Linux: so what flavor of mint do I want?

[Bombastinator]

So I bought a big ol’ 4tb used mechanical hard drive for archival backup (it was really cheap) which my new system isn’t recognizing as existing. (It could just be be DOA). It’s got a DELL sticker on it though so even though it’s made by Toshiba apparently it could just be custom stupidity.  So I thought I’d try it using a nice primitive drive manager that could cut through such things. 

 

A friend of mine gave me a heavily modified install of dragonfly BSD with no GUI (which makes sense.  He runs tiny single board computers.  Got to keep things light)  and I find I like having a GUI.  So I thought I’d try out this mint thing.

There appear to be 3 flavors.  The only one with a GUI I have really used before (long ago (xfce) claims to not be complete(?!) so there appears to be a gnome2, and a gnome3 fork called cinnamon.  The distinct absence of a gnome3 non fork implies to me that gnome3 is not universally liked.  (This is the way of such things.  People periodically have fits of insanity and produce insane garbage like systemD.  One has to just step away sometimes)  when I last looked at gnome it was gnome1 and still wasn’t really completed, so even gnome2 is new to me.  
 

I appear to have missed a lot and there may be something I should know, or should I just download the xfce one or try an ubuntu?  

 

[OhioYJ]

Ive been running Mint for a very long time now. For the most part I run Cinnamon. It is the most customizable, and has the most features. The latest version of Cinnamon has been a bit more buggy for me. Mainly with some of the programs I use.

 

For this reason I've switched a couple of my machines over to Mate for testing. It has annoyances as well too for me especially if you use multiple monitors. Mate is lighter on resources than Cinnamon. 

 

It's been a long time since I've tried XFCE, from what I remember it was a bit too stripped down for me.  However manageable if you have a need for a really lightweight distro.

 

Overall I would recommend Cinnamon if your machine handles it fine. When I say buggy, it's really not bad. I've had some annoyances, but it's been my primary OS for a long time. 

 

 

[Bombastinator]

11 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

Ive been running Mint for a very long time now. For the most part I run Cinnamon. It is the most customizable, and has the most features. The latest version of Cinnamon has been a bit more buggy for me. Mainly with some of the programs I use.

 

For this reason I've switched a couple of my machines over to Mate for testing. It has annoyances as well too for me especially if you use multiple monitors. Mate is lighter on resources than Cinnamon. 

 

It's been a long time since I've tried XFCE, from what I remember it was a bit too stripped down for me.  However manageable if you have a need for a really lightweight distro.

 

Overall I would recommend Cinnamon if your machine handles it fine. When I say buggy, it's really not bad. I've had some annoyances, but it's been my primary OS for a long time. 

 

 

I assume it will.  cinnamon it is then.  Thx.

[Bombastinator]

So I put mint cinnamon 21 liveCD on a usb stick and booted off it.  That thing is a lot smaller than I expected.  It’s also maybe sort of alpha?  It apparently only works with a/b/g wifi and ethernet?  Not even N? Crashed twice too. That’s about as far as gnome1 was when I was playing with it long ago.  Makes me want to see how screwed ubuntu is.  I don’t want to roll a debian. It’s not worth it.

[sailsman63]

On 12/13/2022 at 11:51 PM, Bombastinator said:

It apparently only works with a/b/g wifi and ethernet?  Not even N? Crashed twice too.

Not familiar with what's bundled with Mint/Cinnamon's liveCD. Is it possible that it doesn't have an appropriate driver for your WiFi adapter, and is falling back to a more generic support? What is the adapter, anyway?

 

The thing to remember with Linux is it's almost never a <distribution> problem, per se. I'd search "Linux <your WiFi adapter> stuck a/b/g" and see what surfaces.

 

On 12/13/2022 at 11:51 PM, Bombastinator said:

That thing is a lot smaller than I expected.

Linux distros do like to stay lighter-weight for the live-boot image. 2.4GB isn't really all that small. Arch has a current Live image of ~820MB!

