I think the EU should push for Linux to be adopted more in work and school environments. Linux was historically considered hard for beginners but OS like Mint really make it easy to switch over. What’s best, Linux Mint is free, safe, easy to use and open source.
In my country, Spain, when I was in the school they have computers with linux, furthemore they created a proper linux called "guadalinex", the name came from guada, river or water in arabic andinex from linux and Extremadura. Also, they give computers with that OS, but only few years.
As an IT person, I've been exposed to almost all popular desktops: Mac, Atari, Windows, Linux, etc. My favourite has been Linux Mint since its earlier versions. One of the best, if not the best Desktop OS currently. I've helped many people to discover Linux, too. Thanks, Chris, for making this excellent tutorial.
I think in terms of desktop and menu customization and function alone, Linux Mint Cinnamon beats Windows 10 and 11 hands down (and I use all three most days).
@@brunob.7792 For myself - because I have a Linux machine that has been running at 100% 24X7 for nearly a year. And that reboot was caused by a power interruption. When using Windows, it does well to manage a week without something needing intervention. By the way, my experience spans from IBM OS360, CDC Kronos, DEC RSX, PDP Unix, Fujitsu OS4 F4 mainframe OSs, then all the "favourite" MS variants (with increasing numbers of gaps out of disgust). I am much happier with Mint Linux on my main machine than I was when I ran Windows. Don't ask my opinion on Win10!
Here's a little tip that applies to the Linux terminal: When the terminal asks for operator input, for example "Y/n" to ask for "yes" or "no", often the choice will have one upper-case letter, which signifies that that is the default choice. If the default is what is wanted then it is not necessary to enter any text - just press "Enter" to select the default choice (see 8:43). Sometimes both choices will be shown lower-case. In that case there is no default and the choice must be entered (case insensitive).
Fun fact: on Russian and Ukrainian keyboards, the English key "y" (which means "yes") corresponds to the Russian letter "н", which means "нет", i.e. "no"😄
Well, I though it was capital Y because they were thinking that a new sentence begins inside the square brackets. In all honesty, how I am I suuposed to guess this?!
I've been using Cinnamon Mint for over two years now. The few problems that have come up have been easy to solve, and for the most part, everything just works. Using my computer is no longer a battle. It's instead a partnership.
As I turned on my computer this morning I thought, I think I should go back to Mint and here's the verification of that. It reminds me of the story of the old Maine farmer who went into a computer store, having decided it was time he learned about these computers. He asked the eager young salesmen to show him his best computer. "This model is so up to date that it can answer any question." If you stump it, it's free. "Ha," the farmer thought, " he said, "Ask it where my father is." The salesman typed in the question and the answer came back, "He's fishing on Moosehead Lake." "Ha," the farmer said, "My father was buried in the Pine Hill Cemetery nine years ago." The salesman was nervous and said, "Maybe if we ask it more specifically." "Ask it where Ethan Sumner sr. is." He typed it in and the computer said, "Ethan Sumner sr.'s buried in the Pine Hill Cemetery and your father just caught a trout. "
I am a IT person and have been working with computers for 50 years. I have worked with nearly every OS that you can imagine even before DOS, OS/2, and Windows. I am a Linux Mint MATE user, and appreciate the video here. I will be looking at many more like it.
I also installed Mate edition and was wondering about strange taskbar behaviour. For example when I have applications A and B open (app A on top) and I click start menu open, after that I can't click straight to app B on the taskbar but it starts flashing app A and I have to click that first. Is it normal for Mate taskbar work like this? To me it feels a bit restricting.
@@YoStu242 started using mint mate the day before yesterday , i switched to mint cinnamon yesterday, i feel like mint mate is a bit unstable compared to mint cinnamon , just my opinion
I use Mint because it works right out of the box. I realize that some applications (such as video production) require changing the look of the interface. I’m glad Mint allows that sort of thing, even though I don’t use the options. And it’s great to have a video showing how it is done in case anyone wants to make changes.
Could you elaborate on the video production angle? I'm helping a friend transition over from Windows and a video editor is what he most needs. (He previously used Vegas Pro under Windows..)
Finally a distribution review that adds value instead of just blabbing about. Clarifying, with useful tips. Even for me, the not-using-Mint-anymore user. Thanks a lot Christopher!
I'm a retired Network Administrator and started using Linux Mint a couple years ago. It's an excellent distro. But I had no idea how customizable it was. Thank you for this eye opening tutorial. As always your videos are very much appreciated. 👍😊
I've converted a couple of my older netbooks to Linux Mint after upgrading to an SSD based on your past videos. As a lifetime Windows user, I find Mint very intuitive. I'm excited to transition more and more to open source and alternative options to the large corporations and embrace the community driven world. I can't wait for more Risc-V stuff in the future! This video was a great addition to arsenal of education content. I still learned something even if it was a small setting in a menu I was unaware of. Thank you sir for your contribution to the community:)
Very useful video Chris! I've been daily driving Linux Mint for just over 6 months now, it's a really great operating system and never interrupts me in the way that windows does.
I think that "if it ain't broke don't fix it" is sound advice not only for video drivers, but throughout Linux, especially if you're a novice or you can end up spinning down a very deep dark rabbit hole. I speak from experience.
I think the thing with Linux, for users that like to tinker, is that because it's open source, you absolutely can. If you want to customise it, you can. If you want to mess with the config files, you can. Heck, if you want to dive into the source code and recompile your own kernel, you can. There are no locks nor limits with open source. It's all there, and it's all yours. BUT, of course, just because you can, does not mean it's wise to do so. You play with this, you play with that and, oh dear, that's not what I wanted at all. Umm, why is it so unstable now? Now that I've changed that, I don't like it, so how do I change it back? I'm halfway through this process, but now I don't know what to do. You're right. The "tinkering" rabbit hole with open source software is, basically, a bottomless pit, if you let yourself fall down it. "I just wanted to change the size of my icons. I'm now the chief maintainer of XWayland. Somehow. Send help." Yes, the first Linux distro I had, I hacked and reconfigured to death. It was very unstable. So I blanked it, reinstalled the distro and now I don't change anything about the default "out of the box" configuration unless I really have to. (But, that said, I don't mess with things on my home machine. Because the other good thing with Linux is, if you've got a spare machine, then let that one be the one where you mess around and break everything to learn what's what. What's that crude saying? "Don't shit on the floor where you live". Your daily driver? Don't mess. Your spare "lab" machine? Mess all you like, break it and just reinstall again.)
If it ain't broke.... Just wait until next major update lol The number of times I've had to repair nvidia graphics drivers after an update.... On all flavours of linux
I'm a sysadmin. I've done my fair share of distro-hopping when I first started using Linux (way before my career) and now together with my professional training, I can in theory use whatever Unix-like, Unix-based or whatever OS to do my job BUT I use Mint on my work laptop because I need something that just works without hassle.
For dual boot, I would add 2 bits of advice. 1) Turn off Windows fast boot, it can lock the windows drive as read only when in Linux. 2) run the command to make Linux use the system clock the same way Windows does. If you don't, then everytime you go back to Windows, the time will be out of sync. The command is 'timedatectl'
Aaaah! Thanks! I had the same issue, Windows showing the wrong time when I boot it. I never bother to investigate further as I boot Windows once a month.
The last thing I would do is suggest that anyone new to Linux tries to build a dual boot system - if you end up trashing the Windows side of your PC, you will end up blaming Linux for it and probably never try it again. I've used Linux since 1996, my distro of choice has been Gentoo Linux for 20 years now but when I help newbies build systems, I normally recommend Mint to them. It's perfectly possible to have a good Linux experience on any Core 2 Duo or better machine with 4GB RAM from 2007 or afterwards, bearing in mind that there is the "lite" version of Mint with XFCE desktop. Getting hold of such a machine can be done cheaply, many people may have such a machine in their attic or loft, and if you build such a machine then you can take time learning Linux without affecting your daily driver machine which can continue running Windows as long as you need it to.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Did you watch Chris' previous video right here on this channel from about 2 months ago, all about setting up Dual-Boot ? It's not like back in the old days on Legacy BIOS, when you had to chainload the Win bootloader through Grub bootloader from an extended FAT partition on a primary drive with MBR. These days you can have Linux and Windoze live completely separately, on two different drives and never see eachother. It's literally as simple as install each OS to it's own unique physical drive. Switch between them using your UEFI Boot Manager.
