Hi biged46us,
Welcome to the wonderful world of Linux Mint and its excellent forum!
It would help to know more about your system setup. If you run "
inxi -Fxzd" and "
lsusb" from the console terminal prompt, highlight the results, copy and paste them back here, that should provide enough information.
biged46us wrote:I'm also concerned about privacy and how the new business model seems to forego that.
There are many good posts in this forum on privacy especially those related to online banking.
A quick overview
- Don't use your real name for your computer host name or for almost anything else. Easy to change if you did.
- Use good passwords which are 17-20+ mixed case characters with some numbers and maybe some symbols (no spaces or quotes). Use a password manager to store your sensitive passwords and to create them like "KeePassXC".
- Change your local ISP connection's default DNS server IP addresses to those from a secure DNS provider like Cloudflare.
- Use a VPN provider's servers to connect to the Internet which changes your public (wan) IP address and encrypts everything you do on the Internet.
- Add security related browser extensions and add-ons to all your browsers like an adblocker (ublock origin) if your browser does not already have one, privacy badger or privacy protector plus, Disconnect, anti-fingerprinting or fingerprint masker, etc...
- Never open attachments from anyone you do not know.
biged46us wrote:My main laptop is an HP m7 which I dual boot, there are just some Windows applications I cannot leave. Through the help of this forum I was able to resolve a dual boot issue and the response to my question was quick and thorough and got me up and running.
A lot of people think they have MS Windows only applications that require them to keep MS Windows and in a few rare cases this may be true usually hardware related, but I have found that there are very good to excellent Linux or cross-platform applications for almost anything anyone uses in MS Windows or Mac available for Linux and some software already has Linux versions but some people were not aware of that. So, if you tell us what MS Windows applications you are using, the people in this forum might be able to help you find those.
And, there is always installing virtualbox or vmware with a version of MS Windows in that and install any MS Windows software in that and run them while still in Linux Mint without "dual-booting". There are also the Linux Wine and Play On Linux options as well.
Hope this helps ...
you'll love it. 
