Your first week on Linux
Mint is installed and you’re looking at a desktop that resembles Windows closely enough to be slightly uncanny. Four jobs come first. After that, the week is mostly about unlearning.
The first hour
Set up snapshots before anything else. Mint’s guide is firm that this happens before you start using the system, and it’s right. Open the menu, go to Administration, and start Timeshift. Choose RSYNC, pick the disk to save to, and accept the schedule it suggests. Timeshift is System Restore that works. If an update or an experiment breaks something next month, you roll the system back to last Tuesday, and your documents aren’t touched either way.
Next, the shield icon beside the clock. That’s Update Manager, and the first run will have a fair amount to install. Let it.
Third is Driver Manager, also under Administration. If it lists anything, usually an NVIDIA graphics driver, take the recommended option and restart when it asks.
Last, if you weren’t online during the install or skipped the codecs box, go to Sound & Video in the menu and choose Install Multimedia Codecs. Without them some videos and music files won’t play, and the error messages won’t tell you why.
Where your things live
Your files are in your home folder, which the file manager opens by default. Inside it are Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures and Videos, named exactly as they were on Windows. There are no drive letters. An external drive or USB stick appears in the file manager’s left-hand column when you plug it in, and that’s where your backup will show up when you’re ready to copy it across.
Settings are in one place, called System Settings. After years of Windows keeping half its options in a modern app and the other half in a control panel older than the iPhone, that takes some getting used to.
The Windows key opens the menu, and you can start typing straight away to search. Copy, paste, undo and Alt+Tab are all where you left them.
Installing apps
This is the habit to change. On Windows you find a program by searching the web, downloading an installer and clicking through it, which is also how a lot of unwanted software finds its way in. On Mint you open Software Manager, search, and click Install.
Some listings say Flatpak beside them. That’s a way of packaging an app so the same version works across every kind of Linux, and most of them come from a shared catalogue called Flathub. When a program appears twice, the Flatpak one is often the newer of the two, and either will do.
Now and then an app isn’t in the store, and its maker offers a download ending in .deb. That’s Mint’s equivalent of an installer file, and double-clicking it works. Treat it the way you’d treat an .exe: fine from the company that makes the program, and not from anywhere else. The app pages on this site say which route each one uses.
Being asked for your password
Mint asks for your password whenever something wants to change the system, such as installing an app or applying updates. It’s the same idea as the Windows prompt that dims the screen and asks “Do you want to allow this?”, with the difference that a password can’t be clicked through on reflex.
If the prompt appears when you haven’t asked for anything, say no.
The things nobody mentions
Updates don’t install themselves unless you tell them to, and they never restart the computer. The shield icon changes when there’s something new, and it waits.
Mint doesn’t come with an antivirus subscription, a trial of anything, or a panel of news you didn’t ask for. The quiet is noticeable.
Your printer should be tested early, ideally in the first day or two, while you still remember how patient you promised to be. Plug it in or join it to the wifi, then look under Printers in the menu. If it isn’t found, search the exact model number with “Linux Mint” and you’ll usually land on somebody who has already solved it.
And at some point a forum answer will tell you to open the terminal and paste in a line of text. It’s a legitimate tool and there’s nothing frightening about it. But a command runs with whatever power you give it, so don’t paste one you can’t roughly explain, and be doubly careful with any that begin with the word sudo, which means “do this with full authority”.
By Friday
Put your files back from the external drive. Sign in to your browser and let the bookmarks return. Install the three or four apps you looked up earlier. Then use the computer for ordinary things and notice what’s missing, because that list is shorter and more useful than anything you could have guessed in advance.