@@KomradeMikhail My recommendation to newbie users as a Linux user since 1996 myself remains unchanged - despite your protestations to the contrary. If you disagree with me, so be it.
I'm watching this on a Dell laptop that Ive had for 5 years. Its been useless taking forever to load up and constantly running updates slowly. Loaded Mint Cinammon and have done more in the last week on it than Ive managed in the last five years. It does everything I want it to do brilliantly. So easy to modify and personalise. Still like my Mac as well but this is just fantastic.
If you install Mint with BTRFS on your system drive, snapshots are instant and are restored instantly with a reboot - since using BTRFS I now keep 3 HOURLY snapshots, as well as a couple of daily and a weekly snapshot too - in addition to a daily backup via rsync to my storage disk.
Changing UI configurations don't necessarily need a reboot - right clicking the taskbar → investigate errors → restart cinnamon mostly does the trick :-)
Another very useful and informative video Chris - thank you. Around 7 months ago I made the switch from W10 to LM - and find it an absolute joy to use. To me a big difference is that Windows seems to exist for the benefit of MS first and foremost, whereas everything in Mint is for the benefit of the user. No bloat, no ads, no directing me to crappy online accounts, no telemetry - the list goes on. Although I've wanted to get away from Windows for years, a problem for me was my reliance on Outlook and a historical .pst file of almost 11GB. To get around that I run W11 as a VM using VirtualBox on Mint - but only every couple of weeks or so when I need (REALLY need) to access an old email. Then I'm straight out and back to the sanity and simplicity of LM.
Why not move all the data in your PST files to work under Thunderbird. Thunderbird is available on all platforms so even if you ever had to go back to Windows, you wouldn't be stuck in that Outlook trap. Thunderbird is continually being updated. I think thatit is well worth the effort of migrating from Outlook to Thunderbird - I did it years ago - even before I moved to Linux. It is messy using a Virtualbox just to run your email applications. I also moved away from Virtualbox to KVMs - Chris - how about a video on KVMs using VirtManager as opposed to Virtualbox.
@@mikerothery Apologies, I should have been clearer. I do use (and like) Thunderbird as my "live" email client on LM. The W11 / Outlook / VirtualBox is just for referencing old emails if and when required. I did look at converting the entire .pst file to Thunderbird, (running under W10 at that point), but despite the docs saying it can be done, it actually can't. Well, I couldn't. I got to the point of having to go via a middle-man piece of s/w, and gave up as I had no confidence in it being reliable for something of that size. I very rarely need the old Outlook emails so my current setup seems to work pretty well for me. But I appreciate your input.
I abandoned Windows when they came out with Vista. What were they thinking? I switched to a MacBook Pro which worked well for a long time. Every upgrade of the OS seemed to make my 2010 MacBook Pro run slower and slower. I then decided to load Linux Mint on it and to my surprise I have a functioning laptop again. Thank you so much for the Linux videos.
Hi Chris a happy Sunday to you. I've used Linux Mint for several years now but you've shown me tips I'd never come across before so thank you for that! Timeshift I use regularly it's helped me out of a hole several times in the past. Now I always take a manual snapshot especially before updating the Kernel or Nvidia drivers. I had a system crash a few weeks ago caused by a new Kernel, it didn't take long to restore & switch back to a previous kernel :) One tip: after a Timeshift snapshot you can double click in the comments field & label it as a reminder. All in all an excellent video!!
A note of caution on using Timeshift: The snapshots take up a LOT of room, so only keep as few as you really need. I made the mistake of asking it to store too many and it completely filled up the hard drive, to the point where it wouldn't even boot up linux because the drive was completely full. Thankfully I still had my install USB to hand so I booted from that and fixed things. Nowadays I prefer to just to backup important files to USB, rather than using Timeshift, and if ever the whole system goes wrong I'll just reinstall from fresh. FYI I'm using it on an old laptop with a small HD, but I guess I'm not the only one out there who uses linux on an older laptop. You do what's best for you, but just keep an eye on how much space your backups are taking up. EDIT: With hindsight I realise that I was probably not using the correct settings for my computer, so perhaps this is a cautionary tale to read the helpfile before diving in.
Better to backup to an external drive. The first snapshot save the entire internal hard disc. Subsequent snapshots add new and changed files, taking up minimal extra space.
One more thing. USB flash drives nowadays, errr, do not trust them. Those FTL bugs are everywhere, I encrypt everything I write on the drives so when it comes down to RMA I am able to.. You pay premium for a 256 GB drive which is not even 256 and you end up with a read only key chain toy.
You can set Timeshift to output the backups to an external drive. my main drive is a 640gb which I have yet to fill past 25%, but an external USB 4tb . NEVER trust a SSD for backups.
I just came back to MINT after "distro-hopping" for a LONG time.. (years) and switched to LMDE6 and just LOVE it.. so much nicer than the original mint I started on LONG time ago.. THANK YOU- needed this.. I lost an eye recently- haven't fully adjusted yet-- so MISSED some of the things you pointed out.. THANKS AGAIN... your videos are always PERFECT-- simple- straight forward- NOT wordy or full of fluff and chatter.. just precise instructions said simply and directly... GREAT VIDEOS..
I currently use Pop!_Os on my system76 laptop. I've used Mint in the past and really liked it. After watching this video, if I ever have to rebuild my laptop I think I'm go back to Mint with Cinnamon. That menu is awesome! Thanks for sharing!!!
Another excellent video, Chris!! I just had to reinstall Mint a few days ago, the trouble I had with the secure boot was when I went to reboot the OS, it wouldn't recognise any of my hardware until I issued this command "sudo grub-install /dev/sda1 --no-uefi-secure-boot" but had leave the secure boot on for it to work, thank god, 😊
I like that in the Menu, programs can be uninstalled quickly with a right-click. It makes things very efficient at initial setup when getting rid of things I don't need. Mint was my very first toe-in-the-water Linux distro, and here after over 40 other experimental installs, I'm back. I'll always look for something "better", but so far I haven't found it. LMDE6 is a great parallel development project, but it's not quite to my taste yet. Having gone through a time where I enjoyed rummaging through Linux's basement to get everything just how I want it, I do enjoy Mint's completeness and thoughtful feature additions beyond plain Debian. It saves me a lot of time in setting up production machines for sure. Having released my bated breath after learning that Mr. Scissors is indeed safe and well after the infamous Sticky Old Tape fiasco, I'll say that even though I've thoroughly learned all of the video's points long ago, I also thoroughly enjoyed the video...as always.
Nice one, Chris! As a Linux user who's just recently went back to Linux Mint, I do find this video useful. I 'left' Linux Mint a couple of years ago due to some instabilities I had with, I think, Mint 20. I switched distro but later found out that in my case the instability could be corrected by using certain boot options. After 21.2 is released, I decided to test those options on a Mint live session and found that it seems to work also. I'm now back to Mint and so far my system has been rock solid. Please do give us more on this topic.
I'de like to to your great video a simple information you can install multiple fonts at once to your linux system by simply creating a folder in your home folder with name .fonts and make sure to add the dot before the word fonts then copy all of your fonts there and they shall appear in your fonts list. Finally thank you Chris for your great videos it's my favourite weekly routine watching them, keep on good work.👍
Fantastic video Chris, I loved the how you covered all of the different ways you like to setup the system and the various options Linux Mint has for doing so. I have installed it on quite a few pcs for friends after their windows installation was slowing things down. It runs extremely well on systems 10+ years old, especially if you add a cheap 2.5" ssd. I run it on my laptop as it is so stable and I use the online office apps for work files that require compatability. I'm glad such a distro exists as it has definitely made it easier for many people to cross over into Linux without having to completely change the way they work. This video will hopefully be one that many refer to when trying Linux Mint for the first time. It's a great tutorial. 😄
I've been using Linux Mint on my old Laptop for a few years and its very user friendly, i don't really miss windows at all now. I learnt a few new useful tips from this video, so many thanks.
