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?

  • TriangleSpecialist@lemmy.world
    8·
    13 hours ago

    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.