I put Mint Cinnamon on an older laptop just this past weekend and had a lot of fun with it. Are there any migration tips for my main Windows machine? I was thinking of going with Bazzite since it’s my gaming box. What about saved game data and whatnot? I was reading about Putty and SSH ing over to the laptop, but I’m not sure what a good strategy is for my desktop.
Bazzite is a lot less user friendly than mint in major ways. You get everything in mint as you do on Bazzite.
I switched to Bazzite and it lasted 2 days before going back to mint. KDE is too deep unnecessarily so. Bazzite doesn’t gain you much at all, at this point in time 3 years ago or so I’d not said the same thing. Mint is so polished for gaming shit usually just works now. It’s not worth the hype, hassle. I’ve distro hopped and always came back to mint.
Source is I been there and done all that and more. Your not missing out on anything. Spin up a live USB and try it but believe me dearly it’s not worth moving all your stuff reinstalling etc etc. Keep the work flow you got and master it. Other options have more maintenance and headaches.
KDE is too deep on options and is heavier to run on PC resources not a lot but I’m a lean builder, especially for gaming rigs.
KDE bazzite app names are not easy to understand like mint at all. Workflow is different, menus, options. The reason mint is so highly spoken of and recommended is because it’s truly refined and polished for the GUI user. App names are sane/understandable, system functions are low maintenance and hands off once basic setup is done. Drivers are all automatically handled for the most part.
The only thing I noticed with bazzite that could be considered superior is immutability. That’s it. Everything else seemed somewhat a step backwards and you can gain all the codecs and drivers in mint mostly again automatically as you plug in your hardware the system will reconfigure itself. With proper backups, as you should always have, mint provides nearly the same guarantees. Keep extension, applets, desklets low count and don’t modify the system to an inane amount it’ll remain dead stable either in LMDE6 or Ubuntu main version.
I have distro hopped many times for various reasons, hassle and headaches days weeks in terminal borking shit. Bazzite, Fedora, NIXos, Mint, Qubes, LMDE6, and several others. I’m not saying don’t test the waters on other distros but believe me and everyone. FOMO IS REAL. The grass is not always greener on the other side. Especially with transition changes and relearning. Keep it simple. Enjoy your PC.
(Use a live USB don’t reinstall your entire system multiple times you’ll get fed up and hate Linux, put your home folder on its own partition on your drive then aim any OS at it you end up choosing this is smarter for many reasons than hopping distros)
Mint is so highly recommended because it’s one of and arguably the best/first distro to offer a plug and play, damn near seamless experience on Linux for the average person looking to ditch Windows and doing about anything. Most distros on Linux are somewhat the same loosely anyhow. You can tweak and harden mint nearly the same as any other distro.
Hope this helps. I game on Mint and daily drive it personally for the last 2 years atleast. Aside from some Indie games 1 or 2 of them. It’s been nearly seamless. About the only times I broke my system was well when I was doing stuff I thought I could improve. Keep it simple stupid. Best of luck.
This but what they forgot is on multiple drives. Power failures, drive failures, lost, stolen, dropped, you name it. A good set of backups is fucking worth everything peace of mind and more. Automate your backup process and never look back!!!
Can’t help with saved game data, but Bazzite is a solid choice, not just because it’s a gaming based distro. It’s one of the immutable distros, so all the important stuff that keeps it running, you can’t mess with (easily). And all your personal stuff that doesn’t keep the computer running, it doesn’t touch. So your computer is always up to date ( faster than steamOS, and if something goes wrong, just reboot into the previous) and you can’t screw it up without trying.
I actually just moved my gaming PC from Win11 to Mint Cinnamon 2 weeks ago. There was some driver fuckery (I have an Nvidia card) that made things a bit wonky but everything worked out after some adjustments.
Do you mostly game through steam? Do you install your games on a separate drive?
Steam makes the transition the easiest. All of my games “just worked” with Steam. There were a few modifications required to ensure stability with the games settings but it was mostly smooth sailing for me.
I just used thumb drives to pull all my games save files to and an external drive to back up all my installed games so I wouldn’t have to re download them. Save game files are usually pretty small so all of the ones I had backed up on a single thumb drive and Steam and Linux creates a faux Windows folder system for each game and you just reinsert the save games in those folder structures at the correct spot.
Thanks all for the helpful replies! I do have a second ssd, I can probably dump everything there before I format my m2 ssd.
I do primarily game thru steam, I’ve got icue software that isn’t compatible but I believe I can use openrgb. Nvidia card also, is it just driver related?
I put Mint Cinnamon on an older laptop just this past weekend and had a lot of fun with it. Are there any migration tips for my main Windows machine? I was thinking of going with Bazzite since it’s my gaming box. What about saved game data and whatnot? I was reading about Putty and SSH ing over to the laptop, but I’m not sure what a good strategy is for my desktop.
