I’d suggest you go with companies that offer Linux laptops, e.g. System76, Tuxedo, Framework, and a couple more. Failing that, get a Thinkpad of 1-2 years ago. Failing that, get a DELL from 5 years ago (before the new intel webcams). Just make sure the screen has enough resolution, and you get 16 GB of RAM. Anything else (e.g. cpu, gpu) is enough for Linux to work adequately. Just give it RAM.

I wouldn’t suggest you buy a random new laptop, because even if they might “mostly” work, there will be parts that probably don’t, e.g. the fan controls, the webcams etc. Linux can’t support the latest and greatest, unless the manufacturer made sure of it.

Qemu/kvm is the default way of running a VM on Linux. Virtualbox or winapps or vmware are secondary options.

Onlyoffice is a newer kid on the block compared to libreoffice/openoffice. Yes, it’s web based but it operates as if its a native app. It works well, and it has very good Ms office compatibility. So definitely download its .appimage and try it out. You don’t lose anything to try it out. It’s super easy to run: you download the appimage, you right click on the file to go to its properties and make it executable, and then you can run it. Test it with your files to make sure it supports them well.

Either use qemu to run Windows in a VM, so you can run Office there, or use OnlyOffice, which is a free office app that has the best compatibility with MS office formats (better than libreoffice’s). Wine, winapps etc won’t work well.

I do too (endeavour os), but I prefer Mint. It just works, and it doesn’t break as easily. All my laptops are mint, all my desktops are debian-testing (the most stable rolling release around), and I have one laptop where I play around with other distros for fun.

If you use Linux Mint, it has its own redshift implementation in the new release 22.1.

I bought an A-series Intel card (A310, bought for $110), and I’m very happy with it. Very good drivers that work perfectly with Wayland, and its recent OpenCL drivers now work with Blender and DaVinci Resolve too (despite Resolve saying that it only works with nvidia or amd, the new drivers make the dedicated intel cards work too). Gaming is not too bad either, but I don’t game much.

I like it, but the microphone doesn’t work. They were supposed to make it work last summer, but the work hasn’t began for it yet. Without it, I can’t do calls to my mom, so I don’t use it anymore.

I don’t game much, so it’s smart. As long as I have the color I want (I used to shoot music videos for bands, so I’m into filmmaking), and enough ports, the only other thing that I need is to not scale. I don’t need too much refresh rate, I don’t need hdr, I don’t need ethernet, I don’t need webcams etc etc.

What you’re asking is very difficult due to resources, creating new bugs etc. The reality is, go with true and trusted hardware. Linux can not possibly support every new shiny thing. That’s Windows’ job, because that’s where the drivers are made for. And since it’s difficult to install Linux drivers manually for most users, manufacturers don’t bother with Linux at all. Especially, since Linus doesn’t care about compatibility with older kernels as much as Windows does. Either support is in the kernel, or you’ll experience problems.

Personally, all my laptops and PCs are more than 4 years old, for that reason. I often buy refurbished too. I write this in a refurbished Macbook Air from 2015, where I nuked MacOSX to run Linux Mint (with a binary broadcom wifi binary which is thankfully well supported by ubuntu). On my main PC, the only new thing I bought was an Intel gfx A- card, a 2 years old card, but I knew it had support before I bought it.

And even then, if it’s some weird thing, e.g. some over-complicated sound capture device, gaming mouse with a thousand buttons, etc etc (in other words, non-standard hardware), don’t expect great support for it, even if the years are passed. Stay with vanilla hardware to be compatible. If you had bought a 60 Hz 4k monitor, you wouldn’t have had problems and you would have saved money. Personally, the only feature I look in monitors these days (apart from good color and enough ports), is that they are 32" instead of the usual 27", so that I don’t have to use scaling (which creates yet another problem with Linux). I use 4k in its 100% resolution, fitting lots of windows in it, and not destroying my eyes because they’re well visible.

Yes, this is known. They do the same for Chromium. If you want a browser from ubuntu, it’s going to be a snap.

Server for various open source games that don’t require much cpu or ram. E.g. freeciv, battle for wesnoth.

Your biggest problem is the amount of RAM, not the cpu. Some Linux distros would fit nicely on 2gb with a few native apps open, but the moment you’d want to browse the web, all hell will break loose, as each tab will take hundreds of megs each (youtube takes between 600 and 1200 mb of ram). FYI, even if chrome/ium is hated in these parts, it uses less ram than firefox (there’s also a setting to use even less ram).

I’d suggest you use either Alpine Linux with xfce (240 MB of RAM on a cold boot), or even better, Q4OS with the Trinity Desktop (fork of KDE), 350 MB of RAM. The advantage of Q4OS is that it’s a debian, so it can run lots of .deb files made for debian. Alpine is cool and all, but it has bugs on the desktop (some of its package management has dependency problems).

A tip: to save ram, don’t use background images, only a single color. You can save up to 50 MB of RAM that way, depending on the image you’d be using.

1. You’re not the first person to not be able to make nvidia work on Mint. Here’s another one I found earlier today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl6OBIQl_MI

2. Use gparted to assign label names to your partitions/drives, and you might need to edit /etc/fstab. More info here, and there are more such forum posts to read through: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=344652

Overall, I’d say that Mint is the best distro to start with, but if you stumble on the few bugs they have, start looking elsewhere. I’d suggest you start by trying ubuntu 24.10 instead of mint.

I’ve been using Linux since 1998 on and off, and in the last few years, exclusively. I like Debian-Testing, and Linux Mint. Nothing else seems to work as I want it, it seems.

They’re trying to kill counterculture. Pixelfed is also banned at meta’s servers.

From the developer, he said that Wayland has no way to support these features, not that he won’t support them. You need the right APIs to develop this app, and while X11 seems to have them, Wayland does not.

Linux Mint’s Cinnamon has an involved gesture pref panel, but it’s not per app, it’s system-wide. If the suggestion from the other user for touche/touchegg don’t work due to being designed for X11, you’re out of luck. What you’re asking is a bit too specialized and from what I read from the creator of touchegg on his github, is that Wayland has no way to support these features. So don’t expect it in the future either.

Under Linux, the recommended route is KVM/Qemu, with Virt-Manager as the GUI front-end for them. You will need to follow tutorials to install it correctly, as it requires special steps, e.g. adding them to specific usergroups. But once it works, it works well.

Things can go bad during an upgrade, for example the new mint 22.1 introduced some booting delay bugs that currently fills the linux mint forum with complaints. Not a big problem, and not for all users, but small hiccups can exist. So if you want to upgrade, do have a working usb. Otherwise, change the ssd inside the laptop. Or, get a “new”, refurbished laptop. I recently got an 8 GB ram laptop for $150, works fine, plenty fast for Mint, great condition, no complaints.

Which version of Mint did you install? The new version has zfs modules disabled by default, because they were creating long booting problems on people who were not even using zfs. I stumbled on the problem too, I had mint installed on a usb stick (full install) and on SOME computers, when booted, it would try to load zfs stuff, taking 1.30 minutes of trying to do some systemd job for it.I removed all zfs stuff and nothing got broken.