Switching my computer from Windows to Linux is one of the best decisions I have ever made🔥👌
As usual, my timing is impeccable. I just downloaded 22.1 last night lol
Head on over to Update Manager > Edit and upgrade to 22.2!
Thank you for this
Good job!
If you are currently running Mint 22.1, the upgrade will show up in the Update Manager > Edit menu.
Edit: I updated my machines this way. I’m guessing it isn’t set to automatically move one from kernel 6.8 to 6.14? I can obviously change the kernel via the Kernels menu in Update Manager, I’m just wondering why this wasn’t automatic.
I ran it it remotely logging in from RustDesk while working. Jellyfin (caddy), Copyparty, and my Pihole all run on that machine and it finished and all continued working after it restarted.
Time estimate: 10 mins
Sorry for a noob question, but is there a recommended flavor (xfce/mate/cinnamon) for a 2010 era laptop, or is there no reason not to use cinnamon?
Cinnamon uses slightly more resources than the other two. But, it’s lightweight enough I doubt you are going to have an issue, even with a computer of that era.
Thanks for the feedback! Its a surprisingly big hurdle, especially for someone indecisive that’s not going to try all three.
With Rufus running on a usb stick, trying out all 3 is a 30 minute affair. Download included if your internet speed is high enough.
I never considered it before, but I see now Rufus lets you as multiple images to one stick. Thanks!
Have fun distro hopping 😄
I’d say RAM is going to be the largest performance bottle neck for a desktop environment on an older machine. 4gb of RAM? don’t bother with cinnamon, you’ll likely have a much better experience with Mate or XFCE. 8gb is about where I’d even bother to test out cinnamon.
You should probably take a look into puppy Linux, if low specs. Otherwise anything with xfce should run better on it.
I ran Puppy off of a 4gb USB for almost 2 years when the hard drive crashed in my desktop years ago. As far as the “it just works” OS’s go, it was fantastic.
Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution that works well!
Hard to say without specs. I’d go with XFCE and then MATE right behind it. With a lower end PC, I doubt it could handle the fanciness of Cinnamon and still run software
Woohoo. After a hardware upgrade that requires kernel 6.14 or newer I’ve been stuck on arch. Time to breakout the old drive and try an upgrade.
Fedora also has up to date kernels, if you wanted to run something other than Arch.
At the time of myhardware upgrade it was only arch and nix that supported 6.14.
I’ve got mixed feelings about Fedora. I spent 10 years using a mix of Fedora, Red Hat, CEntOS, and Red Hawk at work so I’m very used to it.
However some of the decisions Red Hat the company have been making make me hesitant about it’s future. It also makes me feel like I’m at work when I use it at home.
It’s not a bad linux family at all and if I was setting up a production server CEntOS would probably be my choice.
I use nobara which is a fork of fedora it’s pretty good. Though the update manager gui is complete crap for how slow it is.
I just briefly went through what’s in the update. It’s mostly visuals and some minor integrations? Or am I missing something?
Its a point release, so that’s to be expected.
They also updated to kernel 6.14 and updated mesa to 25.0.7, which means for people like me with a Radeon 9060 XT, it’s no longer necessary to use a PPA for updated mesa.
Wayland still in experimental mode? :(
yes
I updated last night and don’t see much of a change in my experience other than my toolbar icon look different. I streamed fo 2.5 hours on Arma Refroger no issues
It doesn’t seem like that big of an update. Unless you need something listed in the release notes, you can stay where you are. I am running 21.3. It is good until 2026. My configuration is a bit complex and I hate spending the time to update.
It fixed dark mode not working properly in Firefox. 100% needed for me lol.
That’s weird, I haven’t gotten the update yet but dark mode is working fine in FF for me. The place where it fails is ff-based webapps, which I use for YouTube music, Discord, and MS Teams.
That’s weird. I don’t use any of those other programs but Firefox dark mode has been broken for a while for me.
There are simple workarounds you can try to fix it, see for example https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/issues/12994#issuecomment-3134995065
Glad it helped you.
After using Fedora for a few days I do not care for the desktop environment and hot keys
But holy fuck how have I been sleeping on toolboxes?
The dev environment is great, I’m loving it. I even installed fedora 43 in a container to test out some rocm features and I didn’t even need to reboot.
Have always wondered how badly it could bork my system if I tried to “turn” my beautiful Kubuntu install into a Linux Mint install.
Anyone has any advice or experience of doing it without butchering everything? And yes, I would like to stay on KDE.
Mint has no KDE install which makes it a hazzle to setup and fragile to upgrade. You also wouldn’t gain anything, because they are both ubuntu based systems. Not worth it imo, like a sidegrade.
You can transplant your desktop onto anything, the configuration is stored in .config and .local in your home folder. Bring those to another distribution with the same software (copy while you are not logged in, ie while in live cd or reuse the home partition without formatting) and it will look the same.
Thanks for the advice. Wanted to give Cinnamon a go, didn’t go well when I tried installing it on Kubuntu (permissions with access to important files held in KWallet were all screwed up and half the stuff wasn’t working so I kinda gave up).
Yeah, it is not impossible, but you are actively going against the maintainers choice of software and configuration, that they can assume you have during every update. That is what makes Arch so popular: no handholding that would get in your way; but also no helping hand from upstream, only documentation how to do it. Cinnamon is maintained by the Mint team and considered difficult to install anywhere else. IMHO when you are used to KDE, it can feel lacking.
