The Linux Mint team has just released Linux Mint 22, a new major version of the free Linux distribution. With Windows 10’s end of support coming up quickly next year, at least some users may consider making the switch to Linux.
While there are other options, paying Microsoft for extended support or upgrading to Windows 11, these options are not available for all users or desirable.
Linux Mint 22 is a long-term service release. Means, it is supported until 2029. Unlike Microsoft, which made drastic changes to the system requirements of Windows 11 to lock out millions of devices from upgrading to the new version, Linux Mint will continue to work on older hardware, even after 2029.
Here are the core changes in Linux Mint 22:
- Based on the new Ubuntu 24.04 package base.
- Kernel version is 6.8.
- Software Manager loads faster and has improved multi-threading.
- Unverified Flatpaks are disabled by default.
- Preinstalled Matrix Web App for using chat networks.
- Improved language support removes any language not selected by the user after installation to save disk space.
- Several under-the-hood changes that update libraries or software.
I switched my main gaming computer to Mint after testing it on a laptop. Being away from Windows is awesome. You know how everything always wants your attention on Windows? Your antivirus proudly announces its existence. Windows wants to know if it should remove some printers? Some PDF software needs updated RIGHT NOW. There’s a license change please acknowledge this 20 page document. Animated attention grabbing everywhere. I always think FUCK OFF when presented with this bullshit.
You know what - Mint doesn’t do that. I’ve not been internally shouting at my own computer since I went that way.
It is serene.
How has your gaming journey been so far? Games and general programs are the main reason why in still on Windows
I switched to Linux Mint a couple months ago and use Steam a lot. I’ve tried at least 10 games and all worked perfectly.
But I don’t do competitive multiplayer. Those are more likely to have issues with anti-cheats. Although I did try Hell Let Loose and Helldivers very successfully and those are both major online titles.
Check https://protondb.com if you’re worried about a specific game’s compatibility. I’ve had silver rated games work perfectly though.
Edit: Apps - Photo editing and 3D CAD are the main areas I’ve struggled with on Linux. There’s no good Adobe equivalent, and no good Fusion 360 equivalent. Free CAD exists, but that can gently fuck off.
Apps - Photo editing and 3D CAD are the main areas I’ve struggled with on Linux
Yeah, I feel that. Paint.net is the sole reason I still fire up my Windows VM every now and then.
The closest you can get is Pinta and even then, looking at the surface things may seem very similar, but the workflow is totally different (it doesn’t even have overscroll god damn it!) and the plugin scene is deader than dead. I wanted to code a proper replacement based on Pinta, but I haven’t got the motivation or time for that.
If I wanna edit an image, firing up a VM is still genuinely faster than trying to work with Pinta or GIMP or any other opensource alternative for that matter. Krita has surprisingly been pretty good at replicating the workflow, but it still falls short.
Thanks for the link! Will definitely check out my top played games, unfortunately I play a lot of multiplayer games like Dota, Hunt, CS and War Thunder.
Photo editing and 3d modelling is something I do a lot which is a deal-breaker for me personally. Blender works on Linux afaik but stuff like substance painter/designer, Houdini, plasticity etc I don’t know
Steam + Proton works for most games, but there are still rough edges that you need to be prepared to deal with. In my experience, it’s typically older titles and games that use anti-cheat that have the most trouble. Most of the time it just works, I even ran the Battle.net installer as an external Steam game with Proton enabled and was able to play Blizzard titles right away.
The biggest gap IMO is VR. If you have a VR headset that you use on your desktop and it’s important to you, stay on Windows. There is no realistic solution for VR integration in Linux yet. There are ways that you can kinda get something to work with ALVR, but it’s incredibly janky and no dev will support it. There are rumors Steam Link is being ported to Linux, nothing official yet though.
On balance, I’m incredibly happy with Mint since I switched last year. However, I do a decent amount of personal software development, and I’ve used Linux for 2 decades as a professional developer. I wouldn’t say the average Windows gamer would be happy dealing with the rough spots quite yet, but it’s like 95% of the way there these days. Linux has really grown up a lot in the last few years.