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, sailsman63 said:

Not familiar with what's bundled with Mint/Cinnamon's liveCD. Is it possible that it doesn't have an appropriate driver for your WiFi adapter, and is falling back to a more generic support? What is the adapter, anyway?

 

The thing to remember with Linux is it's almost never a <distribution> problem, per se. I'd search "Linux <your WiFi adapter> stuck a/b/g" and see what surfaces.

 

Linux distros do like to stay lighter-weight for the live-boot image. 2.4GB isn't really all that small. Arch has a current Live image of ~820MB!

Well as far as the hardware goes there doesn’t seem to be much in the manual.  It’s an MSI mag b660m ddr4 wifi.  I thought it would be just a populated e key but no.  It’s apparently built into the motherboard    That’s going to cost me an m.2 bay eventually I think.  I might be able to slap in a wifi card on the pcie x1 that the video card is covering with a step drill and a long ass riser cable, but microATX just isn’t long on pcie slots. One gets eaten by the damn thunderbolt card and the only other one gets eaten by the triple thick video card.  Having trouble finding out what’s actually in it.  Your statement of how a failure might happen makes sense though. Just this evening I had to drop a 4tb mech HDD in it (my HD bay is apparently an antique that can’t handle more than 3tb.  Must fix)  so I installed it internally so I could run crystal disk info on it.  So accidental massive space increase.  That thing I can cut into partitions though, so I might as well actually do an install so I can make the thing work correctly.  I’d actually rather do a usb key install atm.  I’ve been planning to put 3 VMs and an emulator on this thing one of which needs to be a Unix, so it’s in line, but I also want to get the windows system correctly set up first, so I’m avoiding dropping stuff on the main drive until I do that.  I didn’t realize liveCDs were so limited. I don’t know how the install thing works in cinnamon.  Long ago liveCDs used to do this really obnoxious thing where if you hit install they would reformat your main drive and wipe your other system, so I tdidnt want to do that.  Do you get to choose what you install onto?  If that is the case I can just stuff another USBKey in a port and install on that.

Edited December 16, 2022 by Bombastinator

[sailsman63]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

It’s an MSI mag b660m ddr4 wifi.

 

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

 I thought it would be just a populated e key but no.  It’s apparently built into the motherboard

Assuming it's either a Mortar or a Mortar MAX (the only MSI MAG b660m WiFi boards that I could find that matched the slot layout you are implying -see here for the entire MAG b660m line. ) it does indeed have an m2 key. It's in the second slot, in line with that PCIe x1 slot that is currently covered by your video card. It looks like the slot has a heat-spreader bar, which might have hidden the fact that it is occupied.

 

MSI lists the card as "Intel WiFi 6e". If you are booted using a Linux drive, lspci -v in a terminal window should get you a detailed listing of pci devices, including the WiFi card. There may also be GUI apps, or the Windows control panel stuff may have a more detailed listing. (I've not used Windows in a while, so I don't know which screen exactly anymore.) If neither of those is precise enough, I would think that the actual key would have a part number on it.

 

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

I’d actually rather do a usb key install atm

You might have to do some searching, but I suspect that it should be doable. You'll need to make sure that you're automatically loading support for USB storage, or your boot drive won't be able to write back any settings changes or do updates.

 

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

I’ve been planning to put 3 VMs and an emulator on this thing one of which needs to be a Unix, so it’s in line, but I also want to get the windows system correctly set up first, so I’m avoiding dropping stuff on the main drive until I do that.

Do make sure that you partition up your boot drive before installing windows. Newer windows has a habit of storing some of it's VeryImportantFiles^tm at the end of the partition. These files are in-use whenever the windows system is booted, so the only way to move them is with a specially-built offline defragmenter utility - essentially a bootable image that only exists to work on your windows drives without booting into windows. (There is one that allows initiating from in windows - it plugs into the admin tools and windows bootloader) It's rather a pain. Ask me how I learned this.

