I am currently up late doing anything but sleeping. Later, during the day, I will have officially taken the dive into Linux! I am very excited to do so. Does anyone have any tips, anything that a new user should know? That would be greatly appreciated.
Fellow new user here, I installed Mint on a spare laptop about 9 days ago.
Things I’ve struggled with (but eventually overcome) include getting WiFi to work and getting Bluetooth to work (the latter was particularly tricky).
If I’m honest, I’m not 100% sure what I did to sort either of them, I just tried every suggestion I could find on forums, and eventually (unexpectedly!) it was working.
I’ve watched a few videos about setting up, that I’ve found reasonably helpful, so in case you want them:
Not knowing too much about it, I can’t say for sure that these are good advice, but they helped me.
Oh, and it also took me a wee while to get my installation USB stick sorted out, as it needs to be tested for its integrity and for some reason this wasn’t all that straightforward. Hopefully it was just me being dumb though 😁
This video helped with that: https://youtu.be/pc3G2U2Fujk
Additional tip - if you’re using the terminal (which you may well be if you are trying to sort things like WiFi and Bluetooth) something it took me a while to realise was that crtl+v doesn’t paste, but ctrl+shift+v does.
Always have a working live USB (this is just good computer advice)
If you’re using mint and can’t find help with a specific problem online, mint is really closely related to Ubuntu. So, hypothetically, “Wifi issues Ubuntu” might give you help where “Wifi issues mint” comes up empty. Also, if you dual boot, turn off fast start-up on the windows side. It messes things up.
Also might be worth mentioning at the present time Mint is based on Ubuntu 24.04, that can help narrow things down, but also help if you need third party packages.
Thank you!
Watch a tutorial on the Linux file structure. Fascinating and helpful to know where things go and what they’re for.
Tinker with settings via the settings interface. Make it yours.
Steam works.
Epic games works, it’s just called hero.
Roblox works, it’s called sober.
Don’t forget to put ublock back in your Internet browser.Most questions are answered already, search engines will get you there.
Edit… If dual booting, highly recommend a separate drive for Linux. Unplug the windows drive for setup then set the Linux drive as the primary boot drive. Grub will pick up your windows drive after you reconnect it.
Nothing to worry about, linux is easier than windows
