I recently reinstalled Ubuntu on my personal laptop. I found some pleasant surprises in doing so, and I wanted to share what I've got going.
Note:...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Hello Jonathan; great article as always! Ubuntu as been my primary desktop @ home for over a year now and I still learned things from you.
18.x was a nice step forward from 16.x; esp. for the window manager going back to Gnome.
Only part I miss is Direct-X for gaming. One day I'll dig into Wine, one day...
Glad you liked it!
I recommend looking into Lutris for gaming. Its a bit like PlayOnLinux, which sets up wine (prefixed, so you can have different versions of wine for each game), downloads needed fonts, dotnet (if needed), etc, and installs the game for you. I haven't tried Lutris yet because there's plenty of games on Linux already though. I'm only recommending because I've heard a lot of good things from it, compared to PlayOnLinux. Apparently DXVK is a really good compatibility layer for DirectX (which Lutris integrates really well).
Steam already has Proton (Wine + patches) integrated so you can launch many Windows games from there exactly as you run the native Linux games.
I didn't mention because I don't really consider it to be ready for general usage. Most games aren't officially supported.
Well, that's quite subjective. A lot of games are supported officially and many more work just fine although not whitelisted. So it's at least as viable as Wine and requires much less tinkering.
Very few games are supported officially (less than 1% of steam games). I only tried proton for one game (Age of Empires 3 - not whitelisted) which didn't work out of the box. I still think proton needs some work.
It's pretty obvious that not everything runs excellent and it's not that uncommon to find a non-working game. Consult protondb.com/ before buying/trying a game. Proton still expands the available games for Linux by a huge margin and it's only going to grow. My point is that mentioning Wine (which is not that easy to install/maintain) while not talking about Proton (which is already available on Steam and it's the most popular storefront for Linux) is kinda not fair.
I never suggested to use Wine directly. I recommended Lutris and mentioned PlayOnLinux instead of proton because proton is still immature.
You mention protondb - it has been discussed on several occasions that the website's ratings are not accurate.
Pressing ctrl before making a print screen with the mentioned combinations does not save the image on the disk but copies it to the clipboard for pasting in group chats and other programs. I love this feature!
Is't Linux Mint a better desktop than Ubuntu?. Any thoughts?
It depends. I've moved to Mint on it early days, and have being using it since then.
It resembles a lot the Windows 7 workflow if you're using Cinnamon classic, and a lot of Windows 10 using the modern Cinnamon.
Its quite stable after a few months after launch, I use it every day at work and it doesn't get into my way.
So, if you're not looking for nothing to fancy, that works fine and comes with quite good defaults, Mint is very good.
Not sure what you mean by that. It is more familiar for those that are used to Windows though.
Good bookmark. Will probably be setting Ubuntu at some point in near future.
to use your first tty, press [ctrl] + [alt] + F1. [ctrl] + [alt] + F7 gets you back to the gui :)