 

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

Long ago liveCDs used to do this really obnoxious thing where if you hit install they would reformat your main drive and wipe your other system, so I tdidnt want to do that.

Yeek! I can only imagine that those were the "Easy - 1 click install" options??? Every time I've installed Linux, or gone through a distro's installation guide, it always starts with "Let's pick your partitions! If you would like to partition your drive now, here's the tool to do that!" But then again, I'm the guy who always goes through the Advanced Installation options on everything....

Edited December 16, 2022 by sailsman63

[Bombastinator]

33 minutes ago, sailsman63 said:

 

Assuming it's either a Mortar or a Mortar MAX (the only MSI MAG b660m WiFi boards that I could find that matched the slot layout you are implying -see here for the entire MAG b660m line. ) it does indeed have an m2 key. It's in the second slot, in line with that PCIe x1 slot that is currently covered by your video card. It looks like the slot has a heat-spreader bar, which might have hidden the fact that it is occupied.

 

MSI lists the card as "Intel WiFi 6e". If you are booted using a Linux drive, lspci -v in a terminal window should get you a detailed listing of pci devices, including the WiFi card. There may also be GUI apps, or the Windows control panel stuff may have a more detailed listing. (I've not used Windows in a while, so I don't know which screen exactly anymore.) If neither of those is precise enough, I would think that the actual key would have a part number on it.

 

You might have to do some searching, but I suspect that it should be doable. You'll need to make sure that you're automatically loading support for USB storage, or your boot drive won't be able to write back any settings changes or do updates.

 

Do make sure that you partition up your boot drive before installing windows. Newer windows has a habit of storing some of it's VeryImportantFiles^tm at the end of the partition. These files are in-use whenever the windows system is booted, so the only way to move them is with a specially-built offline defragmenter utility - essentially a bootable image that only exists to work on your windows drives without booting into windows. (There is one that allows initiating from in windows - it plugs into the admin tools and windows bootloader) It's rather a pain. Ask me how I learned this.

 

Yeek! I can only imagine that those were the "Easy - 1 click install" options??? Every time I've installed Linux, or gone through a distro's installation guide, it always starts with "Let's pick your partitions! If you would like to partition your drive now, here's the tool to do that!" But then again, I'm the guy who always goes through the Advanced Installation options on everything....

you are correct.  Mag mortar.  Not the mag mortar max. (They’re like $60 more expensive) Should have added that.
 

Re: m.2.
Interrrresting..  I looked at the board when I got it home and opened it and it was like “fffffff-f-f-f….”  This is good to know.  Thx  

 

re: usb key

thx I’ll do that.

 

re: partitions
good to know.  How big a boot partition do you think I should make?  It’s got to be bigger than the Microsoft minimums, which are a bit insane,  and windows really really likes its swap and complains if it doesn’t have it regardless of whether it needs it or not. So some space for that.  128gb do it or do I need more?

 

re: partitions

Cool!  

 

 

 

 

[sailsman63]

29 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

How big a boot partition do you think I should make?  It’s got to be bigger than the Microsoft minimums, which are a bit insane <snipped> 128gb do it or do I need more?

That's going to come down to how you want to arrange the rest of your system. Questions that you should take into account:

• Are you going to keep your user account stuff on the Windows partition, or will that be elsewhere? If your user folder is on another drive, than by default your Documents folder, etc will go there. Most user-generated files default to this part of the file system (pre-filled "Save" boxes, etc.)
• Are you going to install your Windows applications on the primary partition? You can select another drive for apps from the Microsoft Store, and many 3rd-party applications allow you to specify the installation location. Whether it's worth it is your call.

I will note that my Windows 10 install, with a limited selection of applications, is currently taking up 51G of a 75G partition. (Though this is essentially mothballed, and all of my workaday files are elsewhere. If I was actively using it, I'd expect the margin to be thinner.)

 

54 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

windows really really likes its swap and complains if it doesn’t have it regardless of whether it needs it or not.

