Not Copilot - so there's that :)

About me

I’m a curious, detail‑driven person who likes understanding how things work — and fixing them when they don’t.

I ask a lot of questions (technical....I can be a bit grey rock in social settings apparently), push back when things don’t make sense, and appreciate straight answers. I’m also someone who cares about people, community, and doing things properly. This blog is my place to share what I’m learning, what I’m building, and the occasional rant when something refuses to behave.

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My First Tentative Steps Into Linux Land - Well...not really 'first', but first as my daily desktop

I’ve spent years living in the comfortable, well‑paved suburb of Windows , where most things mostly “just work” and the rest can usually be coaxed...

My First Tentative Steps Into Linux Land - Well...not really 'first', but first as my daily desktop

I’ve spent years living in the comfortable, well‑paved suburb of Windows , where most things mostly “just work” and the rest can usually be coaxed into behaving with a reboot, a driver update, or a quiet swear under my breath. Linux, on the other hand, always felt like that mysterious neighbouring country: interesting, powerful, full of promise… but also full of people who compile their own kernels for fun.

Still, curiosity wins eventually. So I decided to take my first proper steps into Linux land — not the “I installed Ubuntu once in 2014 and panicked” kind of steps, but the real, intentional kind.

Why Linux, and why now?

Curiosity mainly. I've tinkered with Linux is the past and have a few VM's running dockers - and it's almost always a pain to get working.

So I wanted to understand the thing properly for a change — not just poke it from a distance. I figured swapping my daily driver from Windows to Linux would have to help...right? right?

Getting Started

I started a few months ago actually...and...um...forgot.

I decided the best way would be to dual boot between Windows and Linux - that way I can always come back to Windows whenever something isn't working. Besides - Excel is still kinda king and I'm not sure (yet) whether I can even get that on Linux.

High level, it involved shrinking a partition in Windows to make room. I recently added a 2nd NVMe so had decided to make that 'it'. I freed up 500GB - could have gone much more but I didn't want to risk confusing the partition with something I wanted to keep, and I didn't know if games would actually work in Linux. So 500GB seemed a reasonable compromise to start.

Then of course there's the distribution. How on Earth do you decide.

Enter MS Copilot. It basically recommended Linux Mint with Cinnamon as it has good out of the box gaming apparently (it also said Pop!/_OS which is more gaming focused, but I'd never heard of it so figured I'd stick with the first recommendation). I heard of both Mint and Cinnamon, but didn't know the difference. Cinnamon is desktop bit - the GUI, or the bit that is intentionally most windows-like. Mint is the actual Linux distribution and is based on Ubuntu - what exactly makes them different I haven't researched yet, but I know commands like 'sudo apt update' work.

I downloaded the Cinnamon Edition of Mint from here: https://linuxmint.com/download.php and proceeded to add it to the USB stick using good old Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/)

Then it's a case of booting from the USB and selecting the partition to install to. Not sure if this is a result of going to the 2nd disk, but in the BIOS of my machine I can choose between 'Windows Boot Manager' and something for Linux. I have it set to the latter, and then grub still gives me opportunity to choose Windows if I wish.

After the install, Internet browsing was working immediately. From that I just needed to install some packages.

So first up is brave browser. Follow the Debian, Ubuntu, Mint instructions here: https://brave.com/linux/

iirc the extensions came along for the ride once I added the sync'ing - this meant I had ready access to my bitwarden extension for passwords.

Next was to install Steam. TBH I'm not sure what I did or didn't do - there was about 2 months between me setting up dual boot and coming back to try Steam, because I was interstate. When I tried to open the installed steam I was getting an icon in the tasktray but it wouldn't open a GUI.

In theory it is "sudo apt install steam" from a terminal, and that's it. and again from terminal "steam" to run it. Now...being ex windows, I click steam from the menu and had a problem and had to resort to "pkill -f steam" from the terminal and the "steam". Is that because you should not run it from the menu - I don't know yet as I haven't rebooted to find out.

With Steam running I pulled down "The Alters". Proton Experimental, Steam Linux Runtime 4.0 and Steamworks Common Redistributables came along for the ride. 90 or so mins later (thanks to only having 100/40 at my place, 55GB takes a while) I had my game - and it worked perfectly straight of the bat!