Just an Introduction (for now)

[Tosh]

First installed Mint in 2012 (version 12) because my 4 year old laptop had slowed to a virtual crawl using Windows XP. Certainly worked better but a couple of issues made it unsuitable as a daily driver. First was the total lack of printer support and the second was my family history database (Roots Magic) was not supported by Linux. Tried Wine which was a total fail but an offer via Roots Magic for a free copy of Crossover which whilst not 100% perfect at least did 80% of what it should.

After about a year I bought a cheap but totally legal Windows 7 copy and that eventually was upgraded free to Windows 10. I was pretty happy but with only 2gb of RAM Widows 10 eventually became difficult as a daily driver so gave up on that and bought a new Windows desktop. Don't suppose 12 years was a bad life for a laptop that ran XP, Mint, Win 7 and 10.

Recently bought the wife a new laptop since her 10 year old Toshiba would not do any further upgrades and the Win10 version on the machine runs out of support in December this year. That left me with what seemed to be a perfectly good laptop that was begging for a version of Linux. Tried many but with Mint 21 due soon I decided to wait for its release before including that in the appraisal. Installed Ubuntu 22.01 Mate and Fedora 36 KDE on old external HD's and both seemed OK. Printing worked which was good but both needed more work setting up than I expected so I awaited Mint 21 since it ran strait out of the box in 2012.

Bought a new 500 Gb HD ready for the release day which with the 8 Gb of RAM in the Toshiba should make it fly.

So on release day I installed Mint 21 with the Mate desktop and it was great from the start, everything worked perfectly. Printing and even scanning with no issues. Added Thunderbird for Mail, Gimp for Photos, LibreCAD for my Drawings and Chromium browser (never really liked Firefox - don't ask why - its just me I guess).

Tried to get Roots Magic working in Wine but as before I had to give up since after much web searching it seemed I would never get it working acceptably well. So I tried Gramps which I disliked at first but now I have grown to accept that since everything works its better than a barely working Roots Magic. Main issue was finding a way to get it to load my media files (never got as far as that issue with RM in Wine) but after a crash course in "relative paths" all is well.

Mint boots up in 25 seconds and at idle uses just over 500 Mb of the 8 Gb of RAM, compared to the 3 Gb my Win11 desktop uses out of its 8 Gb shows just how bloated Windows really is.

So one very happy punter here but be prepared for some daft questions in the future.

[deepakdeshp]

Welcome to the forum.

[NM64]

Welcome! It makes me happy to see that you took into account that Mint 21 was to be released soon - considering your concerns about ending OS support with Win10, jumping straight to Mint 21 will nearly double the support life than if you went with the existing Mint 20.3.

Bought a new 500 Gb HD ready for the release day which with the 8 Gb of RAM in the Toshiba should make it fly.

Surely you mean an SSD, right? I'm not sure any 500GB mechanical laptop hard drive could make a PC "fly"

BTW, in the BIOS, the hard drive mode or SATA mode was set to AHCI, correct? (I mean, any PC in the last decade really should be defaulting to using AHCI rather than "compatibility" or "IDE" but you never know...)

Tried to get Roots Magic working in Wine but as before I had to give up

May I ask if you were using the version of WINE recommended on the Mint homepage or if you were using the latest stable or even staging version?

While the latest stable and staging versions don't 100% integrate into the OS quite as much, I've not really noticed issues with it when it comes to just installing, running, and uninstalling Windows applications and, being a newer version, it has improved compatibility; you just may need to manually note the following terminal commands to access a couple of WINE things:

• winecfg - WINE configuration
• wine uninstaller - Windows program uninstaller (the equivalent of "Add & Remove Programs" on Windows)

The instructions are quite simple to install but it does require copying and pasting a few commands into the terminal (for Mint 21, follow the instructions for Ubuntu 22.04; also you don't really need to worry about any of the stuff on the webpage located below the text that says "If you have previously used the distro packages"):

• https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu

For reference, the "staging" is basically the absolute newest version that releases around every 2 weeks while "stable" is a version that releases at the beginning of each year.

[Tosh]

Thanks for the replies.

The 500 Gb drive is a SSD. Bought a good quality Crucial one.

Looked in the BIOS settings and could not find any options for the HD Mode.

For Wine I eventually used the recommendations on the Ubuntu forum. The first time it was a non worker but on the 2nd attempt it appeared I was getting somewhere. Unfortunately it was not to be. But as I said Gramps seems to be fine and as before I will simply make sure I only enter info on one machine and copy the database and media files from that machine to my others. The only difference will be to save a GEDCOM for Gramps.

I guess the life I get from Mint could ultimately be determined by the life left in the old Toshiba. The one factor that stopped me proceeding with Fedora (I really liked that Linux version) was their announcement that all future versions (37 onwards due later this year) would be UEFI only with no BIOS support which would have limited the life of the Toshiba to that of Windows. They did an about turn but if they thought about it once it could soon come back. So much for Linux being an OS to add life to older hardware.

[antikythera]

So much for Linux being an OS to add life to older hardware.

That's just Fedora, it's meant to be a bleeding edge test bed for future builds of redhat enterprise linux or RHEL for short.

With Mint the abandoning of legacy bios will be at least a decade away if it ever happens. And even then you have the option of Debian based LMDE or of course Debian itself. Only in version 10 of Debian which was the build LMDE4 was based on did they finally manage to implement support for EFI, and they also still support 32-bit architecture in Debian 11

[kc1di]

Hello Tosh,
Welcome to the Linux Mint Forums, enjoy the Journey!
Mint and Linux has come a long way since 2012 and should give you a good daily driver.