Last night I decided to try installing Kubuntu again. I first deleted the EFI partition that had weirdly been created on my backup HDD that I mainly use for bird photographs. The creation of this partition is osmething that I missed before during a previous attempt.
I then ran the Kubuntu installer, selected my secondary SSD and it correctly created an EFI partition on that. When I restarted, the (somewhat ugly) Grub menu appeared, allowing me to select Kubuntu or Windows. Woo.
But now I think I’d like to try Mint again, I think I prefer Cinammon over KDE. I am never satisfied. 😛
I thought my new PC would be well-prepared for Linux–it has an AMD CPU and an AMD GPU, just like Linux distros love.
And in reality, I have installed a few distros with some success:
Linux Mint, my old standby
Kubuntu (Ubuntu, but with the KDE environment)
KDE Neon (for when you want the very latest KDE)
Pop_OS (to try out the Cosmic DE1Desktop Environment)
The problem in each case was a variation of one of the following:
The distro would not see my Windows 11 install and thus not create a proper dual-boot setup.
The distro WOULD see Windows 11, but would still not create a dual boot setup, either by error or design (some distros will not do this without you going in with a hammer and fixing it yourself).
This would lead to things like having to mash the F8 key when switching OSes, which is a pain compared to a nice Grub menu. I faffed about on several of the distros, convinced I could sort it out. I could not.
I tried a bunch of things to help distros see Windows 11, from disabling fast boot, to twiddling with various BIOS settings, to unplugging USB drives. None of this has made any difference.
I thought about taking the SSD from my old PC with Linux Mint on it and adding it to the new PC, but this has its own problems:
Probably needing to run some kind of boot repair to get Grub working properly.
The old system has an Nvidia card and I don’t know how gracefully Mint would handle suddenly running on an AMD system before the right drivers could be installed.
Also, opening up both PCs and moving the drive is just a hassle, and I’m kind of reaching my hassle limit.
So at the moment I’m at a standstill. I think I might try either Mint or Kubuntu again. Mint I know will not recognize Windows 11, and the manual partioning seems weirdly uncooperative. It is very possible this is a me issue. Or I might try Kubuntu again, which has generally been a smoother experience. I’ve even thought about nuking Windows 11 altogether, but I don’t have replacements for all the programs I use quite yet, so I’d prefer to dual boot for now.
I’ll probably decide on how I next want to faff about in the next few days.
Until then, here is a penguin, but not the Linux penguin.
I have a new PC. It’s mere months old, and yet already Windows 11 is bugging out and acting weird. Some examples:
The context menu you get by right-clicking will randomly switch between the new Windows 11 style and the older version used in Windows 10.
Snipping Tool will sometimes fail to open, producing a dialog to find another app in the Microsoft Store (trying again usually works).
Other random applications will just stop working, needing to be ended via Task Manager. The main culprit remains File Explorer, which will occasionally stop responding, even when opening a window with as few as two files in it. Sometimes it eventually recovers, sometimes it just needs a full restart.
General snappiness is already eroding as Windows does whatever it does to make everything slower.
Even the usually sturdy PowerToys sometimes has its tools fail to work (like Preview) until you recite the proper incantation.
Anyway, rather than just complaining, this may finally inspire me to move the drives from the old PC into the new one, and get a proper dual boot system going again. That way I can install Windows XP, a stable operating system.
Just kidding.
(Although it wasn’t bad once you had all three service packs and patches installed.)
I’m going to install some Linux distro. My short list is:
Linux Mint (I’m most familiar with it)
Kubuntu (because I like KDE Plasma and this is one of the more mainstream distros to use it)
??? A lot of others could go here. My bootable USB stick is ready.
Added an ISO for Linux mint 22.2 (along with a few others)
Booted from the USB stick
Ran the Mint installer
Unmounted the drives when prompted
Chose the “Something else” option and confirmed by running Disks that it had correctly chosen to use the 2 TB external Samsung SSD.
Installed and done!
