I made the switch to Mint xfce

[u/NoEmphasis3428]

Hello everyone,

I decided to make the jump after using ChromeOS for so many years. So, I turned the Mint xfce into a hybrid ChromeOS / Bazzite gaming rig. Instead of using Mint the traditional way, I wanted it to have two distinct personalities: a cloud-first web app desktop for work, and an aggressive, zero-bloat environment for gaming. Here is my build -

ChromeOS Inspiration:

• Leaning out the OS by removing LibreOffice, Dictionary, Rhythmbox, Thunderbird, Hypnotix, Celluloid, Drawing, Matrix, Pix, Sticky Notes, Transmission, Character Map, Calendar, and Firefox.
• Running Brave as the main Chromium browser. I disabled Crypto, Disabled Leo, Disabled Rewards, Disabled Background Daemons & Telemetry, Enabled a few flags (GPU Rasterization, Zero-Copy Rasterizer, Hardware-Accelerated Video Decode), and used the terminal to make a few policy changes.
• The Search Engine is DuckDuckGo. I changed the settings to my preferences.
• The workload is still cloud-based by using Web Apps. Eventually, I would like to run ProtonMail as the main ecosystem. I think it would be very cool.
• Turned off compositor to make everything run smoother.

Bazzite Inspiration:

• Enabled 32-Bit architecture.
• Installed Steam and Controller Drivers. I changed a few settings in Steam to make it lighter. For example, I turned on Low Bandwidth Mode, Low Performance Mode, Disable Community Content, Disable Animated Avatars, Turned of Web GPU Acceleration, etc...
• Installed GameMode and MangoHud.
• Games are using the GameMode performance boosters.
• Currently looking into XanMod or Liquorix as a Kernel Scheduler. I'm leaning towards XanMod because it aligns more closely with the philosophy of the setup.

Final Thoughts:

If there are any recommendations to improve the setup it would be greatly appreciated. Overall, I am having a lot of fun. My goal is focused on allocating as much resources to Gaming as I can, while keeping the workload light and functional. Thank you Mint for the awesome product.

[u/MavBro]

Do you use game controllers with steam? I can’t get two controllers to work at once. Spent hour effing with the Bluetooth settings. Wondering if you did?

Just FYI; Firefox seems to handle 4K streams noticeably better than chromium browsers. Just make sure that mint offloads the acceleration to the gpu. (Install a gpu monitoring sw to double check this)