I'm old. Mint 15 XFCE, I burnt an installed copy onto a thumb drive, and ran into a weird grub glitch. Asked on a Mint forum, and Clem himself (maker of Mint) wrote me a detailed how-to-fix.
Warm fuzzy feelings for Mint.
One of my favorite things about Linux is this: you can try it.
Get a thumb drive, get Rufus or Etcher.
Download Mint, Ubuntu, something with a "Live Linux".
Boot from the thumb drive, spend an hour or two surfing, clicking around, seeing if things work.
2018, you had like an 80% chance of a flawless experience.
2024, it's way higher!
Plus, the alternatives have gotten slower, more bloated, more interested in monetizing you than serving you, so even if it feels strange, and you have to relearn some stuff, more than ever, it might be worth it.
Even if it didn't work quite right, keep the thumb drive around. The number of times I've rescued an important file off of a messed up system using a thumb drive with Mint on it? You'd be surprised.
I'm no big gamer, but my gaming laptop is a Ryzen with RTX3060, and I dual boot it (Fedora and Windows 10.) I used the rpmfusion Nvidia drivers, no issue, and I get slightly better frame rates and a bit better 3D mark scores in Fedora than Windows. It's been that way since 37 or 36, I think. Palworld, Monster Hunter World and Rise, Genshin Impact (I know, I know), Borderlands, EDF 5, all work great, along with some retro stuff like City Of Heroes and EQ99. So, I guess I'd like to know why I shouldn't use Fedora with Nvidia? Also, when you say production machine, do you mean like a server?
I'm a student.
I feel like I should throw in a good word for Fedora. I run a combination of dnf and flatpak, and have a grand time, and am doing an IT diploma program aimed very solidly at Windows under Fedora. I've used Ubuntu, Mint, and Manjaro, and landed on Fedora for my desktop experience.
I'm not a windows guy, but I sync a lot of my files with NextCloud. It's free, and I'm sure someone has a way to do it seamlessly with Windows. Maybe a VirtualBox VM with NextCloud in it?
Is there a Windows implementation of Syncthing?
Those would be what I'd try.
I have a 2013 MacBook Air. No issues. I have open core legacy patcher on the Mac OS side to push me well past the cut off for the OS, but it's slow. The Ubuntu side works great still. Good battery life and the battery is still the original, I believe. I don't remember ever changing it out. Been meaning to switch to LMDE or something, but I had a number of false starts dual booting back when I did it and have been busy.
I've had success with an NTFS partition, but I've pretty much just used it like a buffer. If I want to move something from one OS to the other, in it goes, reboot, out it comes.
Never lost anything that way.
This is Ubuntu and MacOS on an ancient MacBook Air.
I've had pretty good luck with www.era.ca. I'm in their city though, so I can pick up locally, and I can return anything that doesn't work for me. They have an eBay store www.ebay.ca/str/calgarycomputerwholesale. They do sell "for parts" and "as is" though, so read the listing.
There's a store in my town called Memory Express, and I bought their generic card back in the day. I can't remember if it was vantech or Startech branded. I didn't actually buy it for that purpose, I just had it lying around. I originally bought it because my work computer had no ethernet port, and I was testing networks with it. It's funny, I seem to wander through my Linux-using experience with amazing luck. I always hear about 'no sound' or 'no wifi', and I've never run into that.
This is really lame to suggest, but I had an old Mac Mini that had a dead NIC, and I also had a USB NIC, and it ran that way for god knows how long...
Maybe 20$ and keep using the Mac Mini?
I have an old Lenovo Tiny that's running a few Docker services. It's an i5-4570t, I think? It sits in my closet next to my router and is probably covered in dust.
I was about to say something snarky about VMWare, but...
Proxmox took me a bit to get used to, but now that I have it figured out, I really like it. It's totally overkill for me, but one day...
Welcome to the club!
My Plex box is an i7-950.
Not a 9600k...
It's whatever I had lying around.
It eats more power than it needs to, but it fits a whole lotta hard disk, so I'm good!
It also shares it's library with a little VM on a Dell tiny i5-4570t which runs jellyfin.
I prefer jellyfin, the Mrs and the MIL prefer Plex.
Don't stress high end hardware, just make sure you can stuff enough disks in it to hold your library.
I bought the tiny used from an auction, and I built the Plex box back in, like, 2008 or something?
Anyways, the point is, it'll probably work fine, go cheaper if you want.
I have been in and out of Linux for years and Docker is just... Hard.
There's a thing called portainer, and it makes it so you can muck with Docker from a web browser, and that is literally all I know at this point.
Still, might be helpful?
I have some Docker stuff, and it works the way I assume my mom thinks Linux works. Someone typed fast and magic happened.
Best of luck!
I've found that, for about the last five years, if Steam and Proton won't run it just fine, Lutris will.
Heck, I fiddled around and got a copy of MS Office to run in Lutris!
Oh, also, I have my /home on a separate partition.
I rsync-ed the old /home folder onto the new partition, then modified the fstab to mount the new /home on the new drive. I found it easier to do it in a live Linux environment. It's honestly all I ever use my Ubuntu install USB for anymore. Having basic functionality on a thumb drive is a neat party trick, and gets me mucho brownie points rescuing docs off of unbootable windows systems too.
I've got a Fedora KDE system that I originally used the Nvidia direct install for, and after a couple of upgrades (35-37, somewhere in there) it all went to heck. I would recommend using the rpmfusion repo method. It's working on that same system across 37,38 and 39, no issues.
My hardware is pretty old though, GTX970.
I'm old. Mint 15 XFCE, I burnt an installed copy onto a thumb drive, and ran into a weird grub glitch. Asked on a Mint forum, and Clem himself (maker of Mint) wrote me a detailed how-to-fix. Warm fuzzy feelings for Mint.