It seems to be running fairly decently. I’ll tweak a bunch of stuff (I need to disable Secure Boot to get it to recognize refresh rates higher than 120 Hz, for starters) and see how it goes. Before installing Mint, I also had a look at Kubuntu for the first time and I liked what I saw, but I’ll stick to Mint for now and do more distro-hopping somewhere down the line.
On my new PC (I’ll have another post soon on what I’ve installed and choices I’ve made/avoided this time around), I have the following drives:
A 2 TB Samsung SSD (main drive)
A 1 TB WD drive (secondary)
A 2 TB Samsung external SSD (no specific purpose yet)
An 8 TB HDD (backup/camera photos)
A 4 TB NAS (backup, various files I want accessible from multiple devices)
I have Windows 11 Pro set up on the main drive and have been planning on setting up another dual boot system, using Linux Mint again, as I did on my older PC. Somewhat randomly, I chose to use the external SSD for Mint.
I booted from a live Mint USB stick and went through the installation. I let it choose to automatically configure the dual boot after verifying that it would install Mint to the external SSD.
Or so I thought.
The install took a very long time. I was patient, I let it do its thing. At the end, it prompted me to remove the install media (USB stick) and hit ENTER to restart. I did, expecting to see the GRUB menu where I would have 10 seconds (by default) to choose Mint, Windows or enter the BIOS.
Instead, I very briefly saw mention of hitting F2 to get into the BIOS, then it loaded into Windows. A survey of all drives showed none had Linux Mint on them. The USB stick, however, is asking to be formatted in Windows, which leads me to believe that Mint installed on the USB stick.
This would seem like a very silly thing to do, but it would explain the very long install time. Why would it install to the USB stick? I do not know.
What I am contemplating doing, though, is taking the 1 TB SATA SSD in my old PC–which has Mint installed–and putting it in the new one, then running Boot Repair to get the GRUB menu working properly. Maybe.
After several false starts (I haven’t documented earlier attempts), it almost feels like the new PC is trying to reject Linux–or at least Mint. Maybe I can try another distro again.
A note, to start: My Mac Studio has largely sat idle or even powered off for most of 2025. I’m not sure why, exactly, but at some point I just found I didn’t enjoy using macOS anymore. It could be as simple as I’m much more used to the things that annoy me on Windows. Whatever the case, I will not be including Mac software below.
I will also not be listing any phone apps.
What I will be listing:
Software I use in Windows 11
Software I use in Linux Mint
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) I use in both (or even the Mac, should I turn it back on)
Windows 11
Browser: Firefox. Backup: Vivaldi.
Diary/Journal: Diarium
Tasks: TickTick
Email: Fastmail (I use the web-based version)
Blogging: WordPress (I have tried many alternatives, none have stuck so far)
Text Editor: This is complicated. I can’t make up my mind, so I’m dabbling with all of these to varying degrees:
Obsidian
Notepad (built-in Windows app)
Notepad++
Zed
Messaging: Signal
Group chat: Discord
Social media: I am only on Mastodon now, I use the Phanpy web app as the client.
Music: The built-in Windows Media Player
Word Processor: I don’t use one much these days, but when I do, it’s LibreOffice Writer.
Fiction writing, with the caveat that I haven’t done much for the past few years:
Scrivener
novelWriter
Photo editing:
Affinity Photo
Photos (the built-in app)
Luminar Neo
Drawing: I do this on a tablet now, so nothing here
Audio editing: Audacity (I rarely do audio editing, though)
Video editing: DaVinci Resolve (I rarely do video editing)
RSS reader: Good question! I keep flipping through a bunch.
Read later: Folio (browser extension for Firefox)
The apps listed above that are paid:
Diarium (one-time purchase through the Microsoft Store)
TickTick (optional yearly subscription to open more features)
Affinity Photo (one-time purchase. This was before Affinity Studio launched, which is completely free but gates AI features behind a Canva subscription)
Luminar Neo (one-time purchase)
Scrivener (one-time purchase)
Linux Mint
Browser: Firefox. Backup: Vivaldi.
