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Linux Mint 22 released: An attractive option for migrating away from Windows | Windows 11 system requirements block millions of PCs from upgrading, while Linux Mint continues to work on older hardware

The Linux Mint team has just released Linux Mint 22, a new major version of the free Linux distribution. With Windows 10’s end of support coming up quickly next year, at least some users may consider making the switch to Linux.

While there are other options, paying Microsoft for extended support or upgrading to Windows 11, these options are not available for all users or desirable.

Linux Mint 22 is a long-term service release. Means, it is supported until 2029. Unlike Microsoft, which made drastic changes to the system requirements of Windows 11 to lock out millions of devices from upgrading to the new version, Linux Mint will continue to work on older hardware, even after 2029.

Here are the core changes in Linux Mint 22:

  • Based on the new Ubuntu 24.04 package base.
  • Kernel version is 6.8.
  • Software Manager loads faster and has improved multi-threading.
  • Unverified Flatpaks are disabled by default.
  • Preinstalled Matrix Web App for using chat networks.
  • Improved language support removes any language not selected by the user after installation to save disk space.
  • Several under-the-hood changes that update libraries or software.
RedAggroBest ,

Okay so as someone who’s getting fed up with Windows and Microsoft as a whole, I’m interested in Linux.

I just wanna game and watch videos. Video calls n such with friends. Nothing too spectacular.

Now can someone who doesn’t work on computers for a living, or even isn’t a hobbyist programmer. Someone like me, who couldn’t write a line of code on their own, answer me how difficult would it actually be?

My biggest fear is that I’m convinced by all the tech nerds here who can of course run this no problem and don’t see why a beginner would struggle, and then my anxiety shoots through the roof while I have a breakdown because I just wanted to get home from work and relax and suddenly my PC is a paperweight.

ThePrivacyPolicy ,

Dead easy with Mint. I’ve been running it full time on my laptop for months now and my wife only recently came to find out it wasn’t windows when I was explaining Linux to her (and she’s not a technical personal - she’s the person who yells at TV remotes when they don’t work). Installation is super easy, much like installing windows - answer a few questions and off it goes. You can even install it alongside windows and pick what one you want to run on boot (I did this because of a couple windows-only apps I can’t ditch just yet). If you can figure out Lemmy, Mint will be a breeze too.

Obi ,
@Obi@sopuli.xyz avatar

Do you sacrifice anything performance-wise by having the dual-boot?

After not even two years my beast pc I have for work has started giving me BSODs, apps crash, etc. Tried a bunch of stuff to troubleshoot hardware side, software side, short of buying new expensive parts like ram etc to test, or reinstalling the OS.

I do mostly video editing, sound editing, and Photoshop+Lightroom mainly, with some 3D, vector and stuff like that here and there. I think most of my software runs on Linux except the Adobe stuff. I’m curious to try Linux see if it would solve some of the problems but afraid that even the dual booting stuff would still be a pain if I need to switch between PS+LR to other tools a lot.

Blisterexe ,

no perf. loss with dualbooting, just takes more space.

ThePrivacyPolicy ,

The other reply answered your performance question already, but to address your concern about switching between OS’s for different program needs - you could always run windows in a virtual machine on Linux and just use Windows and the needed Windows software that way without having to fully reboot into Windows. This is the direction I plan on eventually going someday with my own setup and using Tiny11 for a lightweight windows VM.

Obi ,
@Obi@sopuli.xyz avatar

I’m gonna give it a go after this current job is delivered!

Zink ,

I just did the upgrade this morning. Shocker: super easy, went seamlessly, and didn’t make my computer unusable for a chunk of time like big windows updates do.

NaoPb ,

I recently gave thr debian based Linux Mint a try and I was pleasantly surprised.

I might ditch ubuntu for this.

Zink ,

Just curious, if you’re already using Ubuntu why try LMDE rather than the default version?

NaoPb ,

The default version of what?

Zink ,

Of Linux mint. The Cinnamon edition that pulls a lot from Ubuntu as well as Debian. That’s what got upgraded to version 22, along with the could other flavors. But Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) does not follow the same versions & release schedule.

NaoPb ,

Oh, like that.

Well, mainly because I’m getting a little fed up with how Ubuntu forces snap on to you. I just want to install the apt versions of programs but it won’t do that out of the box.

And I know you can change that and remove snap but I am a little done with always having to mod the shit out of my linux installations to get them to work the way I like.

Other than that I am pretty satisfied with how Ubuntu works out of the box and has pretty good hardware support. I was basically looking fot an Ubuntu without snap.

Zink ,

Ubuntu without snap is exactly what Mint Cinnamon is! You get to lean on all those popular Ubuntu resources and use apt and all that good shit.

