Mar 6, 2024

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:

1. Customized the colors and wallpaper
2. Switched trackpad scroll from “Reversed” to normal (i.e. down goes down)
3. Installed some key programs with Software Manager
4. Removed some bundled software that I won’t need
5. Set up a custom search engine in the browser
6. Installed git with apt
7. Installed Node with nvm
8. Set up SSH for GitHub
9. 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 .deb directly 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.

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