Thanks for the detailed reply. VR isn’t a deal-breaker for me currently but your last paragraph is great, most of the videos I’ve watched have echoed that sentiment of “It works great… Most of the time”
I do want to give Linux a try when I have some time over for trouble shooting and fixing. I feel like a Mac person when I say that lol, “I just want it to work”
Not the person you asked to but my gaming experience has been stellar. If you use Steam you don’t have to do anything, it all works out of the box. If you don’t play those multiplayer games with kernel level anti cheats you’ll be fine.
I was expecting a bad time and was extremely impressed. Gaming in Linux is amazing.
Things with kernel anti-cheat aren’t going to work unless they have a Linux version. So no Helldivers, Valorant, Apex Legends, etc.
Other than that, I have yet to find a game that doesn’t work under Proton. They’ll tell you it’s Windows-only until you go into the game’s steam compatibility settings and set it to Proton Experimental and then it just installs and runs no problem. Even things I didn’t really expect to work, I booted and played Trepang2 under Proton just last night, not a problem in sight.
Along with Helldivers 2, I can confirm Apex Legends works as well. Valorant as far as I’m aware is a definite no-go though.
Just adding on, ProtonDB is a great resource for checking game compatibility!
If in the future you don’t want to dual boot you should check out CachyOS. I use that as my daily driver right now and it’s great for gaming.
This is a great time to switch. I have Bazzite on a 2015 laptop and a Steam Deck with SteamOS, and I’m working on migrating my main gaming rig. 95% of my games run well, and the few that don’t are often tiny indie projects. Most general use apps have Linux equivalents or Linux versions.
My recommendation is to try a few distros in VMs and see if you can set them up how you’d do it for real. Then, try out a few Live ISOs to identify any glaringly obvious hardware compatibility issues you might need to solve (rare, but it happens).
Try the common recommendations like Mint or Pop!_OS, and check out gaming-focused ones like Bazzite and Garuda.
I like the way Linux handles updating software better.
On Windows, every app is installed separately so each app is internally responsible for its own updates. So you sit down to do some work, open up your productivity software and “Autodobe After360 requires an update to continue. [Yes] [Yes]” This isn’t impossible on Linux but it happens much less often.
As you say it doesn’t throw itself under your wheels as often as Windows does.
Linux Mint was my gateway drug to linux. It’s simple and powerful! Now I’m a happy KDE user, but you never forget the first love
It really is. I don’t get the love for the tabletish gnome interface everyone is using.
I get why some people like it, for sure. I’m just surprised so many “power users” seem to.
It has a unique workflow which clicks for people like me, even if they’re on a desktop. It encourages workspaces by making creating and switching between them instant and seamless, and i like seeing all of my windows at once by just pressing the super key.
Gnome is just perfect for laptops and convertibles. I can quickly navigate it using the touchpad and super key. It also has better touch screen support, and with one extension (hide top bar), literally all of the screen real estate is available for your work. Hit the super key or 3-finger-swipe up and the UI appears. Do it again to show all your applications and desktops. Or just start typing to search. 3-finger-swipe sideways to switch to another virtual desktop. All my programs are full-screen and on their own desktop. The animations are so smooth, it’s a joy to use.
And the Gnome apps are just simple and reduced to what you actually need.
On a desktop PC I prefer Plasma for its customizability and smaller UI elements. It’s better for navigating with a mouse (although you can also turn it into a Gnome-clone or a tiling WM just with built-in options). And the KDE apps feel more “professional”, with lots of additional functionality, options and settings.
I’m glad both exist.
KDE has continually felt less solid to me when I’ve used it, and the reviews I’ve seen of it seem to note that is still the case.
I ran a dual-boot for a month and a half when news about Windows Recall broke, but unfortunately, my Nvidia setup experienced a lot of bugs and proved to just be too incompatible.
So, when I upgrade to a new computer later this year, I’m going to make this machine a Linux-only machine with a different distro, and then have my other PC for all my gaming needs.