As someone planning to move to LMDE soon and away from windows, this video is extremely helpful. I am so happy that installing fonts on LM is as easy as it is shown in this video, because it means installing all the fonts I already use will be very straight forward! I love the customisation options shown, though I would likely have to look through them myself to see what I would use in specific. I also like how you showed both the terminal and package manager ways to install specific programs, it helps show that the terminal isn't nearly as complex as it seems. Snapshots are incredible, and will help tons for ensuring that there's always a restore point.
Dear Chris, thanks for this Linux Mint tutorial, I am a big fan of Linux Mint.. Today I found out about LMDE 6, I installed it on my Lenove 2in1and was blown away by its performance and silky smooth appearance.. My next step is to install LMDE6 on my Apple Mac mini, the test drive went very well today.. No reason for anybody to stay with Windoze or Apple OS.. Looking forward to your review of LMDE 6..
I'm currently using the "Dual Boot" Windows and Linux I saw in one of your previous vids. I find myself wanting to use Mint more and more!! Many of my computer customers are also getting more and more used to Mint. Slowly but surely, people will see the sensibility of Linux!!! Thanks for all you do Sir!
overall Linux Mint is great and this is coming from a Slackware user. I would prefer LMDE though, and imo I think the devs should just outright drop the ubuntu base and just focus on the debian base of Linux Mint fully. It would make sense anyways, as ubuntu will most likely keep pushing snaps and other annoyances which caused the devs to add debian as their base "just in case" . Again to reiterate, they should just drop ubuntu and Linux Mint should just be debian-based - i think it would serve Linux Mint much better in the long run anyways
Happy Sunday Chris. Might I ask if you could do a video on "Clear Linux" (what another distro)? It's not that I'm a distro-hopper but Clear only works on Intel processors and it runs very quickly indeed in my experience compared to other distros and Windows (naturally). It's rolling and doesn't support a huge amount of software but the important ones for power users (development, office, Blender, etc.) are all there. The speed different is truly palpable.
LM has been my daily driver for a few years now. I have steered Windows people to LM whenever possible as it has the best learning curve possible in my opinion.
Great video. Just wanted to say that for many people fractional scaling will work better than increasing the font size. A larger font can often break the user interface of some apps if there is not enough room to display the larger text. Whereas if you use fractional scaling the whole interface is proportionally larger which keeps the relative positioning and proportions that the interface was designed to use.
@@ExplainingComputers ...Fractional scaling messes with printing too. BTW, I use Linux Mint Debian Edition | Cinnamon Desktop with font sizes set to 12 & 14 (same as you) on a LG 60" Plasma TV Monitor
Jut imagine a future where Linux Mint runs on a quantum RISC computer. A few of Chris'favourites all-in-one ! Excellent video as usual and concepts applicable in different contexts.
I love your channel for the novel (to me) topics, but even when you cover things that I think I know, there is still something new. With my Mint install, I changed the desktop to a solid Windows NT turquoise and then install the apps I need and mounted my Google drive. Thanks aain!
Really useful to me as I've just installed the 32bit version on an old Dell machine to replace MS Vista to show my grandchildren Python programming. Thank you for sharing.
Getting my stepdad into using Linux Mint. This is a good teachable experience that he can reference. Good video thank you very much. I hope that I can get my step dad into ARCH Linux in the future but familiarity I think is best for someone starting.
Thank you, Chris .. Not only for the useful tips but, also, for your confident faith in this practical distro. After about a year of research, my familiarity, with the overall landscape and plethora of popular distros has left me too confused to make a confident decision, as to a trustworthy daily driver. I am, now, confident in adopting MINT, because of my faith in YOUR pragmatism and experience. THAT, alone, is, by far, the most important and useful takeaway, for me and, all the rest, is just chocolate icing, on this layered torte. Many thanks, again, as chocolate is my favorite! I can now move on, with far less "doubtful anxiety" and THAT, Sir, is sincerely appreciated!
I have a Potato of a laptop, Toshiba with a 2 Core Celeron B800 Processor and 4Gb's of RAM. It came with Win 7 Home, and close to 2020, I switched it to Windows 10, it ran ok, but later Windows bloated the laptop and was almost unusable with 100% cpu utilization and HDD was reading/writing non-stop. Then I learned about Linux. First OS i used was Zorin which I learned about on this channel (Thanx Chris). I later tried a lot of variants, even arch based, but I found myself coming back to debian based OS'es. I'm now running Linux Mint XFCE on this laptop and it does the basics very good... (youtubing, documents, emails, web browsing). This Laptop was manufactured in 2010, and now 13 years later, still not in the dump, thanx to Linux. I'm now considering switching my Win10 Desktop to Linux when Win10 EOL's in 2025... Not going to 11 or 12... Thank You CHRIS for your informative Linux reviews and other videos, Sunday afternoons the TV is reserved for Explaining Computers....
Greetings Chris B. As a long term user of Linux (having used different kinds of mainstream distros), I've always liked Mint for its no fuss setup. Instead of tweaking, one can dive right into their task on hand which is certainly an attractive option. With Edge edition it's become a great choice for those with latest hardware as well which is another attraction.
Very useful for those of us who only use Mint occasionally, and haven't found all the obvious bits! Careful with how many Timeshift snapshots you keep, and be sure to exclude large files like videos and ISOs... I've found the durn thing is not smart about incrementals, and will fill up your HD like nothing else in no time flat. However, it does work to restore things!
Thanks Professor. I also use Linux Mint. Distro hopped when I first moved from Windows. However, the more I read and watched videos it became apparent to just pick one and customize it to my liking. I liked the familiarity of Mint and have been using since 2016. (I will still spin up a VM and load a different distro just to see but I always return to the daily Mint/Cinnamon driver and be productive vs a snoop :~)
Linux Mint has also been my daily driver for the past year, after Zorin, Ubuntu Mate, Xubuntu and Debian (I had a very hectic Distrohopping phase!)... Stability, reliability and ease of use are always at the top of the list. And, yes, the Cinnamon environment ajustment is limitless! I installed it on a high-performance ASUS All-in-One 4 years ago for a friend, and now I'm rediscovering its versatility. An enlightened choice for not bothering with Linux.
I've used Mint for quite some time in the past, when I had a weak pc and was learning about linux. Now I've being using Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE) for a long time, and after watching your video, I installed Cinnamon to give it a try again after a few years. WOW! Almost everything I consider necessary came out of the box! I only had to install "scp" to reduce the monitor's blue light, plus a few adjustments, and everything is great (and FASTER!).
It would take some really catastrophic event to make me hop to another distro from Mint. For me, the strength of Mint lies in the little optimizations and quality of life improvements that the Mint team does to the distro. Personally, I prefer the XFCE flavour as it integrates seamlessly for me in terms of muscle memory, when jumping between Windows and Linux machines.
I wish they'd hurry up with getting it in wayland, XFCE is so much better and far more modular than mate and cinnamon but it lacks a lot of nice modern features
I am also an IT person and love Linux Mint. We scrap old Laptops when they are 5 years old, I will take a laptop and format the ssd and put Linux on it and use on my desk. For a windows guy it works perfectly and I’m able to run open source programs without fear of putting them on my work computer. At home I use both Mac and Linux. In fact the other day I found Mint has a guest function if someone wants to use your computer. It keeps them out of your stuff and deletes itself when they log off.
Cinnamon works perfectly on old hardware or machine with limited resources, and it looks beautiful. I like to use Linux Mint on my computers and my virtual machines. Thanks for the video #explainingcomputers , I love this channel!
Thanks Chris 😃 If ever Windows becomes too expensive to buy a license or if Windows 12 changes to a subscription model like Office 365 then I will definitely switch to Linux Mint. I do keep a copy on a USB drive as an emergency boot option in case of a major problem in Windows.
