Mint veteran here. You aren’t safe.
Nvidia will come for all of us.
Meme aside, they have been pretty stable lately. But 2023-2024 had some pretty iffy drivers for my laptop GPU.
Kernel is on the older side, but safe. You don’t really need to have the latest kernel all the time though. All those 1% performance improvements can wait.
Use Debian and install the NVIDIA driver yourself, doesn’t Mint include non-free software by default? If this is your average Joe, they probably don’t care. In my honest opinion, it should be a mandatory task for every new GNU/Linux user to learn about Free Software, the GNU Project, and libre software. I am not a fan of Mint at all.
when I first switched to linux I used mint for all of two weeks, was an awful experience and almost made me go back to windows until someone told me to try cachyos instead.
I haven’t used Mint since but I might install it on my VM to give it another crack since likely it was personal user error that made it awful for me. Just had constant issues with my nvidia gpu.
Honestly, more than a year ago nVidia drivers were absolutely nightmarish. It used to be such a frequent issue that I stopped updates for nVidia drivers until I could take a full system backup. Btrfs has been a game changer, allowing backups to automatically happen on updates and allowing you to boot into a previous state. And given the level of Linux growth through Steam/Valve pushing it nVidia seems to have been trying harder. Only one update issue this year so far and it was a simple roll back, make a change, apply updates again.
Mint veteran here. You aren’t safe. Nvidia will come for all of us.
Meme aside, they have been pretty stable lately. But 2023-2024 had some pretty iffy drivers for my laptop GPU.
Kernel is on the older side, but safe. You don’t really need to have the latest kernel all the time though. All those 1% performance improvements can wait.
Use Debian and install the NVIDIA driver yourself, doesn’t Mint include non-free software by default? If this is your average Joe, they probably don’t care. In my honest opinion, it should be a mandatory task for every new GNU/Linux user to learn about Free Software, the GNU Project, and libre software. I am not a fan of Mint at all.
when I first switched to linux I used mint for all of two weeks, was an awful experience and almost made me go back to windows until someone told me to try cachyos instead.
I haven’t used Mint since but I might install it on my VM to give it another crack since likely it was personal user error that made it awful for me. Just had constant issues with my nvidia gpu.
Honestly, more than a year ago nVidia drivers were absolutely nightmarish. It used to be such a frequent issue that I stopped updates for nVidia drivers until I could take a full system backup. Btrfs has been a game changer, allowing backups to automatically happen on updates and allowing you to boot into a previous state. And given the level of Linux growth through Steam/Valve pushing it nVidia seems to have been trying harder. Only one update issue this year so far and it was a simple roll back, make a change, apply updates again.