Linux Mint Experiment Part 2

Rob Coles

TL;DR: Long time Windows user trying an alternative to Windows 10 on hardware that Windows 11 won’t support. Part 1 covered why and how the install was done and Mint tweaks on initial load. This post looks at initial impressions, basic software replacements, lessons learnt and next steps.

Initial impressions

Coming from Windows, booting into a desktop that looked at least familiar was a big plus. With a little bit of fiddling, all of my existing hardware was working and I could use all 3 screens including the laptop one which no longer needed a microscope to read. I had customised the wallpaper and that was about it. Now it was time to try to get to work.

Applications

I promised myself that I would try to stay away from Wine/Other windows emulations as much as possible and try to find native Linux solutions to Windows applications I used.

The first was my note-taking app, Obsidian . There is a native Linux version of this so that was straightforward. Sync worked and I had notes and todos again. I installed Chrome just to let me work with something familiar. I am going to look harder at other browsers once I’m over the initial Linux learning curve.

Next up was an email client. I prefer to deal with email locally rather than in the browser, and had used Outlook with a couple of built in macros to make sharing emails with Obsidian easier. Thunderbird was shipped as part of Mint, and connection to Gmail was easy. The macros were a bit more challenging. They were originally written in VBA, which wasn’t supported in Thunderbird. AI converted the VBA for me, including a custom form, and I was able to add a button to the Thunderbird UI to trigger the save, the same as in Outlook. Obsidian button in Thunderbird

I set Thunderbird up to have a local archive and moved my existing email archive out of MailStoreHome as there was no MailstoreHome Linux version. To export from MailstoreHome I had to set up a Windows VM under Linux which actually worked very smoothly. I have kept this around for emergencies.

After email, I needed an office suite. I used MS Office under Windows and had an Office 365 subscription which I was keen to dump. I had heard of LibreOffice and this was also pre-installed with Mint. I had a play and it was similar enough to what I was used to that I started with that. In trying to port over an Excel sheet I used in Windows I hit the first issue with Mint and it’s pre-installed software. Mint pre-installs a bunch of software, and it’s clear that a lot of thought and testing has gone into what is shipped, but that means that the pre-installed versions can be a long way behind. That was causing me an issue with LibreOffice calc. The function I was after was available in the current version of LibreOffice, but not in the pre-installed version. I get the payoff between stability and bleeding edge features, and this wasn’t a show-stopper as I could just add the LibreOffice repository and get the latest version that fixed my issue, but it wasn’t the last issue that the older, pre-installed software would cause me.

The next thing I was looking for was some screenshot software. I take quite a lot of screenshots for my notes. I wanted something that was going to be easy to use. I’ve tried multiple different screenshot applications including just using Grim and Swappy which was fine for quick screenshots, but I really wanted to be able to add arrows, boxes etc. A lot of what I found seemed to have problems either with scaled displays or with Wayland generally. I had wanted to use Flameshot having seen demos on Youtube, but it needed X11. I finally ended up with Gradia , which seems happy with the scaled screens and lets me mark up the screenshots when I need to.

The final thing I wanted to take care of as part of the first phase was backup. Under Windows I backed up to a NAS using Bart, and to OneDrive using windows built in sync. Bart backup does a differential backup and is Windows only, but with AI help I scripted a rsync backup to the NAS. This required mounting the NAS to Mint which was a separate adventure, but is now running happily.

OneDrive was theoretically easy as there is a OneDrive client for Linux. This is not an official Microsoft client but is widely used. I need to explore alternative cloud backup as I currently have OneDrive storage as part of my O365 subscription, and I want to get rid of that, but until there is a replacement in place I wanted to be able to have an off-site backup. The only issue I ran across was that it wasn’t happy with the version of Curl that was installed with Mint, which again was an old version. Replacing that with a more current version stopped the issue.

Lessons learnt

Moving to Mint made the transition from Windows pretty straightforward. The GUI was very similar to what I was used to and with a few teething problems all of the hardware that I had was supported and I could work as normal without too much of an issue. There are a few applications that I still need to get going: I do some home recording from guitar and microphone, and use a Windows only piece of software for that which I need to replace. I also do some programming so I need to look into programming editors. I’ve used VS Code and there’s native versions of that available but I did want to have a look at Vim or NeoVim and see if that’s a more productive thing that I can do.

The main frustration that I’ve had is that the payoff that Mint has between stability and later versions of software has caused me a couple of issues by itself and I do want to have a think about maybe moving from Mint once I’m used to a bit more of the Linux way of doing things. Maybe look at a distro that’s a little bit more bleeding edge than Mint, knowing that I’ll always have the option to return to Mint if the bleeding edge is a bit too painful.

Next Steps

I want to live with Mint for a bit. Linux and all the command line stuff is pretty new, so I need to get a better handle on the Linux way of doing things. That’s going to take a bit of time.

I want to try native Linux editors, Vim and NeoVim. Again, I accept the learning curve with that, but I’d like to see if that’s something that I can work with or if VS Code is the lesser of the evils. I know there’s stripped down versions of VS Code that don’t have all of the telemetry, etc. So that’s a possibility if I don’t get on with Vim or don’t find it helpful. I am looking at also setting up a homelab on a Raspberry Pi and my old Dell laptop, and being able to use native, pre-installed software on those is preferable to having to install VS Code on everything.

I have a bunch of utilities that I wrote in C# and I know you can run C#.Net on Linux but I’d like to try converting those utilities to Python. I have bought a Python course and it is something that I would like to learn. The conversion of existing code that I know into Python will be an interesting exercise.

Music software I mentioned above. I currently use Ableton in Windows but need to find something native. I’ve been looking at YouTube videos and Ardour is probably the direction I’m going to at least start in. It does look like there’s good Linux support for the Focusrite Scarlett that I use for recording, so I don’t think that’s going to be an issue and I’ve been surprised how good the hardware support in general is in Linux. I had tried Linux years ago and stalled at the first attempt with hardware support.

Finally I want to find a replacement for OneDrive that’s Linux friendly but not Microsoft, preferably Windows friendly as well just in case. I’m also going to start having a look at some of the other distros that are a bit more up to date, probably Arch or some Arch version.

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