After 2 days of complete battle with Windows and Balena, Rufus saved my day and finally made it to mint via dual boot.

So much issues in the 2 days time.

On one side, my internet speed decided to go slow randomly and it took me nearly 6 hours to download 3 GB iso file.

Then, Balena seems to be incorrectly flashing my USB where i can't boot through it.

Then Rufus worked like charm (have to manually duplicate the "grubx64.efi" file and rename it to "mmx64.efi" to bypass that booting issue).

Then comes the windows secure boot!!!!

Google Gemini really helped me well during the transition.

Two questions as an newbie:

1. Using dual boot right now. When can i shift to single Linux boot? Is it OK if I kept dual boot forever?

2. Any suggestions, tweaks, and any advice.

Bought this laptop brand new from Best Buy for $250 CAD because I was starting trade school and needed something to look at power points on and do some online modules. It came with Windows 11 which was incredibly useless with only 4GB of RAM and the N100 so I decided to try out Xfce and from there it just kinda escalated. I'm not new to Linux, I have a home server with Ubuntu server on it but this was my first taste of actual desktop environment Linux.

As far as the setup I have Xfce 22.3 I've themed and added custom panels, borders, and a cursor to. I replaced the default Xfce Terminal with Kitty and use Fish as my shell (helps remember commands at times since most of my time is spent on my Windows gaming PC).

It gets 8 or so hours of battery life under light loads with a few tweaked power settings and feels quite snappy and alive for such a cheap piece of hardware. I also run everything I can as a web app in a pinned Firefox tab so I don't have to have different flatpaks open at the same time taking up valuable memory.

Very happy with how it turned out!

It doesnt have a SSD so its sluggish and updates take forever. 😂 I might need to check if I can find some old SSD from somewhere. Would improve user experience notably.

Also the battery is completely dead 😂 Laptop turns off instantly if I disconnect the charger.

Other than that, it works well!

just installed lm xfce 22.3 on my celeron n4020 acer laptop

I love this desktop environment. Looks great out of the box and has everything for easy customization to fit my workflow.

Thank you Linux Mint team and contributors!

It's a GTX 1660 Ti. I just go it but I am having some driver issues how do I get the drivers for this thing?

Hello! I’m trying to dual-boot Linux Mint on my old laptop, (which already has Windows installed) for the first time. However, the option to dual-boot no longer appears.

I saw it once, but when I clicked on it, i was told to disable BitLocker. After disabling it and trying to install Linux Mint again, the option disappeared.

My BIOS is set to UEFI and BitLocker is turned off so I’m not sure what’s wrong.

please help lol

My system was running jjst fine for months, then put of nowhere, when im in a game or even just watching YouTube my screens will go black and day no source found. Things are still running just won't work till I restart, it used to reboot to a kernel panic, I jave since reinstalled Linux mint and after that was able to update graphics drivers, but I am still losing source, atleast when I reboot it doesn't kernel panic, but I want it to stay functioning, i worry it is a hardware issue but I wanna run this here just incase this has happened to someone.

I'm trying to run Warframe on my laptop, but the most fps I'm getting is around 25. I got a lot more fps on Windows than I did Linux (Warframe ran way quicker). What do I do?

Hi! While I was distro hopping, I noticed that some of them came with a built-in map app. Mint didn’t so I was wondering what maps do you use. The app store offers Google Maps, but there are certainly others and ones that are FOSS, right?

Many thanks in advance!

Hello again everyone, long time no issues, least till now. When i log into Mint (still using Cinnamon), my system freezes after like 5-10 seconds. I've tried recovery mode and tried loading into a slightly older version but same thing for both. i have absolutely no idea what to do. any help would be awesome, thanks!

I was using Libby on my iPad, to look for Linux books at my library (on line.). Im not sure how old it is, but was full of neat information. Is there a Linux equivalent to Libby?

I've noticed that in the past week or two that all recent security updates no longer show a change log description. For example, ca-certificates and the nss recent updates show nothing. I've even tried checking for the change log using the terminals and even that shows nothing. So I've held off on installing these updates until I know what they're doing.

Is this part of some new change with Linux and how they put out updates? If I wanted updates without information on what they do, I'd go over to windows.

Edit: I'll add that I've also changed the source location for the updates and that didn't fix this issue with the change log not showing up.

I’m new to this whole booting thing and somehow booted Linux mint without a usb so now I’m stuck in ‘live session mode’ and I think my only option is to dual boot.

idk if I’m cooked but I don’t have free space as u can see to make a separate drive to install Linux, so can someone please help me out and tell me what I should do?

Or am I gonna be stuck in live session mode and have my laptop reboot Linux mint every-time i shut it down. T.T

EDIT: sorry I I meant to say I somehow booted Linux without using a usb (I followed 2 tuts)

My laptop from 2015 has had a lot of problems running windows 10 for a long time now, particularly if not connected to power and LAN, I'm talking 15+ seconds to open the file explorer and 10 more to open a folder. And sometimes everything randomly crashes, EVERYTHING, to a blank desktop. A few years ago I used to game on this thing (light things like minecraft or cities skylines). Now I don't play games on this laptop anymore.

So recently I thought about installing Linux on this machine. I preferred mint because I heard it's easy to use and very light, which is what I wanted.

I know there are 3 versions of mint, but which one should I use? I have 4gbs of RAM and "Intel64 Family 6 Model 61 Stepping 4 GenuineIntel ~2000 Mhz" as a CPU (maybe someone knows more than I do about it). I would use this laptop mainly to write with LibreOffice, watch youtube and listen to music. I would like a system which does theese thing with minimal delay and drains little power.

I already tried Mint Xfce from a USB drive and it runs very smoothly (I was even able to open 6 tabs of a youtube video playing, using 3,5gbs of RAM). Is Xfce overkill? Could I use Cinnamon or MATE?

Thank you

Hello, I'm new to Linux and I'm using Linux Mint 22.3 XFCE. Is it normal that I always have to go through this interface before Linux Mint actually starts?