What is perfect?
Only you can make your install perfect, but we can show you a few pointers towards desktop satori.
thankfully, installing Linux isn’t the perilous adventure it used to be. Gone are the days where even if you followed the instructions you’d carefully downloaded, printed and annotated (because you only had one computer and it was entirely likely to be deprived of network or GUI access for hours to come), there was still a chance your machine would end up broken.
Today, most Linux installs happen without a hitch and the whole process takes about five minutes. On any given day our hard-working writers (who’s that? – Ed) may have installed Linux twice before breakfast. Still, we get enough angry or bewildered letters every month to understand that sometimes things don’t go to plan. Even when they do, one is often left with a few gripes and niggles that aren’t easily remedied. Often the solution is simple, but getting to it involves hours of trawling through log files or Linux fora. Well, we’ve put in those hours of trawling and combined the fruits of those labours with the years of experience of Team Lxf to bring you our guide to perfecting your Linux install.
If you already have a perfectly serviceable Linux install, but not a perfect install, don’t worry. There’s probably no need to re-install and lose your precious settings. Your existing install can be tweaked, maybe even perfected, by following tips and exploring variations thereof in this feature. It’s a little tricky if, say, you decide you want to move your existing root filesystem into an LVM partition, whereas setting up LVM is trivially easy to do if you’re doing a fresh install.
On the other hand, moving /home to a separate partition, something commonly thought to require re-installing, is actually pretty straightforward and at a pinch can be done without even rebooting. We’ll show you how to do it using the Mint live environment.
Users continue to enjoy Mint’s Cinnamon desktop (or MATE if you like) as an alternative to the now-dead Unity. Gnome 3 – the most contentious of desktops – and indeed Ubuntu’s customisation of it is also perfectly useable these days. Whatever your desktop preferences, we’ll show you how to install Gnome and a few other desktop environments later on.