I tried several.
None of them functioned well, and over that period of time it became clear it was a system issue. But, I know there are other distros that are more Nvidia-friendly, and when the time comes, I’ll use one of those.
Thankfully there’s O&O ShutUp to turn off Windows tracking for now.
I’m really inexperienced with Linux but I’ve become interested since getting a steamdeck which uses KDE for its desktop, which I’ve enjoyed—so how do KDE and mint compare?
KDE: traditional desktop environment with focus on lots of customization, options, and features. Often aimed more towards enthusiasts or everyday users who want the latest features.
GNOME: non-traditional desktop focusing on simplicity. Designed to be used a very specific way to maximize productivity. Often aimed more towards corporate or professional users.
Mint uses their own desktop environment (cinnamon) which is somewhere between the two.
All of these are nice in their own way, you just need to find which one you like best!
I made the switch to mint a few months ago. Its astounding to me just how slowly windows boots and I never noticed until I made the switch.
You got me, Lemmy. I caught the Linux from you and I can’t go back.
Mint boots SHOCKINGLY fast, like sub 2 seconds, on a couple of systems I have. Its basically as fast as “booting” one of my old Commodore computers!
Did not see “faster than Commodore 64!” coming!
As an American I am required by our Constitution to use bizarre units of measure. 😊
<2 seconds from powered off to being able to start to open e.g. a web browser?
If so that is indeed truly shocking. Curious what your stopwatch says from powered off to a homepage loaded ready to use.
<2 seconds from powered off to being able to start to open e.g. a web browser?
So that’s time on a reboot as measured from when the UEFI splash goes away to being presented with the logon screen. That feels roughly the same as Commodore’s “Ready” prompt, at least to me. Although the case can be made that the desktop should be up and loaded too. I’d have to enable “auto logon” to get that one.
Curious what your stopwatch says from powered off to a homepage loaded ready to use.
As I said to @Liz@midwest.social I’m starting to wonder just how fast I can make it with a bit of work. The hardware is nothing special but after the UEFI screen goes away GRUB comes and goes so fast it’s unreadable and then…you’re just looking at the logon screen.
Right now that PC is tied up running TestDisk and it’ll likely take another 2-3 days to finish. Once it’s done and I can reboot I’ll do some measuring and tweaking.
Switched to Linux Mint about three years ago after being unable to take my perfectly good laptop from W10 to W11. Dual boot firstly, quickly becoming entirely Mint. It just worked. It was the first Linux distro I’d tried in about 20 years that I didn’t mess up in a week or so.
Recently bought a new laptop and decided to distro hop. Tried various flavours of Fedora, and a few others, but ultimately came back to Mint. None of the others worked quite as well as Mint does for me (though I really liked KDE Plasma, and Gnome surprised me once I finally discovered extensions!)
You can put Plasma on Mint, I’m running that right now myself
When I rebuilt my PC I was planning something similar, got two nvme drives to dual boot, but started with Linux Mint… And never wound up installing Windows on the other, never felt the need, so I finally last night formatted it for more room for all my games
I did try running Plasma on Mint, but it was never quite as good as on Fedora or as smooth on Mint as Cinnamon.
Honestly, I think I just like the simple uniformity of Cinnamon. It’s dull and predicable, but really, really solid.
I really liked Cinnamon but switched mainly because I kept having occasional video problems that didn’t seem to affect KDE… But, that might have been the lack of a proper video driver, I’ve not tried switching back since fixing that
At this point, I’ve found enough with KDE that I like having in my workflow that I’ve been reluctant to try switching back
Linux Mint is just great :)
Agreed. I managed to get my grandpa onto Linux using Mint on his old computer. He said the interface resembled classic Windows and was up and running in less than five minutes. I just had to show him how to use the software manager and that’s it.
I got my aunt’s laptop on Mint. Was unusable with Win 10, like click the start button, wait 4 minutes and then the start menu opens. Took right to it, especially since she’s been using an Android tablet for just about everything so she knew what an app store was. “Linux calls it a software manager” was all the training required.
