Scared and Excited

[tfotos77]

Well hello all. I am a first time Linux user. So far I am glad I chose Mint. A little back story. Aside from being able to build a computer (mainly for gaming) I know nothing about command script and whatnot. It has always intrigued me, and I even took a class for Python in college years ago. Anyway. My college aged daughter came home with the absolute crappiest HP laptop that was on Rollback at Wally-world that she thought would be great for college. Turns out that 4GB of ram and all the bloat of Windows 11 made her computer absolutely unbearable...to the point where my anxiety went through the roof. Nothing I did could save that computer.

Then I did some good old fashioned internet sleuthing and found Linux Mint. Once that was installed on her computer it literally ran like..well...not a Corvette, but not a 1986 Ford Escort either. I couldn't believe the difference! I then researched a little more and installed some MS Word fonts for Libre Office and some other niceties. I was so impressed with how it ran that I pulled out my old HP Pavillion that I used to game on from 2016 and installed Mint on it, then became so impressed that I also installed it on an old 2015-2017ish iMac that we were about to throw out (only problem is I have no sound out of the old iMac, but I am sure there is a fix). I just can't believe how fantastic this OS is. I look forward to perusing the forums and learning more about what all I can do. Have a great one; cheers!

[gittiest personITW]

Welcome to the forums.
This is a great resource, the site is run by pjotr on this forum:
https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/2.html

[JerryF]

Welcome to Mint and the forums!

[Human_63]

I know the feeling. I remember the first time I installed Mint over Windows on a laptop. It was more than a little scary to click the mouse to start that process, but once the process was finished and I saw the result, I was more than glad I did it, and I've never wanted to undo what I did.

[RIH]

Welcome..

I also installed it on an old 2015-2017ish iMac that we were about to throw out (only problem is I have no sound out of the old iMac, but I am sure there is a fix)

Start a new topic & include your equipment details
Menu - System Info - Upload System Information button
& copy & paste the result back into your new post between the code tags (</>)
I am sure that you will get some assistance..

[AZgl1800]

When Win7 got the noise about going to Win8

I installed LM17 Cinnamon and never looked back.

took me a couple years to get used to the new Terminology, and how to fix stuff on my own, but with a good Notebook ( Joplin )

I can usually fix anything, almost.

[kc1di]

Hello tfotos77,
Welcome to the Linux Mint forum, enjoy the Journey!
you may find this page informative also.
https://linuxjourney.com

[tfotos77]

Welcome..

I also installed it on an old 2015-2017ish iMac that we were about to throw out (only problem is I have no sound out of the old iMac, but I am sure there is a fix)

Start a new topic & include your equipment details
Menu - System Info - Upload System Information button
& copy & paste the result back into your new post between the code tags (</>)
I am sure that you will get some assistance..

Thank you for the suggestion. That is next on my list along with learning TLP so I can get more than 1.5 - 2 hours of battery life out of this old laptop. It could, however, just be that this battery is old. A new one runs $22 on Amazon.

[NM64]

I'm a bit late, but I wanted to mention that you should be able to get a bit more out of that 4GB of RAM is you install either zram or zswap!

I've previously tested zram on lowly E-350 CPU with 4GB of RAM (non-soldered—I intentionally used 4GB to test this) and it still ended up being substantially faster to load an early unoptimized program that really wanted more RAM—it was basically the difference between maybe 2 minutes and more than 10 minutes to load said program.

(just note that, if you use hibernate, then you zram will be incompatible and you'll need to use zswap instead; I personally found zram easier to install, but they both basically achieve the same result)


For zram, check out the corresponding Debian wiki entry at the following (ignore everything after sysvinit); once installed you can use the swapon command to check zram status:

• https://wiki.debian.org/ZRam#zram-tools

(if the CPU is particularly slow, you may want to replace the zstd part with lzo-rle but, regardless, for easy mental math I like to set the PERCENT= to 50 instead of 60)


And for zswap, see the following easy linux tips blogpost:

• https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.c ... t.html#ID1