Customising and tweaking
Armed with a Minty-fresh install, it’s time to start exploring.
mint’s welcome screen has a few handy hints in its First Steps section. Most notably it would like you to set up System Snapshots, which you should do. Unlike traditional backups, these by default only back up system files, leaving it up to you to back up your home directory. The theory is that the user should have more of a clue about what’s in here and how important it is, so should manage that separately. Launch the Timeshift program from the Welcome screen, choose RSYNC, and choose a schedule and frequency that suit your requirements and disk-space forecast. Mint recommends keeping five daily and five boot snapshots – so you can revert to, say, three boots ago before you broke everything, or yesterday, when all your troubles (guilty conscience?– Ed) seemed so far away. Snapshots are stored incrementally, so while the first one will pretty much double the size of your install, subsequent snapshots will only record changed files.
If you have modern hardware, including CPUS that enjoy microcode updates or graphics cards from Nvidia, visit the Driver Manager to sort these out out. Do check out the section about the Hardware Enablement (HWE) stack later if you have driver problems. We’ll also cover adding software and firewalls later, but feel free to explore these and all the other First Steps now.
One of the reasons we are so partial (some would say sycophantically so) to Mint is that it has an excellent community and excellent documentation. You should certainly avail yourself of it by clicking the link in the Welcome application or visiting https://linuxmint. com/documentation.php. Also from the welcome screen, be sure to check out the release notes. These are kept up to date and have workarounds and fixes for common issues, so if something isn’t working right, there’s a reasonable chance the solution lies therein.
Nick Peers has a whole tutorial about installing apps in all kinds of exciting and inventive ways over on page 62, so we’ll just stick with traditional methods first of all.
Users and losers
If other people are going to be using your computer and you don’t want them installing anything or seeing your files, adding an unprivileged user is a good idea. You can do this from the main menu by going to Administration > Users and Groups. Click Add and leave the account type as Standard. Fill in the details and click Add. Click on the password field to set a password, or leave it blank if you prefer. You can also, via Administration > Login Window > Users, auto-login the unprivileged user after a specified delay.
Note that anyone who has access to the machine can still potentially cause havoc without needing root privileges, so exercise caution around allowing password-less logins. It would be silly to have all your browser passwords saved in an account that anyone in the house could log into, for example. Still, it’s nice to share – allowing everyone in your household access to your Steam library, for example. Speaking of Steam, it’s very simple to install in Mint, a simple matter of
$ sudo apt install steam in fact. That will install all the required libraries and install the Steam launcher. You’ll then find a Steam icon in the Games section of the main menu. This will download the client to your home directory, where it will hereafter take care of updating itself.
Valve’s Steam Play technology means you can now run Windows-only titles on Linux without messing
around with Wine. This is good news for us, because if you check the release notes for Mint 19.2 there’s some issues with the Wine 4.0 packaging. Steam Play bundles Valve’s custom version of Wine (which incorporates the DXVK and D9VK Directx-to-vulkan translators) dubbed Proton, and brings some 6,000 titles to Linux at the time of writing. A chunk of these are AAA releases, and many of them have thousands of Platinum ratings on https://protondb.com, which tracks all kinds of stats.
You may not like the idea of proprietary gaming, or it may just be the icky DRM in the Steam ecosystem that bothers you. Either way, there are alternatives. Check out the Games section of the Software Manager for some quality open-source titles. And check out John Knight’s awesome Lutris feature in Lxf250 for info on wrangling Wine in a different way. If you do want Drmfree games, pay a visit (and a donation) to the Humble store and www.gog.com.
Gaming is a good way to find problems with your graphics drivers, so you may run into performance issues. If you’re using Nvidia hardware, the Driver Manager should set up the nasty proprietary driver for you; the open-source Nouveau driver is pretty much no use for gaming with newer hardware, but progress is being made for older cards, in part thanks to Nvidia recently releasing some hardware documentation. For AMD and Intel graphics – both of which have excellent open source drivers in the Linux kernel – development is pretty rapid, so you may find things work better if you opt for the Hardware Enablement (HWE) stack, which you can read about over there on the left.
It’s also possible to install newer versions of Mesa and other open source graphics libraries from PPAS. These are unsupported third-party builds, though, and we wouldn’t recommend using them unless you are willing to accept the risk of rebooting to a blank screen of dread and hopelessness. The index of the Oibaf graphics drivers PPA (https://launchpad. net/~oibaf/+archive/ubuntu/graphics-drivers)
proudly announces that it has been providing open graphics drivers since 2011. Using the latest Nvidia driver used to involve a different PPA, but now these are offered directly from the driver manager.
Multi-monitor set ups have traditionally been a great form of strife for Linux users, but Mint makes easy work of this. The overworked editorial staff at Future Towers favour a second monitor rotated to portrait aspect for creating best-in-class (this!–ed) content. This is perfectly simple to set up from Preferences > Display; you can also just open the menu, either by clicking on it or hitting the Windows key, and type the first few letters of whatever you’re looking for. Cinnamon makes reasonably easy work of HIDPI scaling, and if you’re lucky it will activate that for you on high resolution screens. It worked like a dream for us when we connected Jonni’s XPS13, with its precious 3200x1800 QHD panel, to a humble portrait monitor (1024x1280).
You can control scaling manually from Preferences > General, though only 2x scaling is available. For fractional scaling support, you can mess with some Dconf settings, but the results are generally haphazard. You may find a different desktop environment plays nicer with your displays, and there’s a whole section on doing that over the page. If you have a touchscreen or find it easier to use a visual keyboard then the Onboard
ditch the steam dream? “You may not like the idea of proprietary gaming, or it may be the icky DRM in the Steam ecosystem that bothers you. There are alternatives.”
utility in the Universal Access menu may be helpful. There are a number of Accessibility options, including a screen reader, desktop magnification and sticky keys available from the Preferences menu.
While we’re up late putting the final touches to this feature, we’d be remiss not to mention Redshift, which you can find in the Accessories menu. It reddens your monitor’s colour temperature in the small hours, reducing eye strain – and also possibly possession by the creatures that abound around All Hallows’ Eve at the witching hour. But we make no guarantees for either of these things.