Diary/Journal: Zed
Tasks: TickTick (web version, as no native Linux version exists)
Email: Fastmail (I use the web-based version)
Blogging: WordPress
Text Editor: This is complicated. I can’t make up my mind, so I’m dabbling with all of these to varying degrees:
Obsidian
Sublime Text
Zed
Messaging: Signal
Group chat: Discord
Social media: I am only on Mastodon now, I use the Phanpy web app as the client.
Music: Rhythmbox (included with Mint). Backup: VLC Player.
Word Processor: LibreOffice Writer (included with Mint)
Fiction writing, with the caveat that I haven’t done much for the past few years:
Scrivener (I have the Windows version running through Lutris)
novelWriter
Photo editing:
Pix (included with Mint)
Drawing: I do this on a tablet now, so nothing here
Audio editing: Audacity (I rarely do audio editing, though)
Video editing: I have not done this on Mint.
RSS reader: Newsflash
Read later: Folio (browser extension for Firefox)
As you can see, there is a lot of overlap with Windows, which shows how much Linux software has matured in recent years. The one place I feel it lags is in photo/graphics editing (no, I will not use Gimp, the interface just repels me, for some reason1Also, they really should just change the name.).
Paid programs in Linux Mint are the same as Windows.
I think I covered all major categories, but if I’ve forgotten something, I’ll edit it in later.
Last night, when I should have been getting ready for bed, I instead decided to fix my grub bootloader, which was displaying Linux Mint as Ubuntu. Easy to do in Linux Mint itself, as I already had previously installed a grub customizer.
I rebooted from Windows 11 and the grub menu came up, showing Ubuntu, as expected. I selected it and Mint loaded…but something was wrong. My second monitor stayed off and when the desktop loaded, it was locked to a resolution of 1920×1080 instead of the native 2560×1440.
Before diving into troubleshooting, I opted to just restart again first. This time, the grub menu correctly listed Linux Mint 22.2, which I was not expecting. But the one monitor issue persisted. The second monitor had just been working in Windows 11, so I didn’t think this was a hardware issue.
Again, I avoided troubleshooting (it was late, as mentioned, and I didn’t want to start going down rabbit holes), and instead went into the Driver Manager and did a very Windows thing in these types of situations–I updated the drivers, specifically the Nvidia drivers for my RTX 2070, sticking with the newer (and recommended) set. I rebooted again. The grub menu still said Linux Mint 22.2 and the monitors worked correctly when the desktop loaded. I had to tweak a few settings, like refresh rate, but everything was otherwise back to normal.
Then I went to bed, forgot about technology, and had a good sleep.
This morning, everything is still working as expected.
Hopefully this is the last of my PC drama for a while. I’m going to start speccing out a new system again. This one is closing in on seven years old, and I think it’s trying to tell me something, the computer equivalent of “duct tape can’t fix everything” or something like that.
This has nothing to do with food preparation. If only it did.
As mentioned a few days back, I was playing around with a few Linux distros. Most of the well-established ones allow you to install them alongside other operating systems (usually Windows, but could be another Linux distro). One of the ones I tinkered with was Pop!_OS, which is Ubuntu-based, and I forgot it does not do this.
What it does is it declares itself the One True OS and the only way to access anything else is to mash the F8 key when booting up and choosing a boot partition, like some kind of caveman.
I’d had this happen once before (probably the last time I messed around with Pop!_OS) but couldn’t remember the details on how to fix it, so off I went to the interweb. I’m recording the process now for the inevitable time I do this yet again.
First, grub is actually GRUB and is an acronym for GRand Unified Bootloader and the version I’m using is GRUB 2. You can read a little more about it here.
By not supporting grub and doing its own thing, Pop!_OS would just boot automatically, never giving me the usual menu and 10-second (default) time to choose which OS to run after a reboot.
To get my grub working again, I had to repair the grub using these steps:
Boot using a Linux Mint live CD (in this case, actually an ISO file living on a USB stick).