Thanks again for this excellent video. One thing about timeshift: One day or another, if you set it up to work scheduled, it will fill your disk completeley because there is no retention policy. So be aware ;)
There is a retention policy -- as shown at 14:12 you set the number of weekly/daily/etc copies to keep. But granted, if you do not set these sensibly, it will indeed almost fill your disk up! :) (It will not completely fill up, something added as a fix in I think Linux Mint 20).
Blessed Sunday greetings Christopher and all concerned. I also use Linux Mint as my daily driver, and I’m quite comfortable with it. Funnily enough. I also did not know about the auto scrolling in the menu until I watched the video. I would say, I do nearly all of the tweaks that you performed on my own machine. Especially the fonts. I have never been a fan of many Linux fonts. I go for the SANS type and more squarish than the very round fonts which are ubiquitous in Ubuntu. Regarding not putting things on the desktop, I believe, clean and uncluttered is replacing functional and intuitive in computing, which can be sad. My own company has changed one of its websites where the entire menu bar where you could just quickly see at a glance what you needed is now hidden in a drop-down. I do not see the point of that since the bar still exists but is now empty. I am currently testing Mint Debian edition and liking it very much. I may even switch but that remains to be seen. Stay well my friends! Until we meet again!
Linux Mint is so easy just out of the box, I do, do some scaling because I am old. i don't know if I have Timeshift enabled, so I need to check that. Great stuff Chris, thanks.
I don't use Timeshift, I just use the Mint backup tools for the important stuff and a list of my apps then if my system gets killed (which is rare) reinstall things. Takes less time and space plus I can "shop" the software center.
thanks EC, always funny how many people i introduce to linux mint who were scared of ever trying linux and end up liking it and realizing its not much different than OS's they already know
I am using linux mint lmde 6 and it is a very good and stable distro to daily drive. One of the best out there actually and I have tried many. Also Debian 12 with cinnamon desktop is very good too :)
Hey Man, Somehow This One Slipped Through The Cracks. I Have A Computer Running It Through Our Old TV (To Make It Smarter) & It's Never Missed A Beat. Thank You.
Excellent Reference video Chris! As always! This will go in my bookmarked "Reference" library as do many of your videos. As Windows keeps getting less and less software and hardware friendly, Linux Mint keeps getting more attractive. Thanks for all your hard work, and very useful videos.
With Linux Mint being the most popular go to distro for people switching over from Windows, it's guides like these that are extremely useful. I personal started my journey with Linux Mint as my first distro and found it to be extremely easy to use. BUT.....because of this channel, i soon after found Zorin OS and switched over to that OS and never looked back. While Mint is user friend, i find that Zorin is more professional looking and works even easier for those coming over from Windows. I hope Chris will do a video like this for Zorin OS in the near future.
Zorin comes in several editions -- you only have to pay for the Pro version. My most recent Zorin OS video is here: ruclips.net/video/GTMBFtl_xs4/видео.html It is an excellent distro.
@@yogibear2k220 So what?? You're making stupid statement on my thread that make ZERO sense. Paid or not is NOT a reason to do a review of a Distro. GO blabber somewhere else Yogi Bear
Well, I must say a very big THANK YOU for uploading this video. I haven't used Linux for well over a decade and back then it was UBUNTU which, due to my lack of knowledge with the command line didn't last very long. But after watching so many videos recently for the best ways to download and install Linux it was beginning to feel like so many explanations were getting beyond my understanding. That said, with a bit of patience and tenacity I finally stumbled on your video and I'm so pleased I did. I now have Linux Mint installed on my laptop and have just managed to install Brave browser through the Terminal. Yippee.
Ever since I had issues with my fully featured MS Office install I had two options. Either reset my computer/VDI or use the web versions of the office suite. As it was the easier thing to do I went the second route and now after months I see no need to go back. In fact I get earlier access to the newest features because our company is using the semi-annual channel for the old school office apps. Excited to see where this is leading.
Thank you. I use mint on a old Dell laptop that was given to me. I've just learnt a couple of font and scaling tricks that make it much easier to view and use. Got to get around to taking the plunge and using it on my desktop PC sometime soon. Cheers!
Good Morning, Sir! - "Forgive Me for I Have SINNED!" - lol - I have been putting off Linux Mint! - I hereby make a Public Promise to FINALLY "Give it a test drive! And Kick the Tires!" - So to speak! Cheers! - Judson & Buddy !! - Have a GREAT Sunday Evryone!! 🙂
I recently switched from Ubuntu to Debian 12 + GNOME thanks in part to snap being a little pain in the posterior. Your installation video helped me a great deal as I need a stable distribution for coding. I especially like how Debian now makes it super-easy to install Nvidia drivers. Plus two GNOME plug-ins and I’ve got the “Ubuntu style” dock and ISO-8601 date and time in the top bar.
one way to make sure your documents run with the correct fonts when sharing, make sure to enable "store fonts in the file" or "embedded fonts" something along those lines. In libreoffice, you go to File > properties > fonts > Embed Fonts in the document You have to do this per-document in libreoffice there is a way to do it in MSWord as well but I forgot how to do it.
As a Linux user, I don't use Nvidia graphics cards full stop. I have an old but perfectly serviceable laptop that works fine, which is currently running Q4OS Centaurus, based on Debian Buster. The onboard graphics adapter is Nvidia, but post Buster, it is no longer supported. Once support ceases for that version of Debian in July 2024, my only option is to use the Nouveau driver, but every time I try using that driver, the system will randomly lock up forcing a reboot. AMD for me every time. I am currently using a Radeon RX 580 on my desktop computer and have been for a long time and have never had an issue with it.
I think the EU should push for Linux to be adopted more in work and school environments. Linux was historically considered hard for beginners but OS like Mint really make it easy to switch over. What’s best, Linux Mint is free, safe, easy to use and open source.
In my country, Spain, when I was in the school they have computers with linux, furthemore they created a proper linux called "guadalinex", the name came from guada, river or water in arabic andinex from linux and Extremadura.
Also, they give computers with that OS, but only few years.
As an IT person, I've been exposed to almost all popular desktops: Mac, Atari, Windows, Linux, etc. My favourite has been Linux Mint since its earlier versions. One of the best, if not the best Desktop OS currently. I've helped many people to discover Linux, too. Thanks, Chris, for making this excellent tutorial.
c'mon man, it does not have comparison to windows ecosystem quality...you know that....why you keep saying linux is better?
@@brunob.7792because he likes Linux, me too
I think in terms of desktop and menu customization and function alone, Linux Mint Cinnamon beats Windows 10 and 11 hands down (and I use all three most days).
@@brunob.7792 For myself - because I have a Linux machine that has been running at 100% 24X7 for nearly a year. And that reboot was caused by a power interruption. When using Windows, it does well to manage a week without something needing intervention.
By the way, my experience spans from IBM OS360, CDC Kronos, DEC RSX, PDP Unix, Fujitsu OS4 F4 mainframe OSs, then all the "favourite" MS variants (with increasing numbers of gaps out of disgust). I am much happier with Mint Linux on my main machine than I was when I ran Windows. Don't ask my opinion on Win10!
@@brunob.7792 Because it is. Windows is full of unnecessary junk and inefficient coding. I dumped it years ago.
Here's a little tip that applies to the Linux terminal:
When the terminal asks for operator input, for example "Y/n" to ask for "yes" or "no", often the choice will have one upper-case letter, which signifies that that is the default choice. If the default is what is wanted then it is not necessary to enter any text - just press "Enter" to select the default choice (see 8:43).
Sometimes both choices will be shown lower-case. In that case there is no default and the choice must be entered (case insensitive).
TIL why the y is Y
Fun fact: on Russian and Ukrainian keyboards, the English key "y" (which means "yes") corresponds to the Russian letter "н", which means "нет", i.e. "no"😄
I didn't know this! Great tidbit!
Man. Sometimes it pays to read the comments. Excellent tip:)
Well, I though it was capital Y because they were thinking that a new sentence begins inside the square brackets. In all honesty, how I am I suuposed to guess this?!
I've been using Cinnamon Mint for over two years now. The few problems that have come up have been easy to solve, and for the most part, everything just works. Using my computer is no longer a battle. It's instead a partnership.
