I'm all in

2025-11-28

I spent the afternoon today getting my main work computer switched over to Mint. I had started getting the blue screen of death on the Windows installation a while back and had moved anything important to external hard drives, so it didn’t take long to conclude I was ready to wipe Windows.

Shutting Windows down for the last time was exciting. I was so ready to be done with it.

While the install with the laptop ended up getting pretty involved, installing Mint on the work computer was extremely easy. I merely used the thumb drive with Mint on it to boot up Linux and go though the installer. Not long after I was using Mint and Windows was gone.

I did notice that my mouse felt a little laggy. When I dragged windows from screen to screen it felt a little slow or glitchy. ChatGPT helped me quickly diagnose what was going on and my GPU was just plain old and the drivers installed were not the best. We tried to run a different kernel version and different driver, but it stopped running two of my three monitors and everyone on the primary got huge and wasn’t displaying correctly.

Long story short I got things back on the original arrangement that Mint booted up in. We then loaded up XFCE and turned off something (can’t remember) - It cut RAM usage in half and everything feels perfect now.

I will be upgrading my GPU soon, but XFCE should help me have a decent experience until that GPU gets replaced.

This current work computer will end up being a home server project once I build my new work computer. So it’s nice to get it running on Linux, get some experience and kinks worked out before I take that project on and build the new work computer.

Having a blast learning all of this. What is interesting is that I didn’t realize the WHM/cPanel servers I run for work are just user friendly interfaces for using Linux to host websites. You’d think I would have connected those dots prior to this, but I spend a lot of time focused on WordPress, specific of WHM/cPanel and caring about anything outside of those things is just not in the scope of what I do normally. We have support teams that handle that higher level work and it’s insulated me from what the reality is in the background. Like the WordPress of Linux.

Having fun. Going to work more on moving into Mint tomorrow.