Linux Mint Experiences?

[edd147]

It's my first post here so bear with me :-)
 
I know there's a wee bit of Windows infos here but it was a dual boot experience.
 
A wee bit of background infos:
I've just bought an Asus  ROG G752VT a week ago and have been playing around with dual booting Windows 10 Pro/Linux Mint 17.3.
 
The G752VT has a Skylake 6700 Processor and an Nvidia GTX 970m 3GB along with a load of other stuff.
 
The only extras which I have to upgraded/replaced were a Samsung 950 PRO -Series 256GB PCIe NVMe - M.2 and a 1TB Samsung EVO 840 SSD.
 
Sub-note: For the first couple of months after the G752 release, you could only choose Raid mode in BIOS, with the latest BIOS firmware you can choose AHCI or RAID. I know the NVMe is neither AHCI or RAID but it does affect the way Windows or Linux sees the 950 Pro NVMe.
 
Installation: (Windows 10 and Linux Mint 17.3 were installed per UEFI mode using Easy2boot USB medium)

 
Windows 10:
AHCI mode - no probs, works out of the box, Intel Chipset, Nvidia Video, Samsung NVMe drivers etc. installed after Windows did it's bit.
 
Raid mode - Needed to load the Intel IRST driver during the installation.

 
Linux Mint 17.3:
To get into the Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE, MATE, Xfce Desktops I needed to edit the Kernel boot-up with "nomodeset" (nouveau.modeset=0 works as well)
 
Raid mode:
Couldn't see the NVMe drive, didn't try too hard at the moment, hopefully the 4.4 Kernel will be released with the next Linux Mint which is usually at the end of May.
 
AHCI mode:
I could see the NVMe partitions with cat /proc/partitions but Gparted didn't.
 
I started the Installation from the live environment and seen the message at the top saying that I couldn't create partitions on the NVMe drive but could probably use existing ones. So I booted into Windows 10 and created them as RAW partitions.
 
Here's the partition layout on the NVMe drive after the Windows installation + creation of 2 Partitions for Linux:
 
GPT Partitions:
 
1. 450MB NTFS recovery partition (not really needed but created by Windows 10 automatically so left it)
 
2. 100MB FAT32 system partition
 
3. 16MB MSR partition - visible in Linux but not at all in Windows.
 
4. 190GB NTFS - Windows C:\ drive
 
5. 20GB EXT4 Linux partition (RAW before Linux install)
 
6. 4GB Swap partition (RAW before Linux install)
 
7. Just under 24GB free space for over provisioning.

cat /proc/partitions
major minor  #blocks  name

   7        0    1499308 loop0
 259        0  250059096 nvme0n1
 259        1     460800 nvme0n1p1
 259        2     102400 nvme0n1p2
 259        3      16384 nvme0n1p3
 259        4  199229440 nvme0n1p4
 259        5   20971520 nvme0n1p5
 259        6    4194304 nvme0n1p6
   8        0  976762584 sda
   8        1  104857600 sda1
   8        2  660602880 sda2
   8        3  104857600 sda3
  11        0    1048575 sr0
   8       16   30641315 sdb
   8       17    1588867 sdb1
   8       18         31 sdb2
 
My Windows data, Linux data and image partitions would then be on the 2nd 1TB Samsung 840 EVO drive.
 
At the partitioning phase I choose "something else" and choose the following:
Linux mint to /dev/nvme0n1p5 mounted as / (EXT4 with format)
swap on /dev/nvme0n1p5 (swap with format)
data on /dev/sda2 mounted as /media/data (NTFS don't format)
linuxdata on /dev/sda3 mounted as /media/linuxdata (EXT4 with format)

Important: Device for boot loader: /dev/nvme0n1p2 (The efi partition)

After the installation I rebooted into the installed Linux not forgetting the "nomodeset" kernel parameter.

In the desktop I opened the Driver Manager which you can find under Administration in the start menu. From there I installed the nvidia-352 binary driver and could then reboot without any kernel parameters.

The touch-pad and sound aren't working yet but I've only had the G752VT for a week and am still playing around with it, work commitments limits me as well.
 
Hopefully this first post of mine can be helpful to someone else. I'll post it here and on the Asus forum.

[NarimaanV]

@edd147 Wow thanks very much for such a detailed explanation of your setup process. That may very well come in handy when I go to set my system up

[patrick3027]

As a long time Ubuntu user, I tried it out about a year ago, given all the hype there is about the distro.

 

In the end I got back to Ubuntu within a week, just because I've become so used to it, but I kinda get why people might prefer Mint over Ubuntu. In the end it all comes back to this: are you ready to embrace Unity or do you prefer something more 'classic'? If you go for the latter, Mint is the right distro for you.