone know why the screen did these broken lines, and more importantly, does anyone know why mint wasn't working? I used Rufus for the usb stick just as a tutorial said. Is the USB to slow at 10mb read speed? Can Linux mint not display because of firmware? Or is it a different problem completely?