Linux Mint experience so far

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emtor

Linux Mint experience so far

Post by emtor »

Hello all.
My Linux experience is somewhat mixed. I own two computers, an old Lenovo and a new HP Pavillion.
I used to run Ubuntu on the old Lenovo and it's been working fine apart from some minor bugs developing over time.
I've tried installing newer versions of Ubuntu on the Lenovo without success until I installed Mint 17.2 32-bit.
Mint 17.2 runs fine on the Lenovo and has been doing so for months with no bugs or problems.

My HP Pavillion has been running Mint 18.1 64-bit for a while now and the only problem has been watching youtube videos which tended to stutter and make the computer freeze. The stuttering has been fixed by tweaking Firefox but the freezing has gotten worse with time.
Installing other releases of Mint 18 and Mint 19 has not gone well. All the other releases simply refuses to install at all.
Mint 19 did install but sound, date and time, wifi and the menu were all missing.

Linux Mint,-when working OK is an impressive OS, super fast, easy and way better than Windows 10, but installing them has so far been a nightmare.
I will not give up however, and I will most likely be back here for help.
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Pierre
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Re: Linux Mint experience so far

Post by Pierre »

a typical Linux experience is found when installing onto any older hardware,
but that too has it's limitations, as some later kernels, can have issues with certain older hardware.

the opposite is also true, when installing onto newer hardware,,
which is too new for the current crop of kernels, to identify correctly.

yet, another issue with some modern hardware, that is custom designed for just the Windows System,
and are mass produced, just for that system, and are thus somewhat cheaper,,
yet there are still some folks who, will still attempt to install some Linux System onto these !.
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Reaccion Raul

Re: Linux Mint experience so far

Post by Reaccion Raul »

I have to say recently i bought an Acer Aspire 5 and runs perfect on Mint 19 since minute one. I read a lot before buying the computer though. This one is an i5-8250U, 8DDR, intel graphics and a SSD 250 GB. It came with Endless Linux installed. It runs lightning fast.
KBD47
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Re: Linux Mint experience so far

Post by KBD47 »

emtor wrote: Sun Aug 19, 2018 4:39 am Hello all.
My Linux experience is somewhat mixed. I own two computers, an old Lenovo and a new HP Pavillion.
I used to run Ubuntu on the old Lenovo and it's been working fine apart from some minor bugs developing over time.
I've tried installing newer versions of Ubuntu on the Lenovo without success until I installed Mint 17.2 32-bit.
Mint 17.2 runs fine on the Lenovo and has been doing so for months with no bugs or problems.

My HP Pavillion has been running Mint 18.1 64-bit for a while now and the only problem has been watching youtube videos which tended to stutter and make the computer freeze. The stuttering has been fixed by tweaking Firefox but the freezing has gotten worse with time.
Installing other releases of Mint 18 and Mint 19 has not gone well. All the other releases simply refuses to install at all.
Mint 19 did install but sound, date and time, wifi and the menu were all missing.

Linux Mint,-when working OK is an impressive OS, super fast, easy and way better than Windows 10, but installing them has so far been a nightmare.
I will not give up however, and I will most likely be back here for help.
I love Linux Mint, but on old hardware if Mint isn't working well I reach for Debian Stable. It uses some older software and kernels that often sync better with old machines. You might give MX 17 a try if you feel intimidated installing vanilla Debian.
emtor

Re: Linux Mint experience so far

Post by emtor »

On my Lenovo the only Linux releases that have worked are one release of Ubuntu and Mint 17.2. The rest have not wanted to install at all.
As for my HP Pavillion the only release that has mostly worked is Mint 18.1. All other Mint versions either crashes during install or refuses to install altogether.
The same releases even behave differently on each install attempt (different error messages etc.)
Much can be said about Win 10, but it does install but the problems usually appear after install.
Linux on the other hand seems to have severe problems installing on quite a few machines. Over the years I've encountered this problem with several distros on several computers both old and new.
Right now for instance, Mint 18.1 that installed nicely on my HP two weeks ago freezes during install and produces a blinking CapsLock. On the second attempt it installed OK.
I'm aware that certain hardware does not favour Linux, and this is something Linux developers are well aware of. Perhaps they should add a checking routine in their installers that gives an error message when such hardware is encountered. That would save people from wasting time and energy trying to make things work.
puddleglum
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Re: Linux Mint experience so far

Post by puddleglum »

Hardware compatibility with Linux does appear to be getting worse recently. For me things tended to go downhill after the rampant kernel upgrades following meltdown/specter/foreshadow. What can you do? The kernel developers have to patch the kernels to mitigate those design flaws.

I also have an old HP Pavillion with integrated NVIDIA graphics. This never ran with the Linux nouveau driver but fortunately worked great with the 304 NVIDIA proprietary driver. Unfortunately NVIDIA driver updates haven't kept up with the kernels so the Pavillion doesn't run with the latest kernels. I've solved this by sticking in a GeForce 8400GS I have laying around. It takes the 340 NVIDIA driver which loads in Mint Cinnamon 19 but not 18.3. Well at least nouveau works with that card in 18.3.
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Kudalufi
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Re: Linux Mint experience so far

Post by Kudalufi »

Mint 17.2 runs fine on the Lenovo and has been doing so for months...
My HP Pavillion has been running Mint 18.1 64-bit for a while now and the only problem...
I have always had a good experience with running Mint in a virtual machine. An approach that is growing in popularity is to run your main OS inside another OS. That is, your host OS is just a shell OS. Once you find an OS version that runs well on your hardware, you install QEMU/KVM or VirtualBox and use that to install your real OS inside it. CPU virtualization on modern CPUs means that the physical processor can run 99% of all code natively. There is very little performance hit nowadays.

So, if/when you find a good host OS that works, you install it and then you leave it. You do need to set it up so that it has no networking services at all, though. You want it to have nothing that touches the network directly. This way the only thing it will end up doing with the internet is pass packets on to your guest (main) OS. Since it has no networking services at all it doesn't even really matter so much once the host OS goes End-of-Life.

The added benefit of this approach, is as long as any new computer has a same or larger sized hard drive, you can move the flat file that contains your guest OS from the old computer to the new one. As long as the host OS you use on the new computer runs the same virtualization software and as long as you configure the guest the same way, the hardware that, say, VirtualBox presents to its guest will be in most respects identical to what the guest OS saw on the old computer. Which means in most cases, you can actually migrate your entire OS from computer to computer.

There are drawbacks to this approach. Gaming can be troublesome, since it often wants to have accelerated graphics access. This is getting better and better, though. VirtualBox's support of guest access to accelerated video is getting better and better. I think QEMU supports accelerated video on guests too, though I can't speak to how well this works.
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