Looking forward to a joyfull ride

[clriis]

Hi all,

I have been with Microsoft ever since my first PC, a Toshiba T1200 with 8086 CPU, 1 MB RAM and 20 MB HDD running MS-DOS 3.3 and Lotus Symphony.

533px-Toshiba_T1200.jpg (19.31 KiB) Viewed 208 times

It has been an enjoyable journey for the most, but during the last 5-6 years Windows has become increasingly cumbersome and obscure, especially in regards to privacy.

Since 2017 I've been tinkering with Raspberry Pi's for Music and Movies and in 2020 I set up a headless Pi4 as NAS, Pi-hole and VPN gateway.
Meanwhile I also started testing several Linux distros in VM-Ware on my main PC and also installed it on some secondary PC's. Mainly two distros stood out: 'Endeavour OS' and 'Linux Mint'. I chose the latter mainly because it's a Debian derivative like Raspberry Pi OS.

So--- 3 weeks ago I flipped the charts and installed Linux Mint Cinnamon on my main PC while running Windows 10 in VirtualBox and so far it has been really fun with very few hick-ups. Linux (Mint) is a very fast, logical and tidy experience for the most.

Even the applications I still run in Windows (mostly MS Office and a few special apps) is running very smooth in VBox. It takes only 15 secs for Windows to startup and so far I've not had to resort to my "emergency tool"; an older Thinkpad T520 running Win10 with Remote Desktop.

For historical reasons I got 100 GB (lifetime) free space on OneDrive. Therefore syncing to OneDrive is quite important to me and for a couple of years I've been running Abraunegg's OneDrive Client for Linux on my Pi4. It's proved very stable and also runs flawless in Mint.

My main PC is no Ferrari in any sense: Thinkpad X13 Yoga, 1st gen. Core i5, 8 GB RAM and 250 GB SSD. Hence my surprise at how well VBox is performing in Linux.

All in all I look forward to join your community "full scale"

Thanks

Claus
from Denmark

[kc1di]

Hello Claus,
Welcome to the Linux Mint Forum, glad you are enjoying the Journey!

[NM64]

I chose [Linux Mint] mainly because it's a Debian derivative like Raspberry Pi OS.

Perhaps you're already aware, but there's also LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) which is directly derived from Debian rather than derived from Ubuntu (which itself is based on Debian).

Even the applications I still run in Windows (mostly MS Office and a few special apps) is running very smooth in VBox.

If you're feeling more experimental, you can always try running your applications in Wine or, as a more security-conscious option, in "Bottles".

For straight Wine, you'd install it via the following and then, afterwards, install the "wine-installer" package from the package manager:

• standard Linux Mint: https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu
• LMDE (for LMDE6 you want Debian 12): https://wiki.winehq.org/Debian

For "Bottles", just install it from the software manager and that's kind of it really—it works as a sort of sandboxed front-end for Windows applications (just be mindful of a rather silly bug whereby you need to set type as "All files" when selecting an EXE to open in Bottles for the "Open" dialog window to even show EXE files).