I personally use an extension to have the top bar hide when i maximize an app. I can’t stand the wasted space either.

You can install anything you want via their flatpak app, which is pre-setup (unlike ubuntustudio that does come with media apps, but doesn’t have an easy way to get flatpaks going – it only has snaps).

The biggest advantage of ubuntu studio is their special pipewire setup, included in a package called ubuntustudio-pipewire-something. This can be installed by any distro that uses Ubuntu’s repositories, e.g. Mint, Zorin etc. As for the apps included, they’re easily installed manually. So you can go with Mint for a first distro.

I own 3 Macbook Airs, running Linux. The solution was simple: buy a $6 TP-Link wifi usb stick, which is tiny, and it solved all my problems (same for BT). I used to have crashing problems with the linux AND the official broadcomm wifi driver, or the laptop wouldn’t wake up from sleep etc. I just blacklisted all that, and I use the tp-link one. Sure, it eats away 1 usb port, but it’s no biggie. No more crashes, or not waking up properly.

Top reads available memory more correctly than htop imho.

Did you see this? https://askubuntu.com/questions/1425270/sony-bluetooth-headphones-connecting-but-as-an-unknown-device-with-no-option-t

Look at my reply here, where I explained the FOSS apps, their pros and cons: https://lemmy.ml/post/36874236/21366132

Maybe you have a bad burning image? Try re-downloading it and burning it with Balena Etcher.

Erm, no, it doesn’t. Plasma requires over 1.2 GB of RAM on a clean boot. It’s a much more complex DE.

I’d suggest EndeavourOS with XFce (removing the endeavouros addons after installation to save ram). I can make it boot at 460 MB of RAM. Hyprland uses about 900 MB. Might be of interest with just 4 GB of RAM. For example, on Omarchy, which uses arch/hyprland, it uses about 900 mb of ram, but it’s super slow with btrfs and some changes they’ve made. So on an old PC, XFce might be your friend. XFce can be themed really well, here are my attempts:

macos: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114009689446895521

macos classic: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114875117360852977

win11: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114874435763184758

beos: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/114751365408638345

No, it won’t update itself. This is just to try if the problem improves.

Don’t run snaps. Download the .appimage/tarball of firefox and/or chrome .deb file, and try with that. The snap packages have weird restrictions that could create problems with other apps. Another thing to try is try another DE that allows more than 1 hw accelerated app at a time, the fastest to install and without conflicting with your kde, is xfce (use X11).

see the other reply on this

reinstalling grub is not so easy though, you need to know what you’re doing to fix this. It’s not an easy fix for a new user, because you will be running grub from a third party installation, not your normal Mint.

Linux Mint’s boot option will eventually get over-written by Windows’ updates. You will lose the ability to load Mint, be it in a week’s time, in a month’s time, or a year’s time, but be sure, it will happen.

The correct way to run Mint alongside Windows is to install Mint on a usb stick (non-live). Here’s how:

1. Get TWO usb sticks. One to hold the bootable live iso (16 GB minimum), and one to install to (64 GB minimum).
2. Go to BIOS and DISABLE the internal SSD that has Windows in it. At least DELL & Thinkpad laptops’ BIOSes can do this. This is important, otherwise Mint has a bug during installation where it always installs the bootloader on the internal SSD, EVEN if you explicitly tell it to do it on its own USB stick or partition. So it’s best for Mint to not be able to see temporarily the internal SSD.
3. Boot with the burned usb stick, and install Mint on the other usb stick. You can select automatic installation, or you can do it manually: create a 1 GB fat32 /boot partition (make sure you give it the boot flag), 4 GB swap partition, and the rest / (root).
4. Boot after installation with the newly installed usb (remove the installation usb) to make sure mint works well. Check webcam too, not just audio/wifi/bluetooth.
5. Re-enable the internal SSD again.
6. You can now boot on the installed usb during boot time by pressing f12, and selecting the usb stick instead of Windows.

Note: You can choose to install Mint on a separate SSD if this is not a laptop, or an external SSD with enclosure. These will last more than a usb stick (the rewrites destroy the usb stick within a year or two in my experience). But it’s a good first start and it works overall well. I have done it that way 3 times so far, for laptops where we couldn’t change the emmc/ssd/hdd (in one of the laptops the ssd controller was dead, the other one had a bad emmc, and the other one was old and the usb stick was actually faster than the hard drive), so we installed on usb sticks.

I have found the gtk theming to be extremely confusing. It’s too complicated IMHO, or I’m missing something. I wanted to make the titlebar/window manager bar darker (with white text maybe) on this theme https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/115201547347227741 and I couldn’t figure out how to ONLY change the titlebar. I want the various elements (e.g. window bar, menu bar, icon bar etc) to have slightly different colors you see, so I can differentiate what’s what. I can’t use dark themes because I can’t see where the boundaries are of each window/thing. My eyes just can’t differentiate dark theme elements. It’s a mystery to me how people can use these themes. :o)

ClamAV is the one maintained these days.

If you’re careful and only install from the repo, you generally don’t need an AV. But if you do, ClamAV is the main AV on Linux. Installation tutorial for Mint: https://idroot.us/install-clamav-linux-mint-22/

I use a distro that doesn’t fall into such things all the time. Linux Mint works great for me, as is Debian.

The x5-Z8330 has 800 passmark points which is enough to run Arch with XFce without issues. 2 GB of RAM though is the sticky point. It is problematic with Debian/Mint as they consume about 800 MBs of RAM on a cold boot (don’t even think of Fedora or Ubuntu that are dogs when it comes to RAM usage), but on Arch you can configure it to consume only 450 MB of RAM: https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/660/702/810/921/104/original/3313b7ec1d3cdae4.png (here’s my Arch/XFce with a BeOS theme using 585 MB of RAM with 3 apps open). That’s a life saver on a 2 GB of RAM computer, because Youtube alone on Chrome can use up to 800 MB of RAM, while on Firefox goes up to 1.1 GB. Consider that 128 MB of RAM also goes to the integrated graphics card. But with other websites, or with a third party youtube front-end, or other apps, 2 GB can be enough (just make sure you give it a 4 GB swap file – not zswap). Finally, make sure you use only a background color, not an image. Images, uncompressed in RAM, can use up to 80 MB of RAM if they are in high-res. A plain color takes kilobytes! Also, disable the BT service and any other service you don’t use via XFce’s startup utility. That one takes 45 MB alone, it’s a dog… Load it only when you need it.