this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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Recommendations for after installing Linux (Mint) coming from Windows for best practices for a casual user ? (kbin.earth)
submitted 1 day ago by veggay@kbin.earth to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I finally bit the bullet and I'm giving Linux a second try, installed with dual boot a few days ago and making Linux Mint my default from now on.

There are a lot of guides and tips about the before and during the transition but not for after, so I was hoping to find some here.

Some example questions but I would like to hear any other things that come to mind:

I read that with Mint if you have a decent computer you don't need to do a swap partition? So I skipped that, but I'm not sure if I'd want to modify that swap file to make it bigger, is that just for giving extra ram if my hardware one is full? Because I have 48GB of ram and if I look into my System Monitor it says Swap is not available.

Was looking at this other post, and the article shared (about Linux security) seems so daunting, it's a lot. How much of it do I have to learn as a casual user that's not interested in meddling with the system much? Is the default firewall good enough to protect me from my own self to at least some degree? I was fine with just Windows Defender and not being too stupid about what I download and what links I click.

I was also reading about how where you install your programs or save your data matters, like in particular partitions or folders, is that just like hardcore min-maxing that's unnecessary for the average user that doesn't care to wait half a second extra or is it actually relevant? I'm just putting stuff in my Home folder.

Connected to the last two points: in that Linux Hardening Guide lemmy post I shared the TL;DR includes "Move as much activity outside the core maximum privilege OS as possible"... how do I do that? is that why people have separate partitions?

Downloaded the App Center (Snap Store) and I was surprised there was even a file saying to not allow it... why is that? Is it not recommended? Is it better to download stuff directly from their websites instead?

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[–] TriangleSpecialist@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

EDIT: Just saw that Malik already did mention this more succinctly. Please feel free to ignore me.

ORIGINAL COMMENT: The comments here already cover a good bit, esp. with the link to Piotr's blog post.

However I don't see anyone reacting to your mention of the snap store.

If you want some details about that, you can read here: https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.html

But in a few words, distributing software is kinda of a mess in Linux at first glance, for various technical reasons.

To caricature, you used to only install the packages from your distribution (mint for you) repositories, and if a program wasn't in it, you had to either compile it or jump through other hoops.

Then came other formats which made distributing software across Linux distros easier, with some caveats. Two notable ones are Snap and Flatpak.

Snap was made by the guys behind Ubuntu and mint is an offshoot of Ubuntu that made the willful decision to not do snaps by default after a number of fiascos.

My advice would be: try installing software through the normal mint repositories, ideally the non Flatpak version. If it does not exist there or is buggy or whatever, consider the Flatpak. Only failing that should you look into snap IMO.

[–] laurelraven@lemmy.zip 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I would say Flatpak is a good choice if you want or need features in the latest version of a package that isn't in the version Mint runs, which is typically based on the current Ubuntu LTS version (or whichever one was current for the Mint version you're on).

The main drawbacks are size on disk and the ability to work with other apps and the system, but neither issue is as bad as they're typically made out to be... If you're only installing one or two Flatpaks, they'll seem massive compared to installing the version from apt repos, but that's because they need to bring in supporting packages which are used by other Flatpaks, so if you use several of them, the space for each is a lot closer to the apt/direct installed version.

And the permissions, which can be annoying if you run into an issue with them, are typically defaulted to something that works correctly for each package, so you likely won't need to worry about that hardly ever.

But otherwise... Yeah, if you don't know why you'd want the Flatpak version and it's in the Mint apt repos/system install, go with system install. Switch to Flatpak if you're finding features you want missing that are in newer versions.

But they're shouldn't really be any reason to use Snaps on Mint.

[–] veggay@kbin.earth 1 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

There are plenty of reasons why one would use Snaps on Mint... I've been using it for like 2 days and so far I got: Blender, Godot, and Signal. Blender has an older version, Godot has a super old version, and Signal isn't included in Software Manager. Outside of snap I manually downloaded Material Maker.

People keep telling me snaps are not needed and that I should find everything in the official repo and whatnot but that's just wrong generalized assumptions from what I see, neither of those 3 programs are too niche either. There are plenty of people out there that do things outside of web browsing and file management in their computers, I'm so confused why Linux out of all communities would ignore hobbies with specialized software exist, game dev even

[–] Kory@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 hours ago

Signal is included as Flatpak. You have to enable "untrusted Flatpaks" (or whatever the wording is) in the Software Manager settings.

It was a controversial thing Mint added not long ago. Discussing this in detail would derail the post though.

[–] TriangleSpecialist@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

For signal, you can add their PPA As explained here

For Godot, their website has an AppImage. This is a case where I'd say it makes sense not to have it being automatically updated, because if you work on a video game for the kind of time frame that they usually require, you want to decide when to upgrade your game engine (or not to at all) as it may break your current project. But you know your needs, just thought I'd explain the rationale for that particular one.

For Blender... Yeah if the version is outdated and you want automatic upgrades then Snap works. Maybe someone could chime in with another recommendation but that sounds sensible to me.