As I turned on my computer this morning I thought, I think I should go back to Mint and here's the verification of that. It reminds me of the story of the old Maine farmer who went into a computer store, having decided it was time he learned about these computers.
He asked the eager young salesmen to show him his best computer.
"This model is so up to date that it can answer any question." If you stump it, it's free.
"Ha," the farmer thought, " he said, "Ask it where my father is."
The salesman typed in the question and the answer came back, "He's fishing on Moosehead Lake."
"Ha," the farmer said, "My father was buried in the Pine Hill Cemetery nine years ago."
The salesman was nervous and said, "Maybe if we ask it more specifically."
"Ask it where Ethan Sumner sr. is."
He typed it in and the computer said, "Ethan Sumner sr.'s buried in the Pine Hill Cemetery and your father just caught a trout. "
Another tip for desktop customisation, you can just log out and log back in instead of rebooting! It'll still restart the whole gui.
A very good point. :)
... and on a default setup you can do that with [CTL-ALT-BACKSPACE] {password} [ENTER] instead of going through the menus.
I am a IT person and have been working with computers for 50 years. I have worked with nearly every OS that you can imagine even before DOS, OS/2, and Windows. I am a Linux Mint MATE user, and appreciate the video here. I will be looking at many more like it.
I also installed Mate edition and was wondering about strange taskbar behaviour. For example when I have applications A and B open (app A on top) and I click start menu open, after that I can't click straight to app B on the taskbar but it starts flashing app A and I have to click that first. Is it normal for Mate taskbar work like this? To me it feels a bit restricting.
@@YoStu242 started using mint mate the day before yesterday , i switched to mint cinnamon yesterday, i feel like mint mate is a bit unstable compared to mint cinnamon , just my opinion
@@delayedcreator4783 Yeah I think I'm going to switch to Cinnamon too because there's too much weirdness going on with Mate.
As a daily Linux Mint user, I find this incredibly useful!
I use Mint because it works right out of the box. I realize that some applications (such as video production) require changing the look of the interface. I’m glad Mint allows that sort of thing, even though I don’t use the options. And it’s great to have a video showing how it is done in case anyone wants to make changes.
Could you elaborate on the video production angle? I'm helping a friend transition over from Windows and a video editor is what he most needs. (He previously used Vegas Pro under Windows..)
@@NoirpoolSeaI second this request
Finally a distribution review that adds value instead of just blabbing about. Clarifying, with useful tips. Even for me, the not-using-Mint-anymore user. Thanks a lot Christopher!
I have been using Linux mint for over 10 years now.
It is very matured setup. And it works right first time and every time
I'm a retired Network Administrator and started using Linux Mint a couple years ago. It's an excellent distro. But I had no idea how customizable it was.
Thank you for this eye opening tutorial.
As always your videos are very much appreciated. 👍😊
I've converted a couple of my older netbooks to Linux Mint after upgrading to an SSD based on your past videos. As a lifetime Windows user, I find Mint very intuitive. I'm excited to transition more and more to open source and alternative options to the large corporations and embrace the community driven world. I can't wait for more Risc-V stuff in the future! This video was a great addition to arsenal of education content. I still learned something even if it was a small setting in a menu I was unaware of. Thank you sir for your contribution to the community:)
Very useful video Chris! I've been daily driving Linux Mint for just over 6 months now, it's a really great operating system and never interrupts me in the way that windows does.
I agree, and also the fact you can run it straight off a USB drive on other PCs.
I think that "if it ain't broke don't fix it" is sound advice not only for video drivers, but throughout Linux, especially if you're a novice or you can end up spinning down a very deep dark rabbit hole. I speak from experience.
I think the thing with Linux, for users that like to tinker, is that because it's open source, you absolutely can.
If you want to customise it, you can. If you want to mess with the config files, you can. Heck, if you want to dive into the source code and recompile your own kernel, you can.
There are no locks nor limits with open source. It's all there, and it's all yours.
BUT, of course, just because you can, does not mean it's wise to do so.
You play with this, you play with that and, oh dear, that's not what I wanted at all. Umm, why is it so unstable now? Now that I've changed that, I don't like it, so how do I change it back? I'm halfway through this process, but now I don't know what to do.
You're right. The "tinkering" rabbit hole with open source software is, basically, a bottomless pit, if you let yourself fall down it.
"I just wanted to change the size of my icons. I'm now the chief maintainer of XWayland. Somehow. Send help."
Yes, the first Linux distro I had, I hacked and reconfigured to death. It was very unstable.
So I blanked it, reinstalled the distro and now I don't change anything about the default "out of the box" configuration unless I really have to.
(But, that said, I don't mess with things on my home machine. Because the other good thing with Linux is, if you've got a spare machine, then let that one be the one where you mess around and break everything to learn what's what. What's that crude saying? "Don't shit on the floor where you live". Your daily driver? Don't mess. Your spare "lab" machine? Mess all you like, break it and just reinstall again.)
If it ain't broke.... Just wait until next major update lol
The number of times I've had to repair nvidia graphics drivers after an update.... On all flavours of linux
Quite so. I made a USB stick full install as my experimentation platform.
I'm a sysadmin. I've done my fair share of distro-hopping when I first started using Linux (way before my career) and now together with my professional training, I can in theory use whatever Unix-like, Unix-based or whatever OS to do my job BUT I use Mint on my work laptop because I need something that just works without hassle.
For dual boot, I would add 2 bits of advice. 1) Turn off Windows fast boot, it can lock the windows drive as read only when in Linux. 2) run the command to make Linux use the system clock the same way Windows does. If you don't, then everytime you go back to Windows, the time will be out of sync. The command is 'timedatectl'
Aaaah! Thanks! I had the same issue, Windows showing the wrong time when I boot it. I never bother to investigate further as I boot Windows once a month.
or make windows use utc like a normal person. It's gonna mess with your cronjobs otherwise
The last thing I would do is suggest that anyone new to Linux tries to build a dual boot system - if you end up trashing the Windows side of your PC, you will end up blaming Linux for it and probably never try it again.
I've used Linux since 1996, my distro of choice has been Gentoo Linux for 20 years now but when I help newbies build systems, I normally recommend Mint to them.
It's perfectly possible to have a good Linux experience on any Core 2 Duo or better machine with 4GB RAM from 2007 or afterwards, bearing in mind that there is the "lite" version of Mint with XFCE desktop.
Getting hold of such a machine can be done cheaply, many people may have such a machine in their attic or loft, and if you build such a machine then you can take time learning Linux without affecting your daily driver machine which can continue running Windows as long as you need it to.
@@terrydaktyllus1320
Did you watch Chris' previous video right here on this channel from about 2 months ago, all about setting up Dual-Boot ?
It's not like back in the old days on Legacy BIOS, when you had to chainload the Win bootloader through Grub bootloader from an extended FAT partition on a primary drive with MBR.
These days you can have Linux and Windoze live completely separately, on two different drives and never see eachother.
It's literally as simple as install each OS to it's own unique physical drive.
Switch between them using your UEFI Boot Manager.
@@KomradeMikhail My recommendation to newbie users as a Linux user since 1996 myself remains unchanged - despite your protestations to the contrary.
If you disagree with me, so be it.
I'm watching this on a Dell laptop that Ive had for 5 years. Its been useless taking forever to load up and constantly running updates slowly. Loaded Mint Cinammon and have done more in the last week on it than Ive managed in the last five years. It does everything I want it to do brilliantly. So easy to modify and personalise. Still like my Mac as well but this is just fantastic.
Fantastic.
If you install Mint with BTRFS on your system drive, snapshots are instant and are restored instantly with a reboot - since using BTRFS I now keep 3 HOURLY snapshots, as well as a couple of daily and a weekly snapshot too - in addition to a daily backup via rsync to my storage disk.
Changing UI configurations don't necessarily need a reboot - right clicking the taskbar → investigate errors → restart cinnamon mostly does the trick :-)
Another very useful and informative video Chris - thank you.
