Newbie Post: I have gone "all-in" with Linux Mint 22.1, wiping Windows completely. All good...with two nagging problems.

[just_another_person@lemmy.world]

I'm pretty sure you've got a race condition with the Nouveau driver getting loaded first then. That's the open source Nvidia driver in the stock kernels. Run lsmod | grep nouveau to confirm (if you get lines returned, then it's loaded.

You can sidestep this by blacklisting it and giving the installed Nvidia driver a chance to load first. Instructions here (use the Ubuntu section)

Reboot, and then you should be good to go. If nvidia-smi still doesn't show the correct output, you may need to just reinstall the driver packages again.

[gabadabs@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

That's very fair. I say this only because I've found myself going down a rabbit hole of things not working on my own before, and a reinstall is usually the faster option for me. POP was just one example, a lot of distributions come with Nvidia installed by default.
Mint should work pretty much out of the box, but I remember Optimus being tricky sometimes. I do not recommend Manjaro, and not because it's arch. The last time I used Manjaro, it's automatic updater updated my Nvidia driver and my kernel to two separate versions that didn't work with each other, and bricked my system on me. It's not exceptionally stable even as far as Arch goes.
Arch doesn't have to be scary, I use Garuda and it has made it very user friendly.
I run all updates with one command and that command automatically makes snapper backups that I can pick between on boot, which makes fixing anything that can go wrong pretty easy.
Garuda Cinnamon edition uses the same desktop that mint uses.
Anyway, I do hope you're able to get mint working for you.

[trickdacy@lemmy.world]

Pop OS is excellent. You wouldn't really know it's created by a corporation. It's basically just the build they run on their hardware but I've not seen anything in it like ads or anything limiting my freedom. My perception of it is that it's just a more friendly and (snap-free) Ubuntu and I concur with those saying Nvidia is smoother on it. It does have a modified gnome but coming in the near future is their own DE called cosmic which seems promising. If it ends up being bad I will probably just switch to fedora even though Debian based distro are more supported

[yozul@beehaw.org]

If you have the default version of Mint installed then your desktop environment is Cinnamon. There are also XFCE and MATE versions, but you have to go out of your way to get those. The default file explorer for Cinnamon is called Nemo, so if you haven't changed it that would be what you are using.

Honestly, I think your best bet is trying Disks or maybe gparted if you like cli apps, and setting a mount point for the device from one of those. Linux doesn't always like NTFS, but you should at least be able to mount and read the drive consistently, although I have to admit I've never used an NTFS formatted external drive, so maybe something weird is going on with that.

[kualk@lemm.ee]

I don’t understand why Mint is chosen by people.

[melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Seems like a promising answer, I wonder why someone downvoted it. I wish they'd left a comment.

I'll def explore it

[viri4thus@feddit.org]

If you want stability and ease of use similar to Windows, I highly recommend Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite or Bazzite. Optimus is working (now, asus gfxctl was broken for two weeks due to a new kernel) every keyboard shortcut is working, and, for some unknown miracle, battery life is better than windows. I'm on a G14.

[just_another_person@lemmy.world]

Well that's exactly what the issue is, so there's your solution. Easy to confirm with one command.

[golden_zealot@lemmy.ml]

It just works for 99.99% of anything a regular user would want it to. I moved my parents who are non-technical and in their 70's over to it from Windows 10. They like it so much they had me install it on their laptop as well.

[atzanteol@sh.itjust.works]

You can install other DEs on Pop OS.

[spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works]

Distro hopped for years and got to a point I just wanted to use an OS and not screw around with it. I also didn't want to spend time troubleshooting odd problems. Mint's been installed on my machines for years and it works flawlessly.

[spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works]

Mint's default desktop is Cinnamon. The default file manager is Nemo.

[sunzu2@thebrainbin.org]

correct. but i have hard time suggesting that to a noobie.

with that being said, if OP is interested in Cosmic DE, which is very much an interesting DE.

