I finally bit the bullet and I’m giving Linux a second try, installed with dual boot a few days ago and making Linux Mint my default from now on.
There are a lot of guides and tips about the before and during the transition but not for after, so I was hoping to find some here.
Some example questions but I would like to hear any other things that come to mind:
I read that with Mint if you have a decent computer you don’t need to do a swap partition? So I skipped that, but I’m not sure if I’d want to modify that swap file to make it bigger, is that just for giving extra ram if my hardware one is full? Because I have 48GB of ram and if I look into my System Monitor it says Swap is not available.
Was looking at this other post, and the article shared (about Linux security) seems so daunting, it’s a lot. How much of it do I have to learn as a casual user that’s not interested in meddling with the system much? Is the default firewall good enough to protect me from my own self to at least some degree? I was fine with just Windows Defender and not being too stupid about what I download and what links I click.
I was also reading about how where you install your programs or save your data matters, like in particular partitions or folders, is that just like hardcore min-maxing that’s unnecessary for the average user that doesn’t care to wait half a second extra or is it actually relevant? I’m just putting stuff in my Home folder.
Connected to the last two points: in that Linux Hardening Guide lemmy post I shared the TL;DR includes “Move as much activity outside the core maximum privilege OS as possible”… how do I do that? is that why people have separate partitions?
Downloaded the App Center (Snap Store) and I was surprised there was even a file saying to not allow it… why is that? Is it not recommended? Is it better to download stuff directly from their websites instead?
There are plenty of reasons why one would use Snaps on Mint… I’ve been using it for like 2 days and so far I got: Blender, Godot, and Signal. Blender has an older version, Godot has a super old version, and Signal isn’t included in Software Manager. Outside of snap I manually downloaded Material Maker.
People keep telling me snaps are not needed and that I should find everything in the official repo and whatnot but that’s just wrong generalized assumptions from what I see, neither of those 3 programs are too niche either. There are plenty of people out there that do things outside of web browsing and file management in their computers, I’m so confused why Linux out of all communities would ignore hobbies with specialized software exist, game dev even
Signal is included as Flatpak. You have to enable “untrusted Flatpaks” (or whatever the wording is) in the Software Manager settings.
It was a controversial thing Mint added not long ago. Discussing this in detail would derail the post though.
For signal, you can add their PPA As explained here
For Godot, their website has an AppImage. This is a case where I’d say it makes sense not to have it being automatically updated, because if you work on a video game for the kind of time frame that they usually require, you want to decide when to upgrade your game engine (or not to at all) as it may break your current project. But you know your needs, just thought I’d explain the rationale for that particular one.
For Blender… Yeah if the version is outdated and you want automatic upgrades then Snap works. Maybe someone could chime in with another recommendation but that sounds sensible to me.
yeah, the automatic updates made me double think installing Godot from the snap thing but because I always update right away anyway and my game is quite small with only me working on it I thought to stick with it for now; also because it prompts you to save a back up before opening a project with a new engine version. It seems a bit wild to me that almost everyone that has commented here assumes that I use my pc for nothing but web browsing and documents or something… I thought the Linux community (full of tinkerers and developers) would make less of those assumptions than Windows users but it seems I was wrong haha