This is post 2 of my planned series about making Linux Mint my daily driver. The first post is Changing my daily driver to Mint.

Firstly, a little note about my hardware setup. The machine I’m using is an ASUS TUF F17 gaming laptop. While it’s a gaming laptop, I primarily use it for work and just a bit of light gaming. The machine comes with a 20-core i7 CPU, 16 GB RAM, an nVidia RTX 3050 GPU, and a 512 GB NVMe SSD with Windows 11 on it.

I ran Windows 11 for quite a while and have stuff like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 installed on the C: drive, which makes it pretty much full. Since the laptop has a second NVMe slot, I decided to invest in a second NVMe drive and got a Samsung 990 PRO 1 TB to put in that slot. This second SSD is where I installed Mint.

I don’t think I’ll do a “how to install Linux Mint” post, there are already many out there, and it’s a very easy process anyway. The installer even took care of updating my Bios boot options for me so I can still boot up Windows if I need to.

A word about speed

Because I’d been running Windows on this machine for a while, and the disk was starting to fill up quite a bit, I was getting used to it taking between 5 and 10 minutes from when I turn the machine on until I can start using it. I was starting to lose track of all the stuff that would load before the login screen and the many things that would load between typing my password and being able to actually use the machine.

The first time I booted the machine into Mint after installing it, it was under 5 seconds from pressing the power button until I could type my password, and under 3 seconds after entering my password until I could actually start using the machine.

The machine is definitely way more responsive running Mint than it is running Windows. Granted, much of this is due to the large number of things added to the startup sequence in Windows by the assorted applications I use (and Microsoft’s spyware, um, I mean Copilot).

One of the things I do to relax is play Minecraft with the T&A Explore modpack, as a launcher I mostly use MultiMC. On Windows, it would take maybe 3 minutes to load Minecraft with my modpack, on Mint it takes under a minute. I’ve also found that the game is smoother.

Work driver

My day job involves a lot of different things in assorted different tools. A number of these tools live in the browser, or can live in the browser, so they don’t really care what operating system I run.

Another aspect of my job involves being able to Remote Desktop or SSH to a large number of machines on the company internal networks. Naturally, I need to connect to the company VPN to be able to access these machines. Fortunately, I was the person who designed and built the company VPN, and I chose Wireguard with custom Multi Factor Authentication security added to it. It’s a simple matter to install the wireguard and wireguard-tools packages, paste my laptop’s Wireguard config (which I have stored in my 1Password secret vault as a backup anyway) into a Wireguard configuration file, and just use sudo wg-quick up workvpn to connect and any browser to log in to the VPN. At some stage I’d very much like to find, or write, a GUI for this. Maybe it’s time to play with Python3 GUI stuff a bit.

On Windows I use mRemoteNG to handle the very many remote connections I need for work and personal stuff, the tool I use on Mint is Remmina. I used Remmina-mRemoteNG converter to import my mRemoteNG configuration into Remmina. One thing to keep in mind is that it doesn’t seem to import the authentication settings properly, so I edit my SSH connections before opening them for the first time to set the authentication type to SSH agent. For Remote Desktop it’s a bit simpler for me because I never stored Windows passwords in mRemoteNG anyway.

One irritation I have at the moment is that we’re a Microsoft 365 shop, so I’m required to use stuff like MS Outlook and MS Teams for work. Outlook is just fine in the browser, but Teams has some annoyances like not being able to use my own custom backgrounds in video calls. I’m still thinking about possibly using a Windows VM, either a KVM one or a VirtualBox one, for the Microsoft 365 stuff.

Gaming

There aren’t a lot of games I play and it turns out all but one work well, or even better, on Linux.

• Minecraft. I play Minecraft Java edition, so that’s not a problem. As it happens, my launchers, MultiMC (that I use to play) and ATLauncher (that I use to edit my modpack), are both also available for Linux. I find that Minecraft runs better on Mint than it does on Windows.
• Steam. The rest of the games on my list are Steam games, so it’s worth mentioning here that Steam is officially available on Linux.
• Kerbal Space Program. This one also has a native Linux version, so works well. I even managed to get CKAN working via wine, so I can manage my mods.
• Fallout 4. Again, there is official Linux support, so this works well. For modding, I use Proton.
• OpenTTD. Well, this is a Linux game that was ported to Windows, so really no issues there at all.
• Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. So this one is a problem, it’s never going to work on Linux (it won’t even store data on any filesystem other than NTFS). I tried X-Plane 12 on Mint, but after some struggles and failures to get it to start up at all I abandoned it (having read several posts along the lines of “your distribution isn’t officially supported, install a supported distribution” on the X-Plane forums) and requested a refund on Steam.

Coming up

I’m not planning out this series of posts, so I can’t tell what the next post will be about. I have some thoughts, but my time is usually fairly limited so I don’t know yet when the next post will drop.

An interesting “challenge” I’m facing is that getting Mint to the point where I am in fact using it as my daily driver took just a couple of days.

Part of this is based on my specific setup, many of the applications I now use on Mint are the same ones I used on Windows because they were the same applications I’ve used before on other Linux distributions.

Part of this is simply because a lot of stuff, such as the games I enjoy playing, that used to be considered Windows only are now available on Linux because of the growing popularity of Linux as a user operating system instead of a challenging toy for computer geeks to play with.

Anyway… This means that I might not have the stuff I did to get to this point fresh in my memory for long, especially if I want to write these for a more general audience instead of for an audience that understands stuff like “install dnsmasq and set it to forward queries for your internal domain to your internal DNS server” or “modify your sudoers file to allow your user account to run sudo wg-quick without prompting for a password every time”

Feel free to reach out on the Fediverse with ideas.