For those who want a summary; it’s been going okay, but could’ve gone better. I decided to space out my tinkering and keep going with life, since these days my life is not so bound to my desktop. (It’s also possible some details weren’t recorded quite right. Many search tabs were closed)
I’ve been aware of the impending death of W10 in October 2025, with fears that hackers will start taking over the OS at that time. My main reason for avoiding Linux was game support, but Valve has been handling that well.
I decided to set up a Linux Mint 21 drive, which at first was difficult because my first USB stick had corrupted sectors (took some time to determine that was the issue). Then, when I booted in…it didn’t support my wi-fi (it claimed it did, then couldn’t connect, even when pairing with my phone). My first plan was to set up a nice, isolated 500GB partition on my nvme SSD (a drive I’d mostly used to store games) for Linux, and have it refer to the NTFS partition for games. (I would later learn this doesn’t work well, and Linux is optimized for ext4).
Then, I learned this NVME had an “MBR” partition table, and I still had to convert it to GPT. While there’s several tools for this, they complained due to the placement of my partitions, not leaving enough space for the table. I tried moving the entire gaming partition 1MB to the right…and got the same error.
After deleting the (backed up) partition to finish GPT conversion, I learned two things. One, that it was actually complaining because when giving the converter the target Device, I had given it the “Device:” labeled in the Disk management, which was “/dev/nvmen0p1”. Guess what the P stands for at the end? So, gentle tip: The “Device” is not the “device”, it’s the partition - and diskpart does not present the resulting error well. Second thing I learned was that Windows had somehow put some of its boot setup on the NVME back when I had installed it on my computer; so now Windows wouldn’t boot. (I’ll see if I can fix this later. Windows’ fault, not Linux’s)
The good news is, I had downloaded a copy of Mint 22 (1 up), and THIS got full wi-fi and audio support. A little strange I had to go so recent for basic old-hardware support, but it could’ve been something else odd going on. I installed Steam, got a cryptic error about 32-bit NVidia drivers I ignored, and with my library moved back (and fixing ownership through chown, something Steam thankfully provided a relatively clear error message on) it’s been able to run a few test games!
Having my browser and some basics up, I can kick back on YouTube and tackle whichever pressing things I think of first. I don’t have replacements for 2 or 3 Windows products I like, but overall the setup has gone well, and a few of my annoyances actually go to my USB drive store, and Windows. Overall, much better than a decade past when I last tried Linux.
To keep Windows as an option, I’m planning to run a Windows installer repair boot to my original drive; but am admittedly worried whatever caused it to install boot info to the NVME against my instructions last time will, once again, screw up Linux. I may also try seeing if GRUB can locate Windows and boot it successfully. I feel somewhat blind on the topic of setting up / fixing the OS bootup.
I can tell this process is much simpler if someone has only one drive, backs things up to an external device, and then installs cleanly. Only on that vein, I wouldn’t mind recommending it to others. Still, that’s only in part because Microsoft has steadily made things worse and worse on the Windows front. (And, of course, I’ll still be using it for work)
Regarding gaming support, Heroic Launcher also help a bunch, since you can easily set up multiple versions of forks of Wine (Valve’s Proton being one), or even to use the system ones.
About the wifi issue, maybe it is some oddly specific hardware that the devs tackled only in Mint 22. And in a bit of a humorous tone, what’s learning without a bit of struggle? 😅
And lastly, besides dual boot, you could also set up a VM with the secondary system(s) you want. Just worth noting hardware-dependent games, e.g. many from the Windows 9x time, will struggle on VMs.
Oh yeah, I definitely plan to install Heroic and Lutris, which simplified a lot of things. I’m trying to figure out which will be fastest if I happen to have a lot of indie, DRM-free games that follow the format of:
- Download zip file
- Unzip to folder
- Run exe in folder
Ideally a launcher could handle some of that relatively quickly for me without too much manual configuration. On Windows, it’s just unzip and then double-click, which of course will now change a little bit.
A VM is an interesting option - I vaguely recall interacting with very slow VMs a while back but supposedly they’ve gotten better. I don’t know if they’ve ever reached suitable gaming performance, or video editing performance though.
Something I personally do is to load games from their entries in the start menu. And when there’s no installer to set the start menu item, a program like Alacarte, or manually editing the files that handle those entries on Linux, the .desktop files. Alternatively, linking the executable files to either Heroic or Steam can also be viable.
As for how Linux handles executables, if it’s a native Linux program, you usually need to set the read-write-execute permissions to be able to launch them. Tutorials usually suggest to run
chmod 777 /path/to/executable, or other variants that set full permissions to all users and user groups, but as a security concern, I would suggest runningchmod 700 /path/to/executable, as this would give the full permissions only to the current user (there’s a bit of a formula to come up with this number, btw).And regarding VMs, they are as fast as the hardware allows minus the host system’s demands, so it will always be slower than baremetal installs. But in some specific cases, it’s still the best option.
I think your trouble just stems from inexperience, and not knowing exactly what you needed or where you were heading aside from being off Windows.
You also seem intent on Mint (Ubuntu), which sort of locks you into a specific path.
I wasn’t dedicated to Mint, but every thread on distro has had its arguments (eg “Whoa, no, I would NOT recommend xxx to a newbie” “yyy isn’t mature”), so it’s difficult to decide who to trust given the goal of Linux.
I had a bit of experience using Steam OS daily when a Deck was my only computer. I’ve heard of Bazzite, but wasn’t quite sure it was mature enough.
Fedora - faster point releases and closer to modern kernels Debian - slow release, but stable Ubuntu - two releases per year, but sticks to older more stable kernel versions Arch - roll your own. Mostly for the very experienced.
Understanding WHY one distro may not work well on your hardware is key though. The above definitions should help with that, but understand that any derivative of one Ubuntu point release will behave exactly as all others out of the box. Meaning anything based on 24.03 will work with the same hardware out of the box because of the kernel version. Switching to a different distro base may yield different results.
Anyone making too much of a big deal about any of these is either over-opinionated and wrong, or absolutely full of shit and doesn’t know what they are talking about. You need what works best for you, and your hardware. If it runs well from a livecd, just go with it.
Drive Mint till you feel confident enough to switch to something a bit more edgy and up to date (I would personally recommend Void since it’s a lot more stable than Arch). If that never happens, hey, that distro suits your needs just fine and there is nothing wrong with that 😊.
Linux Mint tends to be a bit conservative in terms of kernel version (which is what usually determines driver and hardware support), which explains why you had trouble getting hardware to work. I think they’re getting better at it now though.
Under Linux, I find “gparted” to be a good application for looking at and managing partitions.
… I had given it the “Device:” labeled in the Disk management, which was “/dev/nvmen0p1”. Guess what the P stands for at the end?
Yeah, that is kind of confusing regarding UNIX like operating systems, placing hardware block devices in the same place as software constructs, like a partition or a slice. Thank god subvolumes or pools don’t get placed there as well.
I think it’s actually historically tied to Minix, but I could be wrong. I don’t think software constructs like partitions were originally placed in the same place as hardware block devices in classic UNIX.
