this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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I'm foreseeing a spike in people asking me for help installing Linux.
He you there, totally random person. How do I install Linux?
Any experience with blood sacrifices?
Did the Linux gods see what the hardware gods had going on and decide to get in on the action?
Full guide here for Linux Mint. But the tl;dr is:
Download iso
Create bootable USB drive
Boot to that USB drive
Press next a bunch in the Mint installer
I’ve been experimenting with Linux for a year now running a home server. It’s not that hard, the other person’s comment is exactly what I did.
I used Ubuntu at first but when I fried it I figured I’d try Mint on my re-install. It’s been on Mint for about 4 weeks now.
My thoughts as a still relative newbie:
On both Ubuntu and Mint, user/group permissions are confusing to me even using the GNOME tools app. I wish I there was a better UI to set it up.
My issues are mostly to do with external drives. First of all, it’s weird that I even have to specify a mount point if I don’t want to have to memorize my drive’s device ID, but I figured that out.
Then in Ubuntu I’d reboot and my server software would lose access to the drives. If I unplugged them before rebooting and let it boot then plugged them in the server software could read but not write. So I’d have to do a sudo chmod 777 -R /external drives/ after rebooting too.
I’m having the same issue with reboots in Mint if I don’t unplug them, but if I do it now remembers the permissions now so I don’t have to do the terminal command. This may have nothing to do with the OS. Maybe I messed something up the first time. 🤷♂️ Point is: I’m not having fun dealing with external drives.
Ubuntu didn’t come with GNOME tools but Mint did. (It’s basically a set of apps for all your system settings. Command line is so annoying for this stuff.)
Aesthetically, Ubuntu reminds me of Mac OS while Mint reminds of Windows. Apparently they’re the same-ish under the hood.
I’m a Mac user and I’m not ready to switch my daily driver to Linux yet, but I’m sure I will one day.
FWIW, the permissions thing is generally fixable with fstab entries or editing mount options instead of always doing chmod. The uid/gid and umask/fmask mount options are what you're looking for. I think mint has a UI method to modify mount options for it's auto mounter, but I've not used it in a while so I can't be super specific. I'd recommend fstab for anything that's always connected and the other way for things you plug/ unplug
Thx! That's insightful! I'll go for dual boot tho.
It’s a good call. I still haven’t tried it on my main hardware, but I have an old SDD I plan to use for that sometime soon.
The laptop I’m running my server on is old, so I don’t really see a point in testing the games I usually play on it. I did try a couple low-resource games: OpenRA and 0AD; they’re fine. Steam works and Dawn of War booted up, but I haven’t done much else in that area.
I haven’t touched video or audio editing at all for the same reasons. Especially with it running server stuff in the background.
Email, web browsing, all you basic stuff works just fine. No complaints.
Well first and foremost find yourself a distro you like, I'd suggest something Debian based if your just starting out but no judgement if you want to so to speak jump in the deep end. After that you'll grab a .iso file from wherever said distro keeps such things and you'll need to learn how to 'burn' that to either a USB drive or a regular disc if you want to do it old school. Then you'll need to learn how to get to either the boot menu or BIOS on your computer in order to get it to start from the new OS you've just plugged in. After that the install menu on the new distro should walk you through the rest. Don't worry, I know it sounds foreboding but I first did it as a kid, it's easier than it looks.