OP could install PopOS based on Ubuntu 24, throw KDE on it until Cosmic is baking

[teppichbrand@feddit.org]

I absolutely agree. I use it at home for lots of different tasks and put it on my parents laptops as well. It might not be the hottest, most modern disto for the cool kids but it's a great experience.

[irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

For what it's worth, I actually had a lot easier time with NVIDIA graphics on Ubuntu and Fedora than Mint. And Kubuntu with the Plasma desktop was the easiest to get my partner converted from Windows without much tweaking.

You could try the booting the live CD and see if you're able to get the graphics working more easily. And I've never seen that second issue on either Ubuntu or Fedora, so not sure what's up there.

I'm not too happy with the direction Canonical is taking Ubuntu right now, but it typically has the most documentation for when issues come up and has a very healthy development cycle, so I still recommend it to most people as a starting place. To me, Mint has always been a little too opinionated and catering to the less technical and thus harder to tweak. Ubuntu kind of does it in a way that makes it easier to override the default easy-mode kind of stuff. Just a general observation from decades of Linux use, and may or may not be as true for the current versions.

I use Fedora with Plasma desktop on my other desktop/laptop devices because I prefer RHEL to Debian based stuff, probably just got used to it using CentOS and now Rocky for all my servers over the years.

[melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Working. I had reset my BIOS and "safe boot" was back on. Turned it off, reinstalled the driver from "Driver Manager", Used your commands and followed your instructions and found that the Nvidia driver was working. Opened Nvidia X server settings and it looked the way it should. nvidia-smi showed the whole shebang.

I knew you guys could help me. I could cry.

[melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

This turned out to be key, along with another comment. I went BACK to my BIOS and sure enough, with all the changes I had left secure boot enabled. Disabled it and everything went so smoothly I felt a little embarrassed.

Thanks friend!

[atzanteol@sh.itjust.works]

correct. but i have hard time suggesting that to a noobie.

Why? It's just "apt install kde-standard". It's one of the benefits of most linux distros that you can switch desktop environments trivially.

[shikitohno@lemm.ee]

a test showing me how little I know, and a time-eater that causes my wife to wonder what happened to her husband.

Worth mentioning, but this gets much better with time. Part of it will go away as you learn new things, and is the same as learning any other new thing, be it using Linux, picking up an instrument, or learning another language. Hand in hand with this, you'll also just get better at knowing where and what to look for to find answers to your problems, and how to ask for help in a way that includes all the relevant info and is more likely to get you a reply that sorts out your issue sooner.

It can definitely be overwhelming initially, but it's always helpful to get familiar with the man pages and info pages, which are two forms of documentation that come built-in with your Linux install (along with other systems like the BSDs, if you ever wander over that way. OpenBSD man pages are amazing, fwiw, and may be more helpful at times for finding example commands). You can usually run

man command

to get a man page for most commands in your terminal, though not all. Info pages exist for GNU software, and can often be more thorough in their documentation.

man fstab

for example, will give you a general overview of how fstab works, and also include a list of other man pages at the bottom, under the heading SEE ALSO, that can be helpful in understanding related systems. If one of those entries is followed by a number in parentheses, you type the command slightly differently to access that section of the man page. For example, the fstab page suggests looking at mount(8), which you'd find with the command

man 8 mount

info info

in a terminal will get you a helpful primer on how the info system works, which is good, as it can be somewhat more complex to navigate than man pages and uses a lot of Emacs keybindings.

Both can be a bit daunting when you first start out, but it's worth at least being familiar with, as you can access them without any internet connection, helping you to do things and troubleshoot issues when you're unable to go online, for whatever reason.

Finally, don't overlook the utility of the various wikis out there. For Linux Mint, the Debian Wiki should be pretty decent, and the Arch Wiki is also generally pretty helpful, though may not always work for Debian/Ubuntu-based distros, since it may reference features in newer releases of packages than are available elsewhere. They'll often include basic setup and configuration guides, as well as a troubleshooting section that outlines how to solve commonly encountered issues.

[meldrik@lemmy.wtf]

Good to hear!