Around 7 months ago I made the switch from W10 to LM - and find it an absolute joy to use. To me a big difference is that Windows seems to exist for the benefit of MS first and foremost, whereas everything in Mint is for the benefit of the user. No bloat, no ads, no directing me to crappy online accounts, no telemetry - the list goes on. Although I've wanted to get away from Windows for years, a problem for me was my reliance on Outlook and a historical .pst file of almost 11GB. To get around that I run W11 as a VM using VirtualBox on Mint - but only every couple of weeks or so when I need (REALLY need) to access an old email. Then I'm straight out and back to the sanity and simplicity of LM.
Why not move all the data in your PST files to work under Thunderbird. Thunderbird is available on all platforms so even if you ever had to go back to Windows, you wouldn't be stuck in that Outlook trap. Thunderbird is continually being updated. I think thatit is well worth the effort of migrating from Outlook to Thunderbird - I did it years ago - even before I moved to Linux. It is messy using a Virtualbox just to run your email applications. I also moved away from Virtualbox to KVMs - Chris - how about a video on KVMs using VirtManager as opposed to Virtualbox.
@@mikerothery Apologies, I should have been clearer. I do use (and like) Thunderbird as my "live" email client on LM. The W11 / Outlook / VirtualBox is just for referencing old emails if and when required. I did look at converting the entire .pst file to Thunderbird, (running under W10 at that point), but despite the docs saying it can be done, it actually can't. Well, I couldn't. I got to the point of having to go via a middle-man piece of s/w, and gave up as I had no confidence in it being reliable for something of that size. I very rarely need the old Outlook emails so my current setup seems to work pretty well for me. But I appreciate your input.
I recently restarted my Linux path. I'm using this Linux Mint and thanks for the tutorial sir :D
I abandoned Windows when they came out with Vista. What were they thinking? I switched to a MacBook Pro which worked well for a long time. Every upgrade of the OS seemed to make my 2010 MacBook Pro run slower and slower. I then decided to load Linux Mint on it and to my surprise I have a functioning laptop again. Thank you so much for the Linux videos.
Please tell Mr. Scissors that we are glad he is safe and well and I hope he recovers quickly from the evil sticky tape incident!
Hi Chris a happy Sunday to you. I've used Linux Mint for several years now but you've shown me tips I'd never come across before so thank you for that!
Timeshift I use regularly it's helped me out of a hole several times in the past. Now I always take a manual snapshot especially before updating the Kernel or Nvidia drivers. I had a system crash a few weeks ago caused by a new Kernel, it didn't take long to restore & switch back to a previous kernel :)
One tip: after a Timeshift snapshot you can double click in the comments field & label it as a reminder. All in all an excellent video!!
A note of caution on using Timeshift:
The snapshots take up a LOT of room, so only keep as few as you really need. I made the mistake of asking it to store too many and it completely filled up the hard drive, to the point where it wouldn't even boot up linux because the drive was completely full. Thankfully I still had my install USB to hand so I booted from that and fixed things.
Nowadays I prefer to just to backup important files to USB, rather than using Timeshift, and if ever the whole system goes wrong I'll just reinstall from fresh.
FYI I'm using it on an old laptop with a small HD, but I guess I'm not the only one out there who uses linux on an older laptop.
You do what's best for you, but just keep an eye on how much space your backups are taking up.
EDIT: With hindsight I realise that I was probably not using the correct settings for my computer, so perhaps this is a cautionary tale to read the helpfile before diving in.
Hehehe, happy little accidents of computing 😁
Better to backup to an external drive.
The first snapshot save the entire internal hard disc.
Subsequent snapshots add new and changed files, taking up minimal extra space.
One more thing. USB flash drives nowadays, errr, do not trust them. Those FTL bugs are everywhere, I encrypt everything I write on the drives so when it comes down to RMA I am able to.. You pay premium for a 256 GB drive which is not even 256 and you end up with a read only key chain toy.
Unless you use in Btrfs mode. In which case it only uses exactly as much as it is necessary for the whole data.
You can set Timeshift to output the backups to an external drive. my main drive is a 640gb which I have yet to fill past 25%, but an external USB 4tb . NEVER trust a SSD for backups.
Just instaled Mint on an old Lenovo Z500 and it's running much better than Windows was. These videos are very helpful thanks!
Great to hear!
I just came back to MINT after "distro-hopping" for a LONG time.. (years) and switched to LMDE6 and just LOVE it.. so much nicer than the original mint I started on LONG time ago.. THANK YOU- needed this.. I lost an eye recently- haven't fully adjusted yet-- so MISSED some of the things you pointed out.. THANKS AGAIN... your videos are always PERFECT-- simple- straight forward- NOT wordy or full of fluff and chatter.. just precise instructions said simply and directly... GREAT VIDEOS..
I currently use Pop!_Os on my system76 laptop. I've used Mint in the past and really liked it. After watching this video, if I ever have to rebuild my laptop I think I'm go back to Mint with Cinnamon. That menu is awesome! Thanks for sharing!!!
Mint has been my daily OS for a while now. This is a very nice resource for customizing and tweaking it. Thanks for another great video Chris.
Iv been using Linux mint for years , mainly thanks to this channel.
When I can get mint running on aPi 5, life will be complete!
you cant run mint but you can ubuntu
Yes, ARM Mint would be nice. :)
I’d be an instant adopter.
Mint is my favorite distro. Thanks, Chris
Hello sir, i am a new user of Linux mint and have learn now a lot for that. Thank you and kind regards from Germany.
Thanks for watching. :)
Another excellent video, Chris!! I just had to reinstall Mint a few days ago, the trouble I had with the secure boot was when I went to reboot the OS, it wouldn't recognise any of my hardware until I issued this command "sudo grub-install /dev/sda1 --no-uefi-secure-boot" but had leave the secure boot on for it to work, thank god, 😊
I like that in the Menu, programs can be uninstalled quickly with a right-click. It makes things very efficient at initial setup when getting rid of things I don't need. Mint was my very first toe-in-the-water Linux distro, and here after over 40 other experimental installs, I'm back. I'll always look for something "better", but so far I haven't found it.
LMDE6 is a great parallel development project, but it's not quite to my taste yet. Having gone through a time where I enjoyed rummaging through Linux's basement to get everything just how I want it, I do enjoy Mint's completeness and thoughtful feature additions beyond plain Debian. It saves me a lot of time in setting up production machines for sure.
Having released my bated breath after learning that Mr. Scissors is indeed safe and well after the infamous Sticky Old Tape fiasco, I'll say that even though I've thoroughly learned all of the video's points long ago, I also thoroughly enjoyed the video...as always.
Some very useful tips there Chris, thank you!
Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
Greetings, and thanks for your support. :)
Nice one, Chris! As a Linux user who's just recently went back to Linux Mint, I do find this video useful. I 'left' Linux Mint a couple of years ago due to some instabilities I had with, I think, Mint 20. I switched distro but later found out that in my case the instability could be corrected by using certain boot options. After 21.2 is released, I decided to test those options on a Mint live session and found that it seems to work also. I'm now back to Mint and so far my system has been rock solid. Please do give us more on this topic.
I'de like to to your great video a simple information you can install multiple fonts at once to your linux system by simply creating a folder in your home folder with name .fonts and make sure to add the dot before the word fonts then copy all of your fonts there and they shall appear in your fonts list.
Finally thank you Chris for your great videos it's my favourite weekly routine watching them, keep on good work.👍
Fantastic video Chris, I loved the how you covered all of the different ways you like to setup the system and the various options Linux Mint has for doing so. I have installed it on quite a few pcs for friends after their windows installation was slowing things down. It runs extremely well on systems 10+ years old, especially if you add a cheap 2.5" ssd. I run it on my laptop as it is so stable and I use the online office apps for work files that require compatability. I'm glad such a distro exists as it has definitely made it easier for many people to cross over into Linux without having to completely change the way they work. This video will hopefully be one that many refer to when trying Linux Mint for the first time. It's a great tutorial. 😄
I've been using Linux Mint on my old Laptop for a few years and its very user friendly, i don't really miss windows at all now. I learnt a few new useful tips from this video, so many thanks.