NaoPb ,

It is? I did not know that! Thank you very much for enlightening me! I’ll be giving that a try now.

Zink ,

Glad to help! They do include flatpak stuff in the software manager if you use that, but they are marked as such.

I checked this morning and I have no flatpaks installed and snap/snapd itself isn’t even installed on my system.

NaoPb ,

Great, sounds like just what I’m looking for. Ubuntu without snap but optional flatpak.

visikde ,

Mint’s ok other than that ubun taint Years ago it was a one man show, not as much now?
I came & went from Mint 2010, I don’t remember specifics, something about network shares

My criteria is corporate or community?
Tinker or work?
Bleeding edge or just works
KDE/qt or Gnome/gtk, there are a few DE’s forked from Gnome
I like the consistency across KDE apps of being able to have a custom toolbar & shortcuts

I like community built, user friendly, KDE

Whatever you choose, install the meta package. You can add a DE, but you will have to chase weird crap & it will never be as good as a clean install
I like to install whatever I want to test on usb3 external nvme/sdd/hdd & use the Home [files] on the main machine or copy home as backup, best way to get the full effect of any distro
Just to be safe I like to have stuff from different parts of the linux world as backups

Debian MX just works, been good since they got over their init fixation, got all sorts of user friendly stuff, 6 month release cycle, enough community to keep it working
I just downloaded Spiral linux all the nice touches, but updates direct from debian, kind of like the various arch installers, but not quite so do it yourself
I don’t really like synaptic, the text is too small, takes too long

Arch
Manjaro
As much arch as you want
Very user friendly, big community, Pamac [best package manager], rolling release

Red hat Suze is having weirdness from corporate again
I’m on Mageia, a long history of user friendly [drak tools], stable, just works
Very good community, 18 month release cycle, nice online version upgrade, rpm packages

bobgray123987 ,

I researched this a few years ago, but is their a way to get SolidWorks, SpaceClaim etc working on Linux? Or do I have to run a virtual machine with windows?

djsaskdja ,

Switching to Linux is almost always going to involve accepting that you may need to use alternative software compared to what you’re used to. If that’s unacceptable and you have mission critical work that can only be done on Windows compatible software, you may be better off staying put.

WhiteHairSuperSaiyan ,

Some people have run solidworks on Linux with limited success. Granted I have never personally done it, from what I understand they used wine which emulates windows anyway. So it depends on how much time you are willing to sink to get things working.

Adincar ,

Not to be critical of your input but wine is not an emulator (which is wine’s acronym), it’s actually a translation layer that converts windows calls into Linux on the fly, which can be a lot faster than emulating windows. Add to the original person’s question a quick Google led me to this project

synapse1278 ,
@synapse1278@lemmy.world avatar

I was not successful running Solidworks under Linux and it even detects when it is running in a virtual machine and refuses to install completely!

Finally I have found an alternative that suits my needs, that has free account for hobby purposes: on-shape.com it’s web-based, works flawlessly under Linux and Firefox. Workflow is very similar to Solidworks, and version-control is simple and nice.

morbidcactus ,

Doesn’t onshape originate from a bunch of SW engineers so that’d make sense!

Personally, I was paying for SW with a maker license but this year I’ve committed to Freecad, use realthunder’s fork that has the topo naming fix + modern ui workbench for a more familiar layout.

I would call it totally useable, workflow for me ends up the same or similar to solidworks, I tried fusion because that’s really popular but it didn’t click with me while freecad did. I won’t pretend it’s flawless and doesn’t have quirks but I’m willing to accept that for foss, need to spend a bit of time with it to get used to what it expects you to do but it’s really powerful once you do.

ommorsi ,
@ommorsi@lemmy.ca avatar

I love mint, and Fedora Cinnamon is my daily driver. My only problem with cinnamon is that wayland support is still being developed, so it lacks 1:1 touchpad gestures.

djsaskdja ,

Also can’t run 4k at 60hz on my system at least. That’s a total nonstarter for me.

PersnickityPenguin ,

Can it run steam and autocad?

Also amd gpu support. I had to abandon mint 5 years ago because of poor driver support.

TonyOstrich ,

Not sure about AutoCAD, but I have Mint installed to the expansion card drive on my Frame.work and have been playing a fair amount of Inscryption, FTL, and Stronghold Crusader on it through Steam, so I would say yes?

Petter1 ,

I would try to run autoCAD by adding it to steam as a game and set it to use proton and look what happens 🤔

Blisterexe ,

Steam & amd yes, autocad no

ZarkleFarkle , (edited )

Latest kernel is probably what you need if things work on other distros. There’s a menu in the Mint update manager you can use to change to a slightly newer kernel and I would always advise that if it doesn’t cause any other issues. Newer kernel usually means more and newer drivers.

