Linux Mint Tips & Tricks

I have an thinkpad p52 it has graphics card. So is linux mint cinnamon edge or should I go with pop os with inbuild Nvidia drivers.

Chris, I’m trying to figure out why my Mint install freezes a little when I go to change Deaktop wallpaper. I don’t know if it has something to do with it wanting to open a browser to find more samples to install or something else. Anyone else see a bit of a freeze in this particular menu item?

Great tutorial. From the Linux distros I've tried in the past, Mint certainly has come out best imo. Started with LM 18.1 and have recently installed 21.1. Have tried Cinnamon but strangely enough Xfce for me seems a tad more flexible. Linux, and especially Mint has come a long way. Is it on par with Windows 7? Not sure.
Using W7 as my daily driver (well protected - even Microsoft Security Essentials still updates to this very day despite otherwise claimed by many, but Microsoft still puts the latest definitions online for W7 and 8), I would say that LM is a bit less intuitive. There still are so many settings scattered all over the place (steep learning curve) whilst Windows simply put all of them in one entry from the menu. In W7, one also can simply drag new icons into the menu and delete them there with a right click. New icons can simply be pinned to the taskbar with a simple click, and icons dragged around in the menu. LM 21.1 has this very complicated and most confusing menu editor.
Another downside is that update checks (just the check if updates exists) take about 3 minutes, then downloading them are still at torrent speeds.
The many password naggings can be circumvented by editing policies (complicated but possible by editing some files).
As a daily, LM 21.1 would be fine for light work I would say.
Is it newbie friendly? Not sure. I've taken the time over the years to learn about Linux but would an average user have the patience and time? I get that most Linux users seemed to be IT pros and tinkerers. But how about newbies.
Overall, LM is the best and well underway I'd say but there is plenty of work left. Cleaning up a scatter of entries for the many settings would be a good start. Fast download times and for checks as well, and making the menu and taskbar much more flexible like Windows 7.
Adroid is a good example of Linux simplification so it is possible I gather.

Cinnamon is great, I like how DeLinuxCo reconfigured the desktop,. It is based on Manjaro/Arch, but you can make LMDE or Mint look the same.

Linux mint, a perfect daily driver indeed to be considered 😮, thank you uncle Chris😊

Have you checked out Zorin OS recently? Am a windows person but was quite impressed when I spun this up on an old HP T730 thin client.

rememebr folks the menu editor is buggy..... copy paste delete doesnt always work. you copy n paste it may put it in the same cat and you have 2 icons in the same cat then u try again becuse u think it didnt work then u have 3. then it wont let u delete them

Excellent tutorial Chris, thanks so much!

👁👃👁 My Linux Mint Knowledge has been Quintupled. And YOU did it. Thanks so much. Cheers from So.Ca.USA 3td House on the Left.

Chris, there is a big problem with this video! What fonts are mermaids to use on their pots of jam???

Does mint have maintenance similar to windows? Windows has dism/sfc along with disk defrag/trim and storage sense/clean. What does mint have?

Nice coverage of Linux Mint. I started with Red Hat v5 way back when but switched to Ubuntu when it first showed up (still have the CD, they mailed to me). I sort of lost the taste for Ubuntu around v11 when they changed the Desktop manager and moved over to Debian. I've been on Debian ever since, but you're video has given me the itch to try mint. I particularly like the Cinnamon desktop manager and had no idea about the Time Shift feature, now that's cool. Fortunately I have no computer related projects on the go for this weekend, so I'm going to give Mint a go. Thank you!

Okay one issue I have reguardless of OS and settings. When I click down the mouse wheel, it closes any open tabs. Windows, Linux Mint, Zorin OS, etc. Any mouse, doesn't matter who made it. I even using Logitech's windows utility told the button to be set at "do nothing", and it still closed tabs. I sometimes twitch a bit and I hit it.

I love mint, but for some reason on my new System 76 tower it didn't play well, though POP OS what it came with works great.

Some of the shortcuts shown in this video do work at least partially in Linux Mint with Xfce. Thanks for the video, professor!

What filesystem did you have on your usb drive FAT32? I have so many USB drives with ext3/4 that I have to copy files from onto a USB drive with a FAT filesystem to simply xfer files to Windows.
It vexes me so! SneakerNet is not exciting. Dance The Samba? SSH? VFS? RDP? Oh Bother!

may i please ask for another video about building and programming robots with pico \ raspberry pi for absolute beginners

I have a question Chris. I use Linux 80% of the time, but I still need Windows 10 for some apps I use. Is there any way I can gain access to a Linux hard drive, from a Windows drive? I can view Windows from my Linux, but not view Linux from Windows. My desktop PC has 3 operating systems. Linux Mint, Linux Feren and Windows 10. Sometimes I need to access files I've downloaded on my Linux drives, when in Windows.

What do you actually use Linux Mint for? I know it is your daily driver, but what application do you use it in your daily activities?

@ExplainingComputers Are you on the spectrum? The way you present a video I think you might be. Coming from on the spectrum

Another glorious Linux sermon 👍
Kindest regards, neighbours and friends.

I like that Linux Mint removes bloatware, snap packages, invasive telemetry, Ubuntu pro, etc and is easier to use. Although I prefer fedora based distributions for laptops and PCs and Raspberry Pi OS on rasperry Pi. (Obviously) I really like the pixel interface and wish there was a pixel fedora spin.

I would be interested to hear your honest opinion on Fedora Workstation, installing Windows 11 with Rufus to remove the annoying Microsoft account requirement, The recent releases of Haiku OS, the brand new OpenBSD 7.4 release, MX Linux, Antix and other distro that are not Ubuntu derived. I would argue that Ubuntu is the worst distribution for a beginner because it does not use the stock gnome, uses snaps instead of .deb packages, contains telemetry, and does things differently than other distros enough to mess up your habits.