Open the Terminal and install a program called Boot-Repair.
Command: sudo apt install boot-repair
Update Boot-Repair, then run it.
Important: Choose Advanced Options and make sure I select the right partitions that Mint is on (in this case, it has its own internal SSD) and copy and paste the necessary commands into the Terminal when prompted.
Remove the USB stick and reboot.
NOTE: Since I still had a working Mint install, I could have mashed F8, booted into Mint and installed Boot-Repair and run it from my actual copy of the OS, rather than from the USB stick, but I only figured this out later, because my brain likes me doing things the hard way, at least the first time. More here.
It worked and I have my boot menu back. It was even nice enough to keep Pop!_OS listed after it was acting like a punk and trying to take over. The only hiccup is Boot-Repair sees Linux Mint as Ubuntu, as it is an Ubuntu derivative. Unless I actually install Ubuntu itself again, this isn’t an issue, though I can use a graphical grub editor to tweak the name if it really bothers me (it will probably eventually other me).
In the end, it was a hassle, but now I’m both better prepared and (hopefully) smarter about this for the future.
I’m still toying with making my next PC Linux-only, which would mean no need for grub at all. I feel I’m pretty close to that now, as I find working in Mint pleasant and Windows 11 regularly annoys me (to be fair, it has a bunch of stuff I really like, but it’s akin to a plate of yummy food where you have to keep picking out little rocks before you can enjoy it1Or whatever analogy you prefer. All analogies kind of suck.).
I have an external 2 TB Samsung SSD and wasn’t using it for anything in particular, so I loaded up some of the better-known or regarded Linux distros and tried each in turn to see how they fared.
Bazzite: Billed as the distro for gamers, this took a very long time to install and when it finally did, I kept getting odd error messages and quirky behaviour. I tried installing again and it booted to a blank desktop, with only the mouse pointer visible. Could be my system, but whatever it was, my experiment with Bazzite ended here.
Pop_OS: I installed the beta, which is using the also-beta Cosmic desktop environment (DE). It seemed fine, but I decided I didn’t want to mess around with a beta after all. I’ll try it again once it’s a regular release.
Fedora: The KDE version. The default wallpaper is weirdly unattractive, but it otherwise it was perfectly fine. No issues stood out, but overall it felt a bit bland. Not a bad choice, though.
Ubuntu: I have played around with Ubuntu before and the setup was fast and polished. I am unconvinced that Gnome is better than KDE for the desktop, it’s more just different. However, I got further with Ubuntu than all the others, so it was doing something right. I missed the desklets from Mint, but other than that, everything else seemed to work well.
I’ll keep Ubuntu for now and tinker with it some more, but none of these have convinced me to move on from Linux Mint just yet, partly because of the time I’ve invested in customizing Mint, and also in part because none of them do anything better enough to woo me away, even though there are bits and pieces I like about each distro (except Bazzite).
One plus: All distros now use the grub loader to make it easy to dual (or triple) boot between Windows and one or more Linux versions, so it’s relatively painless to try them out.
First, the good news, which started with Very Bad News.
I got Jeff a Lenovo YOGA 2-in-1 laptop a few months back to replace the aging and decrepit 2017 iPad Pro I gave him when I got a new one in 2020. It has worked OK since, but there have been a few little glitches and weirdness. I was unsure how much was to blame on the hardware, Windows or moon phases.
I got my answer a few days ago when the laptop booted up to an obscure Bitlocker error. I did not realize Bitlocker was even on–it’s activated by default on the Windows 11 install. Researching the error, I was not able to find a reliable solution. Jeff gave the thumbs up to the “nuke from orbit” option. I selected the Windows reset option that blows everything away. It produced an error message with no description other than “an error occurred.” I then offered to install Linux Mint. He said go ahead.
I prepped a Mint USB stick.
I inserted the stick and booted from it.
I chose the Install Linux Mint option on the desktop.
Linux Mint installed and was ready in significantly less time than it took to get to the Windows 11 desktop after unboxing the laptop–and Windows 11 is pre-installed.