As someone planning to move to LMDE soon and away from windows, this video is extremely helpful. I am so happy that installing fonts on LM is as easy as it is shown in this video, because it means installing all the fonts I already use will be very straight forward! I love the customisation options shown, though I would likely have to look through them myself to see what I would use in specific.
I also like how you showed both the terminal and package manager ways to install specific programs, it helps show that the terminal isn't nearly as complex as it seems.
Snapshots are incredible, and will help tons for ensuring that there's always a restore point.
Dear Chris, thanks for this Linux Mint tutorial, I am a big fan of Linux Mint..
Today I found out about LMDE 6, I installed it on my Lenove 2in1and was blown away by its performance and silky smooth appearance..
My next step is to install LMDE6 on my Apple Mac mini, the test drive went very well today..
No reason for anybody to stay with Windoze or Apple OS..
Looking forward to your review of LMDE 6..
Chris thanks linux mint is a very solid community base DE and indeed they deserve a special place among people !
I'm currently using the "Dual Boot" Windows and Linux I saw in one of your previous vids. I find myself wanting to use Mint more and more!! Many of my computer customers are also getting more and more used to Mint. Slowly but surely, people will see the sensibility of Linux!!! Thanks for all you do Sir!
Thanks for the Tips on the windows fonts. Always had that issue when going from Linus to Microsoft OS with documents. Huge help.
overall Linux Mint is great and this is coming from a Slackware user. I would prefer LMDE though, and imo I think the devs should just outright drop the ubuntu base and just focus on the debian base of Linux Mint fully. It would make sense anyways, as ubuntu will most likely keep pushing snaps and other annoyances which caused the devs to add debian as their base "just in case" . Again to reiterate, they should just drop ubuntu and Linux Mint should just be debian-based - i think it would serve Linux Mint much better in the long run anyways
Happy Sunday Chris. Might I ask if you could do a video on "Clear Linux" (what another distro)? It's not that I'm a distro-hopper but Clear only works on Intel processors and it runs very quickly indeed in my experience compared to other distros and Windows (naturally). It's rolling and doesn't support a huge amount of software but the important ones for power users (development, office, Blender, etc.) are all there. The speed different is truly palpable.
i use linux mint as my daily driver.thank you
LM has been my daily driver for a few years now. I have steered Windows people to LM whenever possible as it has the best learning curve possible in my opinion.
Great video. Just wanted to say that for many people fractional scaling will work better than increasing the font size. A larger font can often break the user interface of some apps if there is not enough room to display the larger text. Whereas if you use fractional scaling the whole interface is proportionally larger which keeps the relative positioning and proportions that the interface was designed to use.
It all depends on the app. Fractional scaling breaks many a video editor! :)
@@ExplainingComputers ...Fractional scaling messes with printing too. BTW, I use Linux Mint Debian Edition | Cinnamon Desktop with font sizes set to 12 & 14 (same as you) on a LG 60" Plasma TV Monitor
Frac scaling still has a performance problem. Even the mouse cursor lagging...
Jut imagine a future where Linux Mint runs on a quantum RISC computer. A few of Chris'favourites all-in-one ! Excellent video as usual and concepts applicable in different contexts.
that would be awsome.fully open source
I love your channel for the novel (to me) topics, but even when you cover things that I think I know, there is still something new. With my Mint install, I changed the desktop to a solid Windows NT turquoise and then install the apps I need and mounted my Google drive. Thanks aain!
Great to see someone like you using Linux Mint. I think it's a superior distro. Thanks for the great video.
Really useful to me as I've just installed the 32bit version on an old Dell machine to replace MS Vista to show my grandchildren Python programming. Thank you for sharing.
Getting my stepdad into using Linux Mint. This is a good teachable experience that he can reference. Good video thank you very much. I hope that I can get my step dad into ARCH Linux in the future but familiarity I think is best for someone starting.
Thank you, Chris .. Not only for the useful tips but, also, for your confident faith in this practical distro. After about a year of research, my familiarity, with the overall landscape and plethora of popular distros has left me too confused to make a confident decision, as to a trustworthy daily driver. I am, now, confident in adopting MINT, because of my faith in YOUR pragmatism and experience. THAT, alone, is, by far, the most important and useful takeaway, for me and, all the rest, is just chocolate icing, on this layered torte. Many thanks, again, as chocolate is my favorite! I can now move on, with far less "doubtful anxiety" and THAT, Sir, is sincerely appreciated!
Thanks for this. And I am replying from my Linux Mint daily driver. :)
I have a Potato of a laptop, Toshiba with a 2 Core Celeron B800 Processor and 4Gb's of RAM. It came with Win 7 Home, and close to 2020, I switched it to Windows 10, it ran ok, but later Windows bloated the laptop and was almost unusable with 100% cpu utilization and HDD was reading/writing non-stop. Then I learned about Linux. First OS i used was Zorin which I learned about on this channel (Thanx Chris). I later tried a lot of variants, even arch based, but I found myself coming back to debian based OS'es. I'm now running Linux Mint XFCE on this laptop and it does the basics very good... (youtubing, documents, emails, web browsing). This Laptop was manufactured in 2010, and now 13 years later, still not in the dump, thanx to Linux.
I'm now considering switching my Win10 Desktop to Linux when Win10 EOL's in 2025... Not going to 11 or 12...
Thank You CHRIS for your informative Linux reviews and other videos, Sunday afternoons the TV is reserved for Explaining Computers....
Greetings Chris B.
As a long term user of Linux (having used different kinds of mainstream distros), I've always liked Mint for its no fuss setup. Instead of tweaking, one can dive right into their task on hand which is certainly an attractive option. With Edge edition it's become a great choice for those with latest hardware as well which is another attraction.
Very useful for those of us who only use Mint occasionally, and haven't found all the obvious bits!
Careful with how many Timeshift snapshots you keep, and be sure to exclude large files like videos and ISOs... I've found the durn thing is not smart about incrementals, and will fill up your HD like nothing else in no time flat. However, it does work to restore things!
Indeed!
Thanks Professor.
I also use Linux Mint. Distro hopped when I first moved from Windows. However, the more I read and watched videos it became apparent to just pick one and customize it to my liking. I liked the familiarity of Mint and have been using since 2016.
(I will still spin up a VM and load a different distro just to see but I always return to the daily Mint/Cinnamon driver and be productive vs a snoop :~)
Linux Mint has also been my daily driver for the past year, after Zorin, Ubuntu Mate, Xubuntu and Debian (I had a very hectic Distrohopping phase!)... Stability, reliability and ease of use are always at the top of the list. And, yes, the Cinnamon environment ajustment is limitless! I installed it on a high-performance ASUS All-in-One 4 years ago for a friend, and now I'm rediscovering its versatility. An enlightened choice for not bothering with Linux.
I've used Mint for quite some time in the past, when I had a weak pc and was learning about linux. Now I've being using Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE) for a long time, and after watching your video, I installed Cinnamon to give it a try again after a few years. WOW! Almost everything I consider necessary came out of the box! I only had to install "scp" to reduce the monitor's blue light, plus a few adjustments, and everything is great (and FASTER!).
I love Mint, it is the best OS that I've used since Vax VMS.
I am a real Linux Mint user and it's incredibly flexible and fast.
Some of the shortcuts shown in this video do work at least partially in Linux Mint with Xfce. Thanks for the video, professor!
You're welcome! :)
It would take some really catastrophic event to make me hop to another distro from Mint. For me, the strength of Mint lies in the little optimizations and quality of life improvements that the Mint team does to the distro. Personally, I prefer the XFCE flavour as it integrates seamlessly for me in terms of muscle memory, when jumping between Windows and Linux machines.
I wish they'd hurry up with getting it in wayland, XFCE is so much better and far more modular than mate and cinnamon but it lacks a lot of nice modern features
Your tip is especially noticeable on other distros that use Cinnamon such as Debian 12. It is lacking some of the finer points present in Mint.
