Mint 18.3: The best Linux desktop takes big steps forward

zdnet. ^ | 12 12 17 | Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

[Fiddlstix]

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[dennisw]

MY BIG QUESTION

How much space does a Linux Mint installation take? 20GB?

I want to install Linux Mint on a separate SSD (desktop computer) to test and experiment. What size SSD should I buy?
60GB is enough?
120GB?

(I am a Windows user)

[SpaceBar]

You can run linux from a floppy disk. How much bloat you add is up to you.

[brianr10]

Will it play wmv files?

[Little Pig]

The OS itself occupies less than 4GB as an installation image on a USB stick. Installed, it’s somewhat less than that. 10-15GB is probably more than enough room to get a good pilot installation of Linux with typical applications and space to store documents. 60GB is plenty adequate for an actual in-service workstation, unless you have an absolutely huge media collection you want to store.

[Billthedrill]

I finally got torqued off at yet another Creator's Update that failed late last week, sucking up all my high-speed bandwidth for the month (second time in a month, incidentally, both 1703 and 1709 took a dump on one of my four computers and not the same one) - anyway, slid a new SSD into the smaller box and installed 18.3 Mint last night. Flawless. Within one hour I had a new OS from scratch, functioning email, word processing, music, and YooToob on a functioning browser (I was a little worried about the codecs but it was perfect). That's it. I don't have to spend days troubleshooting Redmond's screwups four times a quarter.

The downside is that I have to give up certain games that I enjoy. These don't like VirtualBox so I'm going to have to play with WINE, but it's a small price to pay.

I've used other Linux implementations but this one seems as smooth to install and with the lowest learning curve I've seen to date. So far very impressed.

It really didn't have to be this way. I like Windows 10 if they'd just leave it alone. Mint will be fine for 80% of what I want to do and that's going to have to be enough. When I finally do get decent bandwidth, and it's coming, I'm really not sure it will be worth going back to Windows.

[vikingd00d]

>> How much space does a Linux Mint installation take? 20GB?

System requirements:

1GB RAM (2GB recommended for a comfortable usage).
15GB of disk space (20GB recommended).
1024×768 resolution (on lower resolutions, press ALT to drag windows with the mouse if they don’t fit in the screen).

[Westbrook]

60 GB should be enough for the Linux Mint OS, but I’d go for the larger 120GB, which is a little more than $50 on Amazon.

Better to have more disk than you need than to need more disk than you have.

[Bob434]

[[If you’ve ever used Windows XP, you’ll feel completely at home.]]

Except when you have to install something not in the software distribution menus- then nope- it’s not like windows- it’s quite hard infact. and when a problem arises trying to find help that isn’;t written in super uber geek speak is difficult at best- but thankfully those two scenarios do not come up for casual users often if at all

[[Run the Driver Manager Choose the NVIDIA drivers and wait for them to be installed Reboot the computer]]

The nivida drivers were not listed in my driver manager in linux mint 18.1 are they listed now? - had to go through some other ppa to finally get them-

I do love mint linux, but at times it can be incredibly frustrating if a problem arises to those of us not familiar with using the terminal commands, or used to installing programs from scratch which is quite hard to newbies- like myself- one progam i will wholeheartedly recommend is easystroke- it takes a little finagling to get it installed, but it’s a supremely helpful program i can’t live with out- it’s like mouse gestures- and makes navigating and opening programs very simply with a mouse gesture- i navigate back and forth between tabs, between pages, close with a quick downward swipe \ and close down my computer with an S curve gesture- open notepad, terminal etc all with gestures- navigating pages and very very quick now with swipes up and left \ up and right/

Well worth the effort to install

[Billthedrill]

You asked about room at a good time - fresh install, less than 100 MB of personal data, looks like this:

219,147 items
5.8 GB used

I used a Samsung 850 256 GB SSD - they're pretty cheap these days - and it's rattling around in there.

[Geoffrey]

Nothing wrong with Mint, but I am a big MX-16 fan as a replacement for windows os.

A little more hardcore is Manjaro.

[Westbrook]

If your CPU has virtualization support, use a windows virtual machine for your games and other stuff you can’t get on Linux.

[enduserindy]

I followed a link in this story to the crossover 17. That sounds interesting. Wonder how broad a spectrum of windows programs it will run.

[Billthedrill]

Oh, and that installation did take all the bundled third-party apps (Office Libre, Firefox, etc).

[Bob434]

def get 120- they are pretty cheap these days- I bought the 1 terabyte one and have BOTH windows 7 and linux runnign on it with plenty of room to spare- but that is overkill- but i needed it for photography which take up lots of room

[Bob434]

i never had luck with virtualization- so i dual boot isntead- works well-

[Bob434]

[[ The downside is that I have to give up certain games that I enjoy.]]

Nope nope nope=- dual boot- it takes a little knowhow to do but is worth it

[Pollard]

I’m running the latest KDE Neon on 2.53GHz Intel Core Duo

Runs just fine on this 12 year old Thinkpad but it’s almost a nightly build sort of thing so I’m thinking about swapping to kubuntu. I’ll still get the Plasma 5 desktop but it would be based on ubuntu 16.04 LTS so there would be way less updates.

Neon has 260 updates right now - been a few weeks since I updated. Still, it will sit there in the background and update away. If the kernel needs updating, I may have to restart but it will be a quick restart, pretty much a normal restart.

When/if I go with kubuntu, all I have to do is back up my home folder and then restore it after install and it will be like nothing ever happened.

I’ve tried 20 or so flavors of linux, all ubuntu based and liked mint well enough but it ran a little slow on my last machine which was under 2GHz. Another one I liked was ubuntustudio. I could create screen casts and edit the resulting videos on this 2.53GHz processor. UbuntuStudio runs in low-latency mode which allows it to just chug along with heavy applications like that.

[dennisw]

Thanks for all the advice on SSD size to get for my Linux Mint install. I will look at SSD prices and even though 60GB is enough (thanks for confirming) I will get 120GB if the 120GB price is not much more