Change happens

 

I bought a laptop earlier this year. I thought I needed a Windows laptop to play games. Then work started to happen and me being a Linux guy since the early 2000s started to get annoyed with windows and with the Steamdeck getting popular and Linux gaming improving. I thought it was time to go back. 

I had options, Pop OS, Fedora, Ubuntu, and a couple of Arch distros. I went in the end with Fedora. I had been using it for about a month. There had been little quirks but I figured I could work through them. 

 

Then the real craziness started. I was using bottles and boxes which is wine and qemu in a nice package. Bottles worked but not where i needed it to be. I was trying to run Paltalk and video chat software. I had fun there starting in 2005 when I was off work for an injury. So I have some friends still on there so I wanted to at least run it so I can get on when I can. It wasn't working because first Pal makes sure your running windows. Now I heard this reason that people were using VMs and other means to circumvent paying for subscriptions services. I think it was BS but I'm not gonna get into that now. So why I say this is because they run windows specific elements that wine has a hard time dealing with. So it wasn't a good option. 

Then i did Boxes where I ran Windows 10. Works great problem solved. Then I started to see another issue. I was running out of space on my 1TB drive. WTH? So I started looking. Three things stuck out. One was Bottles and Boxes and how much space it was taking up. But the last one got me, Flatpak. 

Flatpak is a way to install Linux programs. 

Flatpak is a utility for software deployment and package management for Linux. It is advertised as offering a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in isolation from the rest of the system. (1)

So its sand-boxed which means all that the program needs is included in the download. Which could lead to multiple programs with multiple instances of the same library. So if you are installing a lot of Flatpaks you could be taking up a lot of hard drive space. 

I'm looking at the disk management software saying I have 3% I'm like WTH. So first I removed any VMs I spun up, then removed boxes, removed all my flatpak applications plus purged unnecessary libraries after that. I only gained back 25-30% of the drive. I'm like OK maybe I just need to reinstall but I thought about the quirks I was having with the video. So I thought about old trusty. Its not the first Linux distro I've tried but its the 2nd sturdiest behind Debian. Linux Mint was the distro I gave my mother on a laptop and she used it until the hardware broke down. She never had issues and it ran like a champ for her. (she didn't know I would ssh into it and doing updates.) 

 

So I installed it and this is Day 2. Some things I immediately notices. the video is much smoother and responsive than on Fedora. There is this icon in the tray. I clicked it. It allows me to switch between the Intel and Nvidia graphic that are in the laptop. I right clicked the icon, "Nvidia Optimus" then has the GitHub link (https://github.com/linuxmint/nvidia-prime-applet). How cool. After I updated and personalized it. Feels good. The laptop is responsive I can actually read the text on every screen without having to resize it which I've had to do in the past. So we are looking good. 

Oh, wait here is my trade off. Sound to the laptop is great but I have a speaker. I can connect wired or Bluetooth. When I was on Fedora I had a external USB-c Sound Blaster G3 that the speaker and a boom mic were attached to. It worked OK. On Mint its not working so well. I can hook up the boom mic no issue but I can't play on the speakers from it. So I just did Bluetooth and it works good except for my quirk. Its always a quirk you have to deal with when you install Linux on a laptop that is made for Windows. I have to manually reconnect every time i logout or reboot.It could be a feature not a bug but either way I can deal with it. 

So everything is good for now, but with Linux change is always afoot. I might get interested in a new distro and run off to try it. For now me and Linux Mint are gonna hang out.