I've found that Linux can also benefit from having a bit of swap active, unless you are insanely over-provisioned on RAM. What happens is that both OSs like to cache data in RAM to make reloading an application or file faster. Eventually, it needs some more RAM, and needs to evict some of that cache. If an application is trying to allocate memory faster than the eviction policy can clear it, you can hit an OOM error and randomly lose a process or freeze the system.

• This is not all that hard to do. Two web browsers with maybe 18-20 tabs between them and a Zoom session can collectively bump their head on the top of 16GB RAM without too much trouble.
• You can tune the cache behavior in Linux, but this might actually leave you in a situation where you have plenty of RAM, but the kernel has been told that I shouldn't use it to make overall system responsiveness quicker, and it doesn't help if a process truly does try to over-allocate RAM.
• I personally prefer to have the swap up. If a process does allocate faster than the memory manager can clear cache, this gives it enough headroom to keep running. The stuff that's paged out to swap is then sorted out as the system evicts bits of the cache.

YMMV on the above, and you could probably spend a lot of time figuring out how your RAM size, usage patterns, and the performance of your drive intersect. Honestly, I'm running 2GB swap w/16GB RAM (Older system. That was a lot of ram in 2010)  with the default swappiness (Swap priority) and cache backpressure settings, and it just works.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, sailsman63 said:

That's going to come down to how you want to arrange the rest of your system. Questions that you should take into account:

• Are you going to keep your user account stuff on the Windows partition, or will that be elsewhere? If your user folder is on another drive, than by default your Documents folder, etc will go there. Most user-generated files default to this part of the file system (pre-filled "Save" boxes, etc.)
• Are you going to install your Windows applications on the primary partition? You can select another drive for apps from the Microsoft Store, and many 3rd-party applications allow you to specify the installation location. Whether it's worth it is your call.

I will note that my Windows 10 install, with a limited selection of applications, is currently taking up 51G of a 75G partition. (Though this is essentially mothballed, and all of my workaday files are elsewhere. If I was actively using it, I'd expect the margin to be thinner.)

 

I've found that Linux can also benefit from having a bit of swap active, unless you are insanely over-provisioned on RAM. What happens is that both OSs like to cache data in RAM to make reloading an application or file faster. Eventually, it needs some more RAM, and needs to evict some of that cache. If an application is trying to allocate memory faster than the eviction policy can clear it, you can hit an OOM error and randomly lose a process or freeze the system.

• This is not all that hard to do. Two web browsers with maybe 18-20 tabs between them and a Zoom session can collectively bump their head on the top of 16GB RAM without too much trouble.
• You can tune the cache behavior in Linux, but this might actually leave you in a situation where you have plenty of RAM, but the kernel has been told that I shouldn't use it to make overall system responsiveness quicker, and it doesn't help if a process truly does try to over-allocate RAM.
• I personally prefer to have the swap up. If a process does allocate faster than the memory manager can clear cache, this gives it enough headroom to keep running. The stuff that's paged out to swap is then sorted out as the system evicts bits of the cache.

YMMV on the above, and you could probably spend a lot of time figuring out how your RAM size, usage patterns, and the performance of your drive intersect. Honestly, I'm running 2GB swap w/16GB RAM (Older system. That was a lot of ram in 2010)  with the default swappiness (Swap priority) and cache backpressure settings, and it just works.

Re: partitions

i don’t consider windows to be incredibly safe so I don’t run much on it.  Just browsing and games and the games are all steam and the steam folder is on another drive entirely. 256gb perhaps.  There’s room.  It’s a bit wasteful but I’m also unlikely to run out of space.  It’s a 2tb drive.

 

re: RAM

I’ve got 32gb.  That used to be a fairly insane number for non-enterprise stuff, but kind of isn’t anymore.  
 

Re: swap

ive got adequate  room for an unnecessarily big swap space.  Can’t hurt.  I found out my nvme drive will take optane, and the stuff is unusually cheap atm, but I populated that slot and don’t have room any more.