I like the way Linux handles updating software better.

On Windows, every app is installed separately so each app is internally responsible for its own updates. So you sit down to do some work, open up your productivity software and “Autodobe After360 requires an update to continue. [Yes] [Yes]” This isn’t impossible on Linux but it happens much less often.

As you say it doesn’t throw itself under your wheels as often as Windows does.

I ran a dual-boot for a month and a half when news about Windows Recall broke, but unfortunately, my Nvidia setup experienced a lot of bugs and proved to just be too incompatible.

So, when I upgrade to a new computer later this year, I’m going to make this machine a Linux-only machine with a different distro, and then have my other PC for all my gaming needs.

I’m really inexperienced with Linux but I’ve become interested since getting a steamdeck which uses KDE for its desktop, which I’ve enjoyed—so how do KDE and mint compare?

Agreed. I managed to get my grandpa onto Linux using Mint on his old computer. He said the interface resembled classic Windows and was up and running in less than five minutes. I just had to show him how to use the software manager and that’s it.

I’m curious about these, do the surfaces still require the use of (or benefit from) custom kernels?

It may be worth doing more distro hoping. It sometimes takes a few to get it right for your needs/use case.

I know for me, at least with gnome, toggling between performance, balanced, and battery saver modes dramatically changes my battery life on Ubuntu, so I have to toggle it manually to not drain my battery life if it’s mostly sitting there. I don’t know if Mint is the same, but just throwing out the “obvious” for anyone else running Linux on a laptop.

I’d try fedora or pop os. I never really liked mint personally

That’s most likely a driver issue. I don’t know if this is something that’s easily fixed. Linux is better on open hardware.

How much does it play and what about a GPU in terms of compatibility?

Ive been willing to skip the like 2% of games I have that won’t play on it, personally.

Which of your games doesn’t work? Do they happen to be multiplayer?

I was not successful running Solidworks under Linux and it even detects when it is running in a virtual machine and refuses to install completely!

Finally I have found an alternative that suits my needs, that has free account for hobby purposes: on-shape.com it’s web-based, works flawlessly under Linux and Firefox. Workflow is very similar to Solidworks, and version-control is simple and nice.

Some people have run solidworks on Linux with limited success. Granted I have never personally done it, from what I understand they used wine which emulates windows anyway. So it depends on how much time you are willing to sink to get things working.

Supported until 2029 (so 5 years) vs 10 years for Windows 10 + 3 years with ESU

This is a false comparison for most users.

For enterprise customers, Microsoft has released three or four versions of Win 10 they will support for 5 or 10 years basically to run things like ATMs or MRI machines or shit like that. You know how a lot of machinery still in use today relies on like Windows 95 because that’s what was relevant when the machine was built, the software that ran the machine doesn’t work on anything newer, and the machine still works? That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about here. If you have an MRI machine that runs on Windows 10 the OS is feature frozen and depending on which version may be supported until 2027 or 2029.

For us normal Home or Pro users, Windows 10 spent most of its life receiving mandatory twice-yearly feature updates. If you’ve got a normal PC that you use for productivity or gaming, you had no choice but to install those updates which often changed things about how the system looked and felt. If you wanted to keep Windows 10 Home edition version 20H1 from 2020, you either had to disconnect the machine from the internet or pull some other weird shenanigans. In this way it’s more similar to MacOS and how they’ve been maintaining “version 10” for 25 years now.

Will continue working on older hardware after 2029… So does Windows 10 after the end of support?

I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft to either force Win10 machines to upgrade to 11 or else brick themselves next October. They’ve done it before.

Linux Mint, like Ubuntu above it, releases on a 5-year LTS plan. They release a major (stable, feature-frozen) version every 2 years, with three minor “point releases” released approximately 6 months apart which contain some feature updates and such. Unlike Windows, these are optional. Someone somewhere is running a fully up to date and patched version of Linux Mint 20 Ulyana from 2020 and can continue to do so until next April. So if you need an older version of the software, or just like how it was in 2020 and don’t want slight changes to the UI every 6 months, you can stick with it for 5 years and still get bug fixes and security patches. After those 5 years it will continue to run but the update utility will nag at you that you’re out of support and it’s time to upgrade. Meanwhile, the upgrade to Mint 21 or 22 isn’t as onerous as the upgrade from Windows 10 to 11. The UI isn’t as drastically different, it’s not suddenly full of telemetry or dark patterns, the system requirements aren’t vastly greater, etc.

Latest kernel is probably what you need if things work on other distros. There’s a menu in the Mint update manager you can use to change to a slightly newer kernel and I would always advise that if it doesn’t cause any other issues. Newer kernel usually means more and newer drivers.

Mint is ultimately based on Debian, but with a lot of newer software, although it’s “stable” under the hood. That’s why Mint is popular on personal home computers. The idea behind it is that it should give you all the updates you need, but not too often or in a way that breaks things. If your computer works on one version of Mint, it would hopefully never break from an update, but packages don’t tend to be cutting-edge.

Steam is sort of an exception there. It works well on the vast majority of distros because Valve’s CEO is a bit unusual in that he prefers people to be using Linux and has done a lot to keep it working well. If you don’t use the flatpak for Steam (which I wouldn’t suggest), then it runs in its own kind of custom runtime container that makes sure it works as it’s supposed to in the vast majority of Linux distros.

I’ve never used Autocad, so I couldn’t say too much about it. If a program doesn’t work properly it could be due to incompatible dependency packages with different behaviour. Autocad would also be a graphics heavy program (similar to Blender, but also like videogames) so drivers could come in there too. The updated libraries might help, or it could just be your graphics drivers again. You can also try the flatpak version instead if it doesn’t work, and vice versa.

If you can get your GPU to work on other distros, you shouldn’t have many problems on this new major version of Mint, so long as the kernel is new enough, which I think it would be.

If you have a specific, very new, AMD GPU, there are actually public records of what the developers of the Linux kernel are doing to support newer hardware. Most people don’t find these easy to check, but this would be a common question. There is a long wikipedia page giving a few of the most well-known optimisations, bug-fixes and hardware support improvements in specific versions of the Linux kernel.

By the way, there are lots of people on the official Linux Mint forums who are happy to answer specific questions about bugs or what’s improving in Linux Mint, as posed by community members.

I’ve been using Mint exclusively for quite a few years now (outside of Android) and had minimal issues, outside of poorly refurbished laptops I got for cheap (like one with a physically broken keyboard that spammed one of the buttons, which I was able to fix easily with a simple script I copied from the web).

Sorry if that was too long an answer, but what I’m saying is there is a good chance it will just work out if you try to install this new major version (though there’s some chance it might not). Also I believe they’ve decided to prioritise shipping a kernel with good hardware support now, rather than a more “stable” one (older/LTS) so a lot of more recent hardware will work, unlike 5 years ago.

Don’t be afraid of following a few CLI guides if you have to either. Any distro is good enough if you know a few terminal commands, and any distro can be perfect if you’re an absolute bash wizard.

Hope that helped.

Not sure about AutoCAD, but I have Mint installed to the expansion card drive on my Frame.work and have been playing a fair amount of Inscryption, FTL, and Stronghold Crusader on it through Steam, so I would say yes?