Episode 005 – A breath of ‘Mint’y fresh air [ Part 2 ]

After a good holiday I'm back to share part 2 of my Minty adventures. Feel free to jump back to Part 1 for a refresher.

New SSD installed. USB in. Boot into live. Run the installer. Reboot.

Upon reboot it was such a refreshing sound to hear. A chime that wasn't the Windows chime. The Desktop wasn't just "there" , it faded from nothing into a familiar looking desktop, but it wasn't Windows.

I was greeted by the Mint Welcome screen. You can tell this was for a new user to Linux, it wasn't like any of the Windows first boot screens.

• Vista "Welcome Center";
• Windows 7 "Getting Started";
• Windows 10 "Q&A with Cortana";

The Mint welcome screen held my hand like a little child crossing the road. Instead of suggesting here are the things you "can" do. Or a Q&A session asking you to fork over all your personal data. It was "here , do these things , in this order, and enjoy your stay"

Firstly I made my first backup with timeshift. Set up a Weekly and a Boot backup. I then installed my Nvidia drivers, codecs. Finally updated packages and other software.

The welcome screen showed me the app store for the first time and obviously the first thing I did was to search for Steam, one click install. What is this magic, where is all the "next , next , next "; dialogues I'm used to skipping through.

Being the first real distro I tried it was a really great experience. I have installed Ubuntu plenty at work and set up user accounts and it all seems rather ‘meh’ and Mint, to me at least, seems to have a “I’m an event person distro. If you have come from Windows, I’m familiar, if you have used Linux before I have you covered too.”

All the stock apps seem to be carefully selected to accommodate everyone. There's Libre Office for your office suite. There's Firefox for the browser. I will be going into more in another episode, comparison stock applications from some popular distros.

After going through the ‘First steps’ from the Welcome screen. I had to get my steam games downloaded. At first I tried to just add my steam folder from my Windows drives and this did work, problem was these were on a Windows NTFS file system and Linux uses ( in this case ) ext4. To make sure Linux didn't mess anything up, you know just in case I decided to go back to Windows ( FYI still not happend ). I copied my Counter strike folder to the Mint install SSD as that's the main game I wanted to jump straight into. Great Scott it worked.

And performance wise we are +/- 10% from Windows. Counterstrike GO is a native Linux port from Steam but I couldn't tell the difference. Apart from one thing. My mouse felt funny. A quick look in mouse settings and noticed there was mouse acceleration on , turned that off and set the mouse speed to 6 notches from the slowest (same as I did in Windows). Jumped back into the game and it was just right.

I felt right at home already. And feels good. That's it for now, concluding my first experience in Linux, and Linux Mint was a good choice.

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