Welp, I finally did it. I finally done did it. Not only did I get my brother's laptop running Linux Mint, I have installed Linux Mint on my laptop and my desktop is soon to follow.
Something like this, right? Isn't this how it works? I thought so. I know this seems a bit like I'm going whole hog into this, but it's not exactly a sudden decision. Allow me to back up a bit and explain. Firstly, I am NOT a fan of Windows 11. I do not like what they're doing and what they're forcing on their customers. I'd rather stay on Windows 10 and wait for Windows 12 to come along. But unfortunately, we can't have nice things, because Windows 10 is going end of support next year. When that happens, I don't want my computer to be anywhere near the Internet.
Second, my brother's laptop is a hand me down from me. I bought it in 2017, and it served me well. I hear the shit out of it, and I know it. But it was still a solid PC, capable of plenty of things my brother would get up to. But eventually, it got to the point where it wasn't updating because of a glitch, and I couldn't reinstall Windows because...there was something that caused it to not want to install. The crazy part was that I even had a new SSD and couldn't get it to work with the computer, even if I installed Windows 10 on it. I still don't know why it wouldn't work. Anyway! I had heard Linux Mint was gaining a lot of traction for being close to the Windows experience and easy for the renewal public to use. On a lark, I was like, sure, let's give this a try. So I set up a live USB and tried running it on the laptop. It fired up, it ran smoothly, and I was even able to install it to the SSD! And oh boy, did this computer FLY!
I opened it up and did a little spring cleaning on the innards, just to make sure it was going to be ready for my brother. He just got it back this Monday.
Setting up his computer got me thinking about my systems. After a little backing up and prep work, I decided to try it out on my laptop first before anything else. I was able to install it without too much hassle. I had to disable Intel RST, but that wasn't bad. Everything works out of the box, with one catch. I can get audio through the headphone jack, but not through the speakers. This is apparently a known issue with Asus ROG Strix laptops and ALSA, so I'm not going to fuss too much over it. I tried the live USB on my desktop tonight, and I can find my secondary drives and everything. I'm thinking a little bit of cleanup/backup and I'm going to move my desktop over to Linux Mint as well!