Hello. Since some of the forums here haven’t had any experience with Linux, I wanted to share some of mine. Maybe these might seem banal to some people and don’t represent anything out of the ordinary, but on the other hand it might help a few newbies to get around mistakes or problematic situations that I made. In any case, I would have been happy if I had taken the following into account right from the start. Like people in “Show your desktops”[sic!]-Thread, I’m currently using a slightly older laptop and (thus) not a powerful one. My introduction to Linux was Linux Mint (19.3?) XFCE on my main PC a few years ago. He’s currently taking a “forced break”. But that’s another story. At least Linux is not the trigger In any case, I found Linux Mint to be very stable so far and it runs quite smoothly on the old laptop. I went through a few learning processes along the way: Most recently – probably due to an update – my system on the laptop became unstable and the WiFi became unreliable. I managed to reinstall Mint 20.3 again. There I set up the backup tool ‘Timeshift’. Unfortunately, I ignored the tool for years. But it has been able to help me a lot in the meantime. The restore worked great… So here are a few lessons learned and tips for Linux newbies, especially those who want to use Linux Mint:
- Use a backup tool for the system partition right from the start (as you (hopefully) learned from your Windows days – back up private data and games on extra partitions/drives)! Especially today, people have more than enough fast storage and a backup tool can be set up quickly and a backup created quickly. It’s reassuring to know that you can always access a backup and restore the system to a stable state. So you can try out a lot of things with little risk. Linux Mint comes with a simple tool called ‘Timeshift’ pre-installed.
- Apparently, if you have Linux installed as the sole operating system (and it uses ‘Grub’ as the boot menu), the ‘Grub’ menu does not appear. I find it less stressful if it is displayed briefly by default every time I boot. This allows you to start recovery mode if necessary or use the console – for example. to restore the system to a backup. To make ‘Grub’ appear by default, all you have to do is change two entries in the grub config and then activate the changes (update-grub).
- Allocate generous space to the system partition. If this is not possible, the system is used for a longer period of time and people diligently make updates – keep in mind that each secured kernel is 500 MB (?) in size and may gradually fill up the system if it is limited in size . If the system partition is full, the system will hang at the next boot. However, you can easily prevent the retention of many older kernels by setting it if it is not already set by default. Or you can do it manually and remove one outdated kernel after the kernel update. A handful of kernels should probably be enough as a backup.
- Okay, the following tip is very general: Don’t be afraid of the console/terminal… In fact, it’s a useful tool. This allows you to install and uninstall software, driver packages, fix problems… You can find instructions and commands in abundance on the Internet. And so be careful and enter non-equivalent commands like ‘format c:’ or ‘deltree’
nothing bad should happen if you take the top point here (backup!) into account. If necessary, you can just restore the last backup. .gif "sm_B-) :-)")
- …
If anyone has had similar experiences or thinks that beginners’ mistakes can be avoided using simple means, please write about it here…
Last edited: 1 minute ago