Mint is ultimately based on Debian, but with a lot of newer software, although it’s “stable” under the hood. That’s why Mint is popular on personal home computers. The idea behind it is that it should give you all the updates you need, but not too often or in a way that breaks things. If your computer works on one version of Mint, it would hopefully never break from an update, but packages don’t tend to be cutting-edge.

Steam is sort of an exception there. It works well on the vast majority of distros because Valve’s CEO is a bit unusual in that he prefers people to be using Linux and has done a lot to keep it working well. If you don’t use the flatpak for Steam (which I wouldn’t suggest), then it runs in its own kind of custom runtime container that makes sure it works as it’s supposed to in the vast majority of Linux distros.

I’ve never used Autocad, so I couldn’t say too much about it. If a program doesn’t work properly it could be due to incompatible dependency packages with different behaviour. Autocad would also be a graphics heavy program (similar to Blender, but also like videogames) so drivers could come in there too. The updated libraries might help, or it could just be your graphics drivers again. You can also try the flatpak version instead if it doesn’t work, and vice versa.

If you can get your GPU to work on other distros, you shouldn’t have many problems on this new major version of Mint, so long as the kernel is new enough, which I think it would be.

If you have a specific, very new, AMD GPU, there are actually public records of what the developers of the Linux kernel are doing to support newer hardware. Most people don’t find these easy to check, but this would be a common question. There is a long wikipedia page giving a few of the most well-known optimisations, bug-fixes and hardware support improvements in specific versions of the Linux kernel.

By the way, there are lots of people on the official Linux Mint forums who are happy to answer specific questions about bugs or what’s improving in Linux Mint, as posed by community members.

I’ve been using Mint exclusively for quite a few years now (outside of Android) and had minimal issues, outside of poorly refurbished laptops I got for cheap (like one with a physically broken keyboard that spammed one of the buttons, which I was able to fix easily with a simple script I copied from the web).

Sorry if that was too long an answer, but what I’m saying is there is a good chance it will just work out if you try to install this new major version (though there’s some chance it might not). Also I believe they’ve decided to prioritise shipping a kernel with good hardware support now, rather than a more “stable” one (older/LTS) so a lot of more recent hardware will work, unlike 5 years ago.

Don’t be afraid of following a few CLI guides if you have to either. Any distro is good enough if you know a few terminal commands, and any distro can be perfect if you’re an absolute bash wizard.

Hope that helped.

ZarkleFarkle ,

My bad. Autocad is commercial software that mainly supports Windows, so you would have to see if you can set it up through Wine (popular for running Windows software on Linux).

Blisterexe ,

Mint ships with 6.8 now

ipkpjersi ,

Technically Mint is based on Ubuntu (this release is based on Ubuntu 24.04 which released earlier this year).

Mint decrapifies Ubuntu by removing things like Snap, I’m going to switch to Mint eventually - honestly maybe even later this year, maybe in December or something.

ZarkleFarkle ,

Ubuntu is based on Debian, although they made quite extensive changes over time. Ubuntu and Mint are very similar, but Ubuntu is owned by a corporation called Canonical that people have had a few concerns about the priorities of, whereas Mint is community ran.

jpablo68 ,

Autocad AFAIK doesn’t run, I am trying to get something like nanocad to work, also any version of SAP2000, ETABS or Staad.

localhost443 ,

Did I blink and miss something… Mint actually looks pretty modern compared to how I remember the release notes, kernel 6.8… I’ve never bothered with it as it just seemed like a distro to run on old hardware if you don’t mind your core being 2 years out of date, where Debian v.xx with kde just made more sense

Interesting…

JustARegularNerd ,

I’ve got an older Latitude that I’ve nearly maxxed out on a shoestring budget, it runs LMDE 6 and is my dedicated Linux machine. I use it for online study, Zoom sessions, content consumption, and some Python here and there, LMDE is rock solid and hasn’t given me any fuss at all.

Unless LM22 has undergone some significant changes, I would say LMDE 6 doesn’t feel “modern” but it feels polished

localhost443 ,

Oh so is this 22 like the rolling release Vs that? I should just look it up but I made both these comments on the toilet and hate web browsing on mobile 😄

JustARegularNerd ,

Kind of, its based on the latest LTS of Ubuntu if memory serves me right

I try to avoid Ubuntu for a lot of the common reasons seen here, so a Debian based Mint suits me well

GladiusB ,
@GladiusB@lemmy.world avatar

It’s solid. I game all the time on it. I don’t do much else on my home PC. Watch videos and movies. It’s solid enough that I have abandoned Windows completely. I still deal with it with my work laptop, but I don’t give a shit. It’s not my money there.