Bazzite is a lot less user friendly than mint in major ways. You get everything in mint as you do on Bazzite. I switched to Bazzite and it lasted 2 days before going back to mint. KDE is too deep unnecessarily so. Bazzite doesn’t gain you much at all, at this point in time 3 years ago or so I’d not said the same thing. Mint is so polished for gaming shit usually just works now. It’s not worth the hype, hassle. I’ve distro hopped and always came back to mint.
Source is I been there and done all that and more. Your not missing out on anything. Spin up a live USB and try it but believe me dearly it’s not worth moving all your stuff reinstalling etc etc. Keep the work flow you got and master it. Other options have more maintenance and headaches.
Appreciate the advice; I may just follow it considering how positive an experience Mint has been.
Would you be so kind to substantiate the above claim beyond what’s found below?
KDE is too deep on options and is heavier to run on PC resources not a lot but I’m a lean builder, especially for gaming rigs.
KDE bazzite app names are not easy to understand like mint at all. Workflow is different, menus, options. The reason mint is so highly spoken of and recommended is because it’s truly refined and polished for the GUI user. App names are sane/understandable, system functions are low maintenance and hands off once basic setup is done. Drivers are all automatically handled for the most part.
The only thing I noticed with bazzite that could be considered superior is immutability. That’s it. Everything else seemed somewhat a step backwards and you can gain all the codecs and drivers in mint mostly again automatically as you plug in your hardware the system will reconfigure itself. With proper backups, as you should always have, mint provides nearly the same guarantees. Keep extension, applets, desklets low count and don’t modify the system to an inane amount it’ll remain dead stable either in LMDE6 or Ubuntu main version.
I have distro hopped many times for various reasons, hassle and headaches days weeks in terminal borking shit. Bazzite, Fedora, NIXos, Mint, Qubes, LMDE6, and several others. I’m not saying don’t test the waters on other distros but believe me and everyone. FOMO IS REAL. The grass is not always greener on the other side. Especially with transition changes and relearning. Keep it simple. Enjoy your PC.
(Use a live USB don’t reinstall your entire system multiple times you’ll get fed up and hate Linux, put your home folder on its own partition on your drive then aim any OS at it you end up choosing this is smarter for many reasons than hopping distros)
Mint is so highly recommended because it’s one of and arguably the best/first distro to offer a plug and play, damn near seamless experience on Linux for the average person looking to ditch Windows and doing about anything. Most distros on Linux are somewhat the same loosely anyhow. You can tweak and harden mint nearly the same as any other distro.
Hope this helps. I game on Mint and daily drive it personally for the last 2 years atleast. Aside from some Indie games 1 or 2 of them. It’s been nearly seamless. About the only times I broke my system was well when I was doing stuff I thought I could improve. Keep it simple stupid. Best of luck.
Step one: back up your data.
Step two: back up your data again.
This person backs up.
Step three: test your backups
Step four: back up your data again
This but what they forgot is on multiple drives. Power failures, drive failures, lost, stolen, dropped, you name it. A good set of backups is fucking worth everything peace of mind and more. Automate your backup process and never look back!!!
Can’t help with saved game data, but Bazzite is a solid choice, not just because it’s a gaming based distro. It’s one of the immutable distros, so all the important stuff that keeps it running, you can’t mess with (easily). And all your personal stuff that doesn’t keep the computer running, it doesn’t touch. So your computer is always up to date ( faster than steamOS, and if something goes wrong, just reboot into the previous) and you can’t screw it up without trying.
i’d recommend getting a new SSD and installing Linux on that, then you can read your windows drive from Linux and copy over the files you need
Game files can be copied over the same way (obvs to different directories)
If you only have one M.2 slot then M.2 to USB adapters are stupid cheap and infinitely useful as a fast AF flash drive.
If your drive is sata then those are also cheap and the same applies, just not quite as fast.
I actually just moved my gaming PC from Win11 to Mint Cinnamon 2 weeks ago. There was some driver fuckery (I have an Nvidia card) that made things a bit wonky but everything worked out after some adjustments.
Do you mostly game through steam? Do you install your games on a separate drive?
Steam makes the transition the easiest. All of my games “just worked” with Steam. There were a few modifications required to ensure stability with the games settings but it was mostly smooth sailing for me.
I just used thumb drives to pull all my games save files to and an external drive to back up all my installed games so I wouldn’t have to re download them. Save game files are usually pretty small so all of the ones I had backed up on a single thumb drive and Steam and Linux creates a faux Windows folder system for each game and you just reinsert the save games in those folder structures at the correct spot.
Thanks all for the helpful replies! I do have a second ssd, I can probably dump everything there before I format my m2 ssd. I do primarily game thru steam, I’ve got icue software that isn’t compatible but I believe I can use openrgb. Nvidia card also, is it just driver related?