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.
Nvidia is a mess on Linux in general, though it's gradually improving. They decided to neglect everything that the other GPU manufacturers and the community were doing and roll out their own buggy concepts.
This really isn't the fault of Mint. PopOS works with it just because its developers System76 also has a line of nvidia based hardware. However, as I said before, nvidia is slowly starting to implement the standards and situation on other distros like Mint will gradually improve.
Meanwhile, I'm curious. What hardware did you try Mint on?
Sure, but whoever's fault it was didn't really matter to me at the time. I just remember being annoyed at everyone constantly praising linux and saying how easy it is nowadays while I'm just jumping from one issue into another, that experience made me delay moving my main PC to it since I also have an nvidia GPU there. Had to go through like 3 different ways of installing drivers, various weird containers or bottles or wine and lutris or proton just for it all to constantly freeze or crash my PC.
It was a Dell laptop, not sure about specs but it's at least a few years old model, nothing too high end. The plan was to keep it as a small home server for hosting various stuff, services, media in the end, with varying success.