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Linux Mint 22 released: An attractive option for migrating away from Windows | Windows 11 system requirements block millions of PCs from upgrading, while Linux Mint continues to work on older hardware (www.ghacks.net)

submitted 3 months ago by ForgottenFlux to c/technology

244 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] PostingInPublic 146 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago (11 children)

How has your gaming journey been so far? Games and general programs are the main reason why in still on Windows

[–] jettrscga 45 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

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.

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[–] thundermoose 20 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] pathief 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Xeroxchasechase 87 points 3 months ago (10 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Plasma is quite nice now.

[–] ripcord 11 points 3 months ago (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (6 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Did not see “faster than Commodore 64!” coming!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Did not see “faster than Commodore 64!” coming!

As an American I am required by our Constitution to use bizarre units of measure. 😊

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[–] davetansley 51 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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!)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] davetansley 18 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Rooki 34 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Linux Mint is just great :)

[–] NateNate60 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 months ago

I use mint btw 🌿

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago (8 children)

I tried Linux Mint for like a day or two when I left Windows, but then I tried Kubuntu and after that I didn't have a need to try anything else

[–] [email protected] 37 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's all about finding the distro that works for you. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

[–] FlyingSquid 10 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Thank you. That was what really pissed me off when I finally switched to Linux. Suddenly it went from OS wars to sub-OS wars.

Like the first day I installed Mint I asked a question and some guy told me that Mint sucked and I should use some other distro. You've all been trying to get people to switch to Linux for years and now you give them shit when they are using a distro you don't like? The fuck?

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago (5 children)

I tried Linux Mint on my old XPS laptop and the battery life is, unfortunately, a nonstarter for me. It lasts about 2 hours running Linux versus up to six on Windows (thanks to battery settings). It also doesn't hibernate properly. I wish it had worked for me

[–] Olgratin_Magmatoe 14 points 3 months ago (5 children)

It may be worth doing more distro hoping. It sometimes takes a few to get it right for your needs/use case.

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[–] HC4L 18 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Just switched after seeing how much of my Steam library I could play on my Deck. Just have to switch back for BF5 sometimes and I don't miss Windows at all. Very nice experience.

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[–] SpaceNoodle 18 points 3 months ago (1 children)

My old Microsoft Surface is running much better now that it's running Linux Mint.

[–] vikingtons 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I'm curious about these, do the surfaces still require the use of (or benefit from) custom kernels?

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[–] DaddleDew 15 points 3 months ago

I revived a 15 year old laptop by installing Linux Mint on it (and replacing the hard drive for an old SSD I had kicking around). It does everything a modern laptop would do except play new games now.

[–] MataVatnik 14 points 3 months ago

Mint is so user friendly

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Tbf, most distros work on older hardware.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Mint is mint! I'm using Debian Edition of Mint; according to the Mint forums the package backports for LMDE6 will be worked on after everything with LM22 is complete, and LMDE7 is for when a new Debian comes out.

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[–] ClydapusGotwald 10 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Too bad Linux can’t run all my games yet. If it could I’d switch in a heart beat

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Let me preach you the gospel of

bazzite.gg

A user friendly, steam OS like distro specifically made for gaming. About as difficult to set up as a new smartphone, and comes with all the goods needed for gaming preinstalled, like steam, wine (lutris), and various other compatibility features.

It is also an immutable distro, which essentially means you can't break your system*. If you mess something up you can simply roll back to an earlier configuration.

*you certainly still can, but you would have to actively try

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (14 children)

Tried it this week, video signal would cut off as soon as there was a tiny bit of load on the GPU (like intro videos in a game would be too much)... I'll have to experiment some more but you can't blame people for using the option that just works when switching OS probably means troubleshooting for tens of hours...

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

I installed Bazzite earlier this month as a dual boot and have been very happy with it. A lot of stuff just worked on bootup, haven't installed a single driver, and that's including my AMD GPU, just installed a game, plugged in my controller, and it played. Most games seem to run better than Windows. Fullscreen mode is a lot less annoying to tab out of - there isn't the annoying momentary black screen, tab just happens. OBS seems to finally be on the level of Windows performance, although some of my favorite extensions are Windows-only. That's been something of an annoyance, a lot of stuff is Windows-only, but usually if I Google "[program] Linux" I'll get a workaround or substitute. I still leave Windows installed because of anti-cheat nonsense, but I rarely boot into Windows anymore.

Kind of meandering but that's my experience so far. Overall pretty satisfied.

[–] ripcord 9 points 3 months ago

Ive been willing to skip the like 2% of games I have that won't play on it, personally.

[–] tabular 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Which of your games doesn't work? Do they happen to be multiplayer?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

Mint is my daily use OS at work, and will soon be taking over my windows machine at home that acts as a server.

I’m sure it’s a side effect of me being old and being busy all the damn time, but I love that it can literally be easier to install and use than windows, without losing any linux-ness. Big deal if it looks like I have a windows taskbar, I still have my screens taken up by Firefox, VSCode, terminal.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Did I blink and miss something... Mint actually looks pretty modern compared to how I remember the release notes, kernel 6.8... I've never bothered with it as it just seemed like a distro to run on old hardware if you don't mind your core being 2 years out of date, where Debian v.xx with kde just made more sense

Interesting..

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Just did a timeshift then upgraded and it went perfectly. Had to disable a ppa but the upgrader even did that for me.

I only recently came over from Windows and am very impressed - most Windows upgrades go less smoothly than this.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (5 children)

I researched this a few years ago, but is their a way to get SolidWorks, SpaceClaim etc working on Linux? Or do I have to run a virtual machine with windows?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

Switching to Linux is almost always going to involve accepting that you may need to use alternative software compared to what you're used to. If that's unacceptable and you have mission critical work that can only be done on Windows compatible software, you may be better off staying put.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I love mint, and Fedora Cinnamon is my daily driver. My only problem with cinnamon is that wayland support is still being developed, so it lacks 1:1 touchpad gestures.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (8 children)

I recently gave thr debian based Linux Mint a try and I was pleasantly surprised.

I might ditch ubuntu for this.

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