Switching from Ubuntu to Linux Mint
Ubuntu was running slow on my old personal laptop. Previously I had turned to Lubuntu, but I read online that Linux Mint has slighly better performance on low-powered devices. So with a free morning I decided to give that a go.
Setup steps:
- Customized the colors and wallpaper
- Switched trackpad scroll from “Reversed” to normal (i.e. down goes down)
- Installed some key programs with Software Manager
- Removed some bundled software that I won’t need
- Set up a custom search engine in the browser
- Installed git with
apt - Installed Node with
nvm - Set up SSH for GitHub
- Cloned this repo and started writing
First impressions:
- It seems to run faster than Ubuntu
- It generally looks good (though I’m not sold on the “LM” icon)
- The window management is nice
Issues:
- I first installed VS Code with Software Manager, but 1) the terminal was not
loading the correct shell, and 2) the icon was non standard. I downloaded the
.debdirectly from VS Code and installed to fix those problems.
Open questions:
- How can I get an emoji picker?
- How do I configure the panel clock to use 12-hour time?
Notes on improving the process for me:
- I haven’t setup settings sync for VS Code, and getting everything running from scratch isn’t fun. Figure out how to do that for the future.