[Questions] I am pondering a switch over to Linux Mint, but have some reservations I'd like some input on

Hi there!

I've been with Windows my entire IT-Life, including working as a System Administrator for over 16 years on a workstation level. I'm very comfortable with Windows and "know" enough to get rid of most of the annoyances MS likes to throw at us.

Now as MS moves forward and more and more cloud functionality is introduced, my worries grow. I'll still use it for work, but on my personal devices, I feel like I want to divest.

I'm lurking on some Linux stuff, and I see some worrying comments there as well.

My use case:

  • Gaming (Majority on Steam, some on GoG)
  • Streaming / Recording via OBS
  • Light video editing
  • General browsing and faffing about
  • some VTT use

Nothing Linux Mint won't be able to do. I am also not averse to dual booting or simply running Windows in a VM for anything I am missing, should such a thing be encountered (I am fairly fond of MS Office, don't kill me for it, again a thing of habit and depth of existing knowledge on troubleshooting and functionality).

So here's some of what I read that makes me very hesitant:

  • People comment about "Oh yeah, it's fairly stable but you'll have to reinstall now and again"
  • While I understand encryption with recovery keys isn't truly secure, my threat model doesn't require it and will hamper me more if I encrypt a drive and cannot recover it should something go wrong (especially in combination with point one here)

So some questions following from that:

  • Are there any simple backup solutions I can run locally with a NAS?
  • How much troubleshooting will likely be required based on my use case and how much of that will be command line? (obviously that's a total crapshoot of an approximation to make, so any guess is welcome)

I've not needed to reinstall my Windows 10 system for a solid 3 or 4 years but looking at EoL of it approaching and not really wanting to go to Windows 11...

Thanks for any (constructive) input in advance!

ghostatnoon,
ghostatnoon avatar

This is a rather old post, but given that you've not received any answers yet, I hope replying isn't too inappropriate.

For the first question, I back up my files on a NAS using rsync. It's a command-line solution, but I stored the command in a .desktop file to make an icon in my app list that I can just click to back everything up to the correct places. Makes it easy, and wasn't too difficult to implement.

Your second question might depend on your hardware. I just set up a new laptop on linux mint and had to do significant amounts of troubleshooting, all of it involving the command line, because linux mint didn't come with or know about most of the drivers required. If you're using an older or more well-supported computer, it might work better out of the box. Most troubleshooting will probably be command-line, but there's a lot of support out there for that if you need it.

App-wise linux mint has a fairly robust software manager (app store) with a wide variety of apps on it that, for the most part, don't require a lot of troubleshooting. (I only recently switched over to mint from Ubuntu, and was impressed at how many apps you could access so easily, including a large variety of unofficial releases of software that isn't officially available on linux). Unless you're intent on building obscure software from source, installing and using applications should be fairly painless.

I can't speak to the stability of mint, since I haven't been using it for long enough. However, I used Ubuntu for five or six years and never had to reinstall it, so you could always look into Ubuntu if stability is important to you.

AlteredStateBlob,
AlteredStateBlob avatar

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

I recently learned that you can update the Linux kernel on mint to the newest stable and have a much larger set of drivers available right out of the gate that way. I am looking at a regular PC, no laptop.

My current plan is to find support for every bit of hardware I am using before switching.

Looking more and more likely I will do it within the next year or so.

ghostatnoon,
ghostatnoon avatar

Yeah, I installed a few drivers manually and then came across one that was, for some reason, only available via the newest kernel and not as a separate piece of software. I'd have updated the kernel before that one if I'd realised that it might have been able to fix my issues, but it hadn't come up as a possible solution until then. If you do figure all that out before actually installing the os, you'll probably have a better time than I did. :)

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