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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Migrating to Linux Mint - my journey...
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9698 |
First off, let me just say that if you WANT to run W11, including all the baggage that comes with it, that is fine. Each to their own.  This is MY journey.  The attempt by MS to FORCE everyone to use a MS account with W11, and various other things that they have been also quietly forcing on their users for a while now, has made me say "Enough is enough!". The entire "You must replace your working PC with a whole new one for W11 support" thing is a MAJOR turn-off for me - and it would seem rather a lot of other people also. W10 support has officially ended - fine. But that does not mean I HAVE to move to W11, and I won't, and I haven't. I have moved - officially - to LMDE6. (Linux Mint Debian Edition) I am still using my existing W10 hardware, and it is working flawlessly. I chose LMDE over the standard(Ubuntu) Mint distro, as I don't want or CARE about newly added features, I just want my PC to run. I am not interested in updating every few weeks for a new feature, just give me the STABLE and let ME decide if I want to upgrade. So, installed LMDE6, and there WERE no drivers to install. It picked up EVERYTHING, including the correct video, audio, USB, Network(both WiFi AND Ethernet)....and even the PRINTER - all WITHOUT having to download a single driver. Everything just worked. Amazing. I even have GFXterm, MMEDIT, ST-CUBE programmer, Etcher, HandBrake video transcoder and various other things all working, with VERY little effort. I have yet to setup the PICAXE programmer, as it wants other things, but the PICAXE website were very helpful telling me exactly what I had to do BEFORE I tried to install the Linux version of their editor. Things were working SO WELL, I removed a 16GB RAM stick(it had 32GB for W10), and even with HEAPS of websites running in tabs, and about 10-odd apps all running at the same time, RAM consumption is about 8GB of 16GB total, and about 4MB of the swap file. Astounding.....  Sure, I still have some little quirks to work out, but this was SO EASY to get running, vs Windoze, where you have to install a plethora of drivers for various hardware. Yes, I am ranting a bit - sorry about that.  EDIT: Here is my desktop in LMDE6 - so far... Sorry it's fuzzy - dual screens and I am still learning how to use Gwenview.  Edited 2025-10-18 16:42 by Grogster Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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Gizmo Admin Group Joined: 05/06/2004 Location: AustraliaPosts: 5137 |
Your having better luck than me. It wont work on my dual screen setup, refuses to install the NVidia drivers without coming up with a " error 10 ". I'm using Mint 22.2 with Cinnamon. The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is right now. JAQ |
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Mixtel90 Guru  Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 8212 |
By default Linux will handle its own displays, you shouldn't need to add different drivers. It's like that with a lot of hardware, especially graphics. GPU manufacturers won't disclose how their systems work so it all has to be reverse-engineered by the linux community. You'll generally find that the default drivers will provide a display but may not do some of the clever things that a monitor is capable of. Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| SunBakedWA Newbie  Joined: 22/12/2023 Location: AustraliaPosts: 6 |
I have had curry with the NVidia drivers and Mint too. Just put 22.2 Cinnamon on my 5 year old desktop PC which was factory installed with win10 and an NVidia graphics card. The open driver for the card did two screens but was a bit jittery on video playback. The closed binary blob driver only 'half' installed and gave an error message complaining about missing files. After looking around the general opinion was as the video card was 5 years old NVidia couldn't be bothered to update their driver for the latter kernel releases. By pure luck I had just pulled a similar age AMD card out of another machine that is doing server work (also running Mint), so I put that in my desktop and used APT to removed the NVidia driver package and both screens worked fine. In fact is like a new machine, much more snappy and way faster boot times. With this upgrade we are now a windows free household. BTW the desktop was 'entitled' to a free win 11 'upgrade'. That was a Yeh, Nah. Everything here has been Sun Baked in WA |
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