I disagree on the "If your NVIDIA driver works, leave it be" statement. You should always keep your drivers up to date to patch out vulnerabilities. But, I agree that you should use Timeshift before updating, just in case a new bug was introduced. Stay up to date, or you'll give Information Security a heart attack! 🙂

Talk faster.

As Debian user since 2003 I installed MINT with MATE, Cinnamon and XFCE (I can switch to whatever I fancy when logging in) 2021 on 10 year old hardware. I prefer Cinnamon due to hardware limitations.

Since then I wanted to get rid of an icon in the favorites, but always forgot to google for it. Today, watching you video, the answer came.

But really, Cinnamon should allow the direct removal of a favorite by right clicking on it. First search for it in the app list appears to be not very intuitive for me.

Nvidia drivers..... the bane of my existence on LM.

Every time I get an update it for some reason makes my screen go black and I have no choice but to restart in safe mode and run "sudo dpkg --configure -a" every single time. It always seems to happen when I need it to work the most, like when I'm about to watch a movie with guests, or in the middle of an important document I haven't saved. I disabled automatic updates just because of this problem.

Is there any new desk tour video at 1M subs? :)

Hello There. Could you please review the N100 sbc ?

Hi ec, I have a technical question... when I watch movies on Netflix with Windows they look very good but when I install Linux Mint the movies pause very frequently. I understand that in Linux there is a way to expand the temporary storage and with that the fluidity of the movies is improved. Could you explain to me how to improve Linux Mint performance... I use Mozilla as an explorer on both OS... I am writing to you from Colombia, I am a follower of your excellent channel... thanks alot

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. 👍😊

What about linux mint + xampp + vscode + xdebug far a new video ?

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.

Again an excellent video.

After more than three decades of installing Windows workstations and servers, I'm totally surprised how well Linus Mint is working. I have spend countless hours instilling drivers, licenses and billions of reboots and now I'm almost have a feeling of cheating, because I just install Linux Mint and everything I try, works so far.

And Linux Mint Xfce runs on small and old computers also.

My most critical user, my wife are now using Linux Mint LMDE (Debian) and I'm still a happy married man. Even our network printer and scanner (Brother), works without any issues .

I have only two Windows applications left and I'm running them using WMware and Windows 7 and it works flawlessly.

Now I'm back where my career started, programming 40 years ago. I'm now learning C using CodeBlocks and Raylib for graphics and it just works great.

My only regret is, that I should have started with Linux Mint long time ago.

I'm using ChatGPT, if need to know something about Linux Mint. The answers can be good, bad or sometimes very ugly, but I often got suggestions about similar applications to Windows and it's helping a lot.

The hardest part for me is, if I have to install a printer that are missing from the inbuilt list. And so far, I have not found software for my HIK camera.

I'm now a much, much more satisfied user and don't have telemetry, advertising and other MS issues to fight against. Generally is very easy to install applications and easy to get rid of them also.

Some interesting stuff there. I'll have to see how much applies to MATE because my pc ground to a halt using Cinnamon, before replacing the hardware I installed MATE, a new lease of life with no obvious downside, perhaps it can't handle something I don't want to do so haven't noticed.

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!

Would older versions of installable offices work on wine? Lets say I have a license for 2016 and I don't really feel like purchasing a newer one or subscribing to the web service.

I find it interesting that I've tried the things you shown on the video before this video was released. Things were well explained and would have made things a bit easier if I had known these about 3 years ago haha, but I did learn things through experience so that works too.

The Office 365 Web Apps don't have feature parity with the desktop versions on Windows and Mac (they aren't feature complete compared to a desktop install of Office in simple terms). Such as the References functions on Word. There's some things that don't work the same like on Excel when formatting a line on a multi line cell.

As someone else has said Timeshift can take a lot of space especially when running periodic backups. It is probably better to just run it before doing something major like changing Nvidia drivers or updating to unstable software and the like just to have a safe point to return to.

Nvidia drivers are just a pain for me. I had weird screen lagging issues when there's no full screen window when I had a dual screen setup. It didn't matter if it was the 470, 490, 515, 525, or 535 drivers or kernel 5.4, 5.10, 5.11, 5.15, 6.0, or 6.1. So I changed to an AMD gpu and it is nice that I don't have to deal with the Nvidia drivers.

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.👍

Great vid! My step daughter asked me if I could recover her password for a tablet someone gave her. Nope, i installed mint 19 32, bit (1.5 gig single core, 3 gig of memery)on it, set it up for her, she loves it! Fast and snappy. She watches movies on it via Amazon plus.
Your videos are why I did it. Thank's!

Does Mint allow you to change your American keyboard layout to UK layout? Thanks for another great vid.

Mint is and has been my daily driver for years, however after testing Ubuntu 23.10 in vm, I'm seriously considering a switch.

I've been on Linux for 15 years and recently switched to an AMD graphics card, RX 6950 XT, after buying Nvidia for 20 years. I'm loving it and I will probably never buy another Nvidia card because they are not open source friendly so poo on them. I have a few tips that I just recently learned about and that is if you are a gamer and you use an Ubuntu based distro such as Mint you can add the ubuntu mainline kernel PPA and install the mainline package to install a nice app in your menu to graphically install the newest stable kernel. And also there are one or two PPA to get the newest stable mesa drivers. These two things makes gaming much better and makes sure you have the newest game features and compatibility with them actually loading up.

kernel PPA: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cappelikan/ppa
mesa PPA: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kisak/kisak-mesa

This has inspired me to give Mint a try, using your excellent previous video about dual booting with 2 drives. Since most of the software i use is open source anyway I can probably migrate to Linux completely, except for gaming maybe

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!!!

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.