I am also an IT person and love Linux Mint. We scrap old Laptops when they are 5 years old, I will take a laptop and format the ssd and put Linux on it and use on my desk. For a windows guy it works perfectly and I’m able to run open source programs without fear of putting them on my work computer. At home I use both Mac and Linux. In fact the other day I found Mint has a guest function if someone wants to use your computer. It keeps them out of your stuff and deletes itself when they log off.
Cinnamon works perfectly on old hardware or machine with limited resources, and it looks beautiful. I like to use Linux Mint on my computers and my virtual machines. Thanks for the video #explainingcomputers , I love this channel!
Thanks Chris 😃 If ever Windows becomes too expensive to buy a license or if Windows 12 changes to a subscription model like Office 365 then I will definitely switch to Linux Mint.
I do keep a copy on a USB drive as an emergency boot option in case of a major problem in Windows.
Linux Mint 21.2 on both computers. Windows 10 pro was the last windows I ever used. I can do anything I need in Linux.
There is a good community of helpful people on the Linux Mint Forums. I get lots of tips from this forum -- lots of knowledge there.
Thanks again for this excellent video. One thing about timeshift: One day or another, if you set it up to work scheduled, it will fill your disk completeley because there is no retention policy. So be aware ;)
There is a retention policy -- as shown at 14:12 you set the number of weekly/daily/etc copies to keep. But granted, if you do not set these sensibly, it will indeed almost fill your disk up! :) (It will not completely fill up, something added as a fix in I think Linux Mint 20).
Good to know. Thanks.@@ExplainingComputers
I really like the tip for the USB file transfer....it will save a lot of time.
Blessed Sunday greetings Christopher and all concerned. I also use Linux Mint as my daily driver, and I’m quite comfortable with it. Funnily enough. I also did not know about the auto scrolling in the menu until I watched the video. I would say, I do nearly all of the tweaks that you performed on my own machine. Especially the fonts. I have never been a fan of many Linux fonts. I go for the SANS type and more squarish than the very round fonts which are ubiquitous in Ubuntu.
Regarding not putting things on the desktop, I believe, clean and uncluttered is replacing functional and intuitive in computing, which can be sad. My own company has changed one of its websites where the entire menu bar where you could just quickly see at a glance what you needed is now hidden in a drop-down. I do not see the point of that since the bar still exists but is now empty.
I am currently testing Mint Debian edition and liking it very much. I may even switch but that remains to be seen.
Stay well my friends! Until we meet again!
Linux Mint is so easy just out of the box, I do, do some scaling because I am old. i don't know if I have Timeshift enabled, so I need to check that. Great stuff Chris, thanks.
I don't use Timeshift, I just use the Mint backup tools for the important stuff and a list of my apps then if my system gets killed (which is rare) reinstall things. Takes less time and space plus I can "shop" the software center.
thanks EC, always funny how many people i introduce to linux mint who were scared of ever trying linux and end up liking it and realizing its not much different than OS's they already know
There is indeed a big mental barrier to Windows adoption. :)
I am using linux mint lmde 6 and it is a very good and stable distro to daily drive. One of the best out there actually and I have tried many. Also Debian 12 with cinnamon desktop is very good too :)
Hey Man, Somehow This One Slipped Through The Cracks. I Have A Computer Running It Through Our Old TV (To Make It Smarter) & It's Never Missed A Beat. Thank You.
God I love Linux Mint. I discovered it I think about 7 years ago and have been a daily user ever since. Love this channel!
Excellent Reference video Chris! As always! This will go in my bookmarked "Reference" library as do many of your videos. As Windows keeps getting less and less software and hardware friendly, Linux Mint keeps getting more attractive. Thanks for all your hard work, and very useful videos.
Well said Rickster2317,
As always, great reference material from Chris.
Given that this old dog runs Mint 21.2 as his daily driver, this was very handy - Thank You!
With Linux Mint being the most popular go to distro for people switching over from Windows, it's guides like these that are extremely useful. I personal started my journey with Linux Mint as my first distro and found it to be extremely easy to use. BUT.....because of this channel, i soon after found Zorin OS and switched over to that OS and never looked back. While Mint is user friend, i find that Zorin is more professional looking and works even easier for those coming over from Windows. I hope Chris will do a video like this for Zorin OS in the near future.
He will never do that as Zorin is not free!
Zorin comes in several editions -- you only have to pay for the Pro version. My most recent Zorin OS video is here: ruclips.net/video/GTMBFtl_xs4/видео.html It is an excellent distro.
@@yogibear2k220 Zorin is free! I'm not sure what you are talking about?
@@klwthe3rd Yes but there is a paid for version.
@@yogibear2k220 So what?? You're making stupid statement on my thread that make ZERO sense. Paid or not is NOT a reason to do a review of a Distro. GO blabber somewhere else Yogi Bear
Well, I must say a very big THANK YOU for uploading this video. I haven't used Linux for well over a decade and back then it was UBUNTU which, due to my lack of knowledge with the command line didn't last very long. But after watching so many videos recently for the best ways to download and install Linux it was beginning to feel like so many explanations were getting beyond my understanding. That said, with a bit of patience and tenacity I finally stumbled on your video and I'm so pleased I did. I now have Linux Mint installed on my laptop and have just managed to install Brave browser through the Terminal. Yippee.
Great to hear. :)
explainingcomputers is like a 2012ish style youtuber! i love it
Ever since I had issues with my fully featured MS Office install I had two options.
Either reset my computer/VDI or use the web versions of the office suite.
As it was the easier thing to do I went the second route and now after months I see no need to go back.
In fact I get earlier access to the newest features because our company is using the semi-annual channel for the old school office apps.
Excited to see where this is leading.
Thank you. I use mint on a old Dell laptop that was given to me. I've just learnt a couple of font and scaling tricks that make it much easier to view and use. Got to get around to taking the plunge and using it on my desktop PC sometime soon. Cheers!
Good Morning, Sir! - "Forgive Me for I Have SINNED!" - lol - I have been putting off Linux Mint! - I hereby make a Public Promise to FINALLY "Give it a test drive! And Kick the Tires!" - So to speak!
Cheers! - Judson & Buddy !! - Have a GREAT Sunday Evryone!! 🙂
Greetings!
I always liked Linux Mint. It looks good, and the functionality is really increased over the generations.
Another excellent video describing some key features in a super quick and digestible format
Amazing distro. I add Windows 10 theme for desktop and Oxygen for icons. Unfortunatelly, creating shortcuts from file menager is still complicated.
I recently switched from Ubuntu to Debian 12 + GNOME thanks in part to snap being a little pain in the posterior. Your installation video helped me a great deal as I need a stable distribution for coding.
I especially like how Debian now makes it super-easy to install Nvidia drivers. Plus two GNOME plug-ins and I’ve got the “Ubuntu style” dock and ISO-8601 date and time in the top bar.
Thanks Chris, big help for this new Linux Mint user.
I'm a Linux Mint user since version 4.0! I switched from Windows in 2006.
i just installed Linux Mint last week, these are great tips. thanks Chris.
Good information, thanks for making this video. I went to Linux Mint on one of my computers and have been enjoying the time I spend there.
Excellent tutorial, i've used Mint for a few years now (and just went LMDE), never dabbled with customising things tho.
one way to make sure your documents run with the correct fonts when sharing, make sure to enable "store fonts in the file" or "embedded fonts" something along those lines.
In libreoffice, you go to File > properties > fonts > Embed Fonts in the document
You have to do this per-document in libreoffice
there is a way to do it in MSWord as well but I forgot how to do it.
Nice just in time for the new video about good old Linux Mint have a nice one!
As a Linux user, I don't use Nvidia graphics cards full stop. I have an old but perfectly serviceable laptop that works fine, which is currently running Q4OS Centaurus, based on Debian Buster. The onboard graphics adapter is Nvidia, but post Buster, it is no longer supported. Once support ceases for that version of Debian in July 2024, my only option is to use the Nouveau driver, but every time I try using that driver, the system will randomly lock up forcing a reboot. AMD for me every time. I am currently using a Radeon RX 580 on my desktop computer and have been for a long time and have never had an issue with it.