My Linux Mint Tribute

LXer Feature: 23-Aug-2024 Hi there it’s me Scott, in my previous article I wrote about How I Turned My Chromebook Into A Mintbook and all the fun entailed in doing it. Well, its been two months and a few friends and others have asked me, “So how’s it going with your Mintbook”? Or “My Mintbox” as my friend Donny kids me.

Hi there it’s me Scott, in my previous article I wrote about How I Turned My Chromebook Into A Mintbook and all the fun entailed in doing it. Well, its been two months and a few friends and others have asked me, “So how’s it going with your Mintbook”? Or “My Mintbox” as my friend Donny kids me.

Its been two months since I installed Mint over ChomeOS Flex on my HP laptop and it’s going great. Just how great you may ask? Good question..let me tell you. Since I have installed Mint I can count the number of times its crashed on the amount of cars I own..btw I don’t own any cars lol.

I have installed Proton and Steam and a bunch of the stuff that comes with them because you have too and it all installed without a hitch. Now I only have an integrated GPU, an Intel GeminiLake UHD Graphics 600. I don’t know a lot about GPU’s but I know mine is no where near the greatest. But I have Wine, Steam and Proton and gotten on there and played a couple of games, even ones that were supposedly only going to work on Windows and everything worked just fine.

Along with that I have installed, and un-installed a few other programs and different terminals and stuff. And they have all worked, every time. It’s just amazing, my laptop is everything I want it to be and more. My laptop never overheats, never freezes, every update goes flawlessly, the upgrade from the 21.3 I installed on it to 22 took about an hour, and one reboot later I was running the latest version of Mint. I love it!

Now I want to talk about a couple of things though, because I hear all the time “Why do people like Mint instead of Ubuntu?” or “What makes Mint better than Ubuntu?”.

Well, good questions..

The biggest differences between them I think is with the Cinnamon DE when you first boot into it as a former Windows user it looks and 'feels' a lot like home. Yeah, very quickly once you start looking around and seeing the different names for some things and where some of them are it gets different. But there isn't all that crud that Microsoft includes, like links (that don't look like it) to things you don’t work and don't want to buy and can’t get rid of etc.

But that aside it's not that different, and they quickly realize how much free software, good software, it comes with. Especially once they discover the Software Manager full of over 20,000 programs that you can literally get lost in looking at stuff you can install on your computer.

Yes, it's based on Ubuntu but it is 'not' Ubuntu and I think unfortunately for Ubuntu that is what attracts people to Mint. It takes the back of the house advantages that Ubuntu has (and it does) like the hardware detection and LTS support and combines it with the initial DE familiarity of Windows. It doesn't sound like it should matter, but it does.

Once a new user discovers the forums, chat rooms on app.element.io along with the Linux and Mint subs on Reddit along with the fact that looking up just about anything to do with Linux Mint on Google brings you page upon page of helpful, interesting and sometimes entertaining results. They soon realize how much help is out there and they don't feel so all alone in their new journey.

But it's that first boot when they look and see the way it is and how much faster their computer is, and that it doesn't just cash for no reason, that's what grabs them and keeps them. It's that magic the developers of Linux Mint have captured that really makes it better than Ubuntu. You can take it the state given you and customize it anyway you want too. Gaming? Rock on. Programming? Code away.. You can do whatever you want too with it. Or leave it just the way it is and be just fine.

That initial comfort makes a person's mind much more open and willing to learn something new. That willingness is special, very special to capture. That's why so many people who try Mint, stay. That's why I'm writing this tribute to Mint. Because it's captured me, completely and willingly and I'm as happy as I can be about it.