New to Mint

[Gareth McMillan]

Hi, Thanks for the add. I recently dumped Windows 7 and installed Mint. I almost feel instant regret as some of my programs wont work. Such as Cura for 3D printing, Fusion 360. and Celtic pipes, a Bagpipe music editing software. what do you guys do to get over your program user blues,. Do you run the program in a proxy?

[xenopeek]

Welcome to the Linux Mint forums.

Many of us made the move from Windows to Linux and had to figure out what to do with programs that were only available for Windows. When you have such programs it might be easier to dual boot for a while, so you can fall back to Windows when you don't yet have an alternative for some task. If you still have a Windows license you could install Windows in a virtual machine (like VirtualBox) so you can run Windows inside Linux Mint as a program and have access to those few programs that way. Another alternative is to try if they will run one Wine; a program that can run some Windows software on Linux.

But spearing ahead and finding alternatives fast is also an option A useful website for that is https://alternativeto.net/, where you can search for programs you know and find alternatives to it on other operating systems.

Cura is in fact available for installation through Software Manager in your menu. If you need a newer version than available there you can try compiling it yourself with https://github.com/Ultimaker/cura-build or this https://launchpad.net/~thopiekar/+archive/ubuntu/cura software repository to your system, where somebody else has done the compiling for you. Some information about other 3D printing software available on Linux: https://wiki.debian.org/3DPrinting.

For Autodesk Fusion 360 there are some other CAD programs suggested here: https://alternativeto.net/software/fusi ... form=linux. They may suffice for what you need or you may need to look a bit further into CAD programs for Linux (try a web search).

For music notation have a look here: https://www.linuxlinks.com/musicnotation/. I don't know anything about music notation so forgive me if bagpipe music needs something other.

[WharfRat]

Hello Gareth

Welcome to Linux Mint and the Linux Mint forum

I only need to run a windows application a couple of times a year so VirtualBox does it for me.

[AndyMH]

When I started with mint, I was dual booting between mint 17.3 and win7. Now my main OS is still mint (19), but for those windows programs you can't live without I run win7 as a virtual machine (using virtualbox). The other alternative is wine which allows you to run some windows programs directly under linux. There is a commercial, non-free version of wine called crossover which supports a greater number of windows programs. In addition to win7 in a VM I also use crossover. Note, a VM is good for most things, but not games.

[jimallyn]

MuseScore is a complete music notation package. I can't imagine that it wouldn't be able to do what you need to do, the one possible downside is that obviously it's not optimized for bagpipes.

[lsemmens]

Hi Gareth, welcoe to Mint, and the mint forums.

[kc1di]

Hello Gareth McMillan and welcome to Linux Mint Forums,

Enjoy the learning curve and you'll find many who have had to run former Windows programs. Some my work in wine - I recommend leaning and using PlayonLinux
or virtualbox. Or you can dual boot which I did for may years, but as time went on found I didn't need the windows programs after all. I have one windows program I run now and it runs fine in wine.
Good luck and enjoy your new system.