Mwa ,
@Mwa@thelemmy.club avatar

ngl linux mint aint that bad but i dont like their desktop envoirment choices not saying cinnamon is bad its alr

suction ,

if you use unix with a GUI, you’re doing it wrong

Blisterexe ,

What???

suction ,

Ya heard me 👂🏾

Blisterexe ,

I mean, please ecplain why you said that, in genuinely curious

suction ,

Why? I’m just a random guy on the internet, don’t pay attention to me

AVengefulAxolotl ,

Collecting downvotes eh?

suction ,

Why not? It’s not like they count for anything IRL, just as their positive counterpart.

communist ,
@communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz avatar

these days I recommend fedora kinoite to beginners from windows.

Mwa ,
@Mwa@thelemmy.club avatar

their os-tree package manager sucks it somtimes will refuse to uninstall stuff

communist ,
@communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz avatar

You’re not supposed to use that, and in fact, when i give it to beginners, i don’t mention the package manager, I just use discover with flatpaks.

Mwa ,
@Mwa@thelemmy.club avatar

oh,but flatpacks are missing native hosting on some browsers but its mostly not a big problem and not all apps are on flatpack

communist ,
@communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz avatar

Nearly everything the average person needs is in flatpak.

I don’t know what you mean by “native hosting”

Mwa ,
@Mwa@thelemmy.club avatar

I don’t know what you mean by “native hosting”

I meant native messaging

Mwa ,
@Mwa@thelemmy.club avatar

Nearly everything the average person needs is in flatpak.

True tho

ommorsi ,
@ommorsi@lemmy.ca avatar

It’s a good distro and it is a lot harder to break on accident, but there are a lot more minor kinks than fedora workstation. It can also get confusing for newcomers on the somewhat regular occasion that you need a non-flatpak package.

communist ,
@communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz avatar

Can you give some examples of these kinks? I haven’t had any issues giving it to beginners.

ommorsi ,
@ommorsi@lemmy.ca avatar

Just from my own experience, many flatpak apps such as Steam, VSCode, or Kdenlive have a lot of issues, and many other flatpaks are maintained by third parties with poor quality control. This isn’t Silverblue/Kinoite’s fault, but it is still an issue that affects it. For certain machines where drivers aren’t included by default, it requires a lot more troubleshooting to install them compared to Linux Mint’s driver manager, or even just copying a few commands from the internet on a distro like Fedora.

communist ,
@communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz avatar

Ah, the driver thing is mitigated by me doing the installation for them.

As for flatpaks having issues, that makes sense, i try to stick to verified flatpaks and do tell them to avoid unverified ones. I just really haven’t had these problems, have you had them recently or historically?

ommorsi ,
@ommorsi@lemmy.ca avatar

It’s more of a historical problem, and I’ve always been able to solve it. Not everyone has the time or patience that I do though, especially when it involves changing permissions with flatseal. Overall though, the fedora atomic versions are solid, and it’s ok for beginners. It just adds a slight bit of complexity plus less resources for troubleshooting than linux mint or ubuntu.

Zink ,

Mint is my daily use OS at work, and will soon be taking over my windows machine at home that acts as a server.

I’m sure it’s a side effect of me being old and being busy all the damn time, but I love that it can literally be easier to install and use than windows, without losing any linux-ness. Big deal if it looks like I have a windows taskbar, I still have my screens taken up by Firefox, VSCode, terminal.

ModerateImprovement ,
@ModerateImprovement@sh.itjust.works avatar

Any Debian based distro is not really good to recommend for newbies, I think most beginners should start with Nobara linux, OpenSuse or if the PC is just for browsing the web a immutable distro(OpenSuse MicroOS, Fedora kryptonite,Elementary os,… Etc).

Clarification: The reason I don’t recommend Debian is that the package manager break things frequently.

LeFantome ,

Not sure what you are saying here.

Regular Mint is based on Ubuntu. It is perhaps the most user-friendly distro.

LMDE is Debian based but includes all the same user facing tools and features.

I do not use Mint ( not a newb ) but it is a great distribution and great for beginners.

drislands ,

I switched to Mint for my new PC a few months ago. There are a handful of games that don’t work on it, but they’re few and far between.

Defaced ,

My main issue with mint has always been the reluctance to use a newer package base. Fortunately I think that’s changing since they’re adopting Wayland support and have their edge iso now. Currently running bazzite and it’s pretty rock solid with a couple quirks, but I’ve always thought about going back to mint when they start updating their package base.

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