Mint automatically recognized the Brother printer once it connected to the Wi-Fi. The touchpad was recognized, as was the included pen when using the built-in drawing app, cleverly named Drawing.
Everything is working just fine. The laptop, to me, feels snappier and more responsive. It may actually be a better laptop now with Mint than the bloated mess that is Windows 11. This is good news.
Now, the bad news. On my PC, I dual boot between Windows 11 and Mint. Mint has generally given me no issues, but at some point recently and issue did arise. It may have been an update or something else, I’m not sure. It’s not Bitlocker, at least.
The issue seems to be related to Firefox, the built-in browser (and my browser of choice) and YouTube. At some point, while watching a YouTube video, the whole system will freeze and continue to freeze intermittently. The only way to fix it once it starts showing this behaviour is to shut down Firefox.
The issue might be Firefox. It might be YouTube. It might be something else. I have done no troubleshooting. What I have done is started testing to see if the issue replicates in Vivaldi, my backup browser of choice. So far, it has not happened with Vivaldi. This makes me sad, because I want to keep using Firefox in Mint, but I also really don’t want to spend time troubleshooting this when a) I may spend a lot of time on it when I could be doing something productive or at least entertaining and b) I may find no actual solution. So this is bad news.
But I may do a little troubleshooting, at some point. Maybe.
Linux Mint is getting closer to being a replacement OS for me over Windows 11 and macOS whatever (the yearly updates are kind of meaningless now, it’s just a yearly dribble of new features no different from what MS does with Windows 11, just with a cute name like Sequoia attached).
But it’s still not there quite yet, which I’ll elaborate on below.
First, I’ll say this: Linux Mint (the distro I have been running for some months now as a third OS) is pleasant to use. It stays out of the way, it doesn’t constantly ask me to grant permission to everything (Macs are trending toward becoming the UAC nightmare that was the initial release of Windows Vista, sinking the user experience in favour of “security”). There are frequent updates, but they are handled with a few clicks whenever you decide to apply them. Most don’t require a system restart.
It has built in software bits like applets, extensions and desklets hat are easy to add (or remove) that help customize the experience in small, but nice ways. The look and feel of the entire OS is highly customizable. It loads fast, everything feels snappy.
At this point, the only things holding it back for me are the same as before:
Photo editing
Gaming
Journaling
Photo editing has improved and I’m experimenting with a few new programs there, such as Prima.
Gaming is also getting better, though having an Nvidia card complicates things a bit. Native gaming, when available, works great, and emulated gaming is also pretty good now. It’s not quite there, but it’s close.
Diarium (the unfortunately named journal app I use) I am running in a Windows 10 VM. The VM is a tiny bit laggy, but since I only use the app briefly in the morning and evening, it’s not a big deal. A native solution would be preferable, but seems unlikely, unless I switch to a different piece of software.
Still, I feel Linux Mint is closer than it’s ever been in terms of replacing the other OSes. If and when I get a new PC, I will likely turn this one into a dedicated Linux box and see how it goes on a rig that is 100% penguin-based.
But 2025 is the first time I’ll be spending a decent amount of time using Linux and not just tinkering or experimenting with it.
Its primary weaknesses remain the same for me:
Gaming is good, but not entirely there yet.
Graphics programs are still significantly weaker than on macOS or Windows. Some programs are reasonably powerful, like GIMP, but come hobbled with genuinely awful UIs that don’t work like any other modern program out there.
For myself, there are a few things I miss from Windows, mostly in the functionality enabled by PowerToys, like a multi-item clipboard.
But in terms of stability, speed and general use, Linux Mint 22.1, the distro I’m using, is providing a very smooth experience and I generally prefer it to Windows 11 now.
Fake edit: I found CopyQ on Linux, described thusly:
CopyQ monitors system clipboard and saves its content in customized tabs. Saved clipboard can be later copied and pasted directly into any application.
So far, it seems to be working fine.
Here’s to the Year of Linux Frequently on the Desktop.
