This is part 3 of my series of posts about making Linux Mint my daily driver.

Last time we looked at the start of my Mint move. In that post I mentioned that my move was pretty quick and the stuff I did for the move won’t be fresh in my memory for long. This time I’d like to dive into some of the stuff I’ve done to make using my system easier to use for work.

Screenshots

On my Windows system I used Greenshot for screenshots, it’s a nifty little screenshots system that lets you do stuff like select an area to take a screenshot of and annotate your screenshot.

The default screenshot application on Linux Mint (just called Screenshot) is a bit more limited, you can select an area to take a screenshot of, but there’s no built-in annotation functionality. Fortunately there’s a nifty tool called Flameshot available on Flathub with all the features that Greenshot provides and more.

Installing Flameshot is just a matter of going into Software Manager and installing it. There is a System Package version and a Flatpak version. I decided to go with the Flatpak version, so the rest of this section refers to running flatpak run org.Flameshot.flameshot instead of just flameshot.

Installing Flameshot done, the next step is to make it easier to launch. For this you change what the Print (or PrtScr) button on your keyboard does. On the main menu, search for and start the item called Keyboard. In the Keyboard config, go to Shortcuts and then navigate to System and then Screenshots and Recording. In there, go through the list of shortcuts and see which one uses the Print button (it will probably be the Take a screenshot item). Click on the Print button assignment (twice? I think?) and press Backspace to make it unassigned. Next go to Custom Shortcuts and press the Add custom shortcut button to add a new shortcut. Name it whatever you want (mine is called Flameshot screenshot) and make the command flatpak run org.flameshot.Flameshot gui.

That’s it, to take a screenshot of an area of you screen just press the Print or PrtScr button on the keyboard.

Taking notes

Since I have ADHD, a note taking application is very useful to me. Fortunately, Obsidian, which I used to use in Windows, is cross-platform and available as a Flatpak.

Coding

This may seem odd, but I still prefer Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code for light coding. I didn’t use the packages available in Software Manager to install VS Code, I used the Debian package available at https://code.visualstudio.com/download

Remote access to other computers

A lot of what I do involves needing to access remote Linux and Windows systems. Fortunately, Linux Mint comes with Remmina already installed. Since I used mRemoteNG for this function on my old Windows setup, I was able to use Remmina-mRemoteNG converter to import my mRemoteNG configuration into Remmina. As I mentioned an earlier post, this script can’t do it all, the first time you use an imported profile you need to edit it and make sure the authentication settings are right for your setup.

Microsoft 365 stuff

My day job makes extensive use of Microsoft 365 and Azure stuff. Fortunately, most of this stuff lives happily in web browsers. Just for convenience, I installed the Microsoft Edge Flatpak and use that just for my Microsoft 365 stuff. Most functionality should also work in Chrome (and to a lesser degree in Firefox, at least for fancy stuff like Teams), but the Edge Flatpak comes with the best set of pre-configured permissions for stuff like Teams to work “out of the box” as it were.

Of course we also have LibreOffice available, though I haven’t done too much stuff with it recently, mainly because most of the documents and spreadsheets I work with are homed in my work OneDrive or Sharepoint environment and often shared with other people in the business.

Sometimes you still need a bit of Windows

February 2025 update: Most of what I have in here is no longer valid, so I’ll just mention that I now use Gnome Boxes to run a small Windows VM and you no longer need Wine to run Winbox because Mikrotik have released a cool Linux version

From time to time, not very often, I still need to do something with Windows. For some stuff, like if I need to do something with my old mRemoteNG config, I just have a Windows virtual machine in Oracle VirtualBox. Note that I didn’t just install VirtualBox in Software Manager, I used the Ubuntu 22.04 package from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads

Other stuff, like Mikrotik’s Winbox tool, works happily in wine instead of needing an entire Windows virtual machine. For convenience, I just use PlayOnLinux to run those tools, because that also lets me do some gaming stuff that still wants a bit of Windows around.

One “gotcha” with PlayOnLinux that’s specific to Winbox is that the automatic install of Winbox via PlayOnLinux doesn’t seem to be working at the moment. I “installed” (Winbox doesn’t actually get installed) it as a custom installer, then copied the Winbox64.exe into ~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/Winbox/drive_c and added a shortcut in PlayOnLinux to C:\Winbox64.exe

PlayOnLinux has a habit of putting shortcuts on your Desktop. I haven’t decided yet if this is annoying or OK to ignore, it isn’t much of a convenience thing because actually getting to the desktop to use them takes longer than just starting PlayOnLinux from the system menu.

Conclusion

Right now that pretty much covers it in terms of stuff I did to make this system a platform I can use for work. There are some items I can’t go into too much detail on, like my VPN connection setup, but maybe a broad overview is in order. I make use of two different VPN technologies, with Wireguard being the primary VPN technology used by my work. I also use ZeroTier for personal stuff and as a backup route onto hypervisors at work that run my Wireguard infrastructure so I have a way in to fix stuff if the Wireguard stuff is affected by a problem.

There is also a VPN provider I use when traveling and using public WiFi, I choose not to say which one I use, but I will point out that I did my research first before choosing so I’m pretty sure my provider does what they say they do.