Ex-technologist, now an artist. My art: http://www.eugenialoli.com/

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • 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.






  • 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.



  • 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.



  • Linux Mint will work wonderfully on it. It has 4 GB RAM and a cpu that scores 1220 CPU points on passmark benchmark. That’s more than enough to run Mint with Cinnamon – which is very Windows-like, and the recommended distro for windows users.

    I’d suggest you install it for him, and you configure it as it should (go through the prefs). Also, disable a couple of startup things found in the utility in the prefs, e.g. the wizard and the reports, to save ram. To save even more ram, install chrome for your friend (I know, I know, Firefox is there, but Chrome uses less ram on youtube – almost 2/3s). On a 4 gb laptop, for someone who specifically wants to use youtube, that matters. And along with it, ublock origin on the medium level, so it can block youtube ads.



  • Eugenia@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlMint 22 won't suspend automatically
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    23 days ago

    That seems like a policy kit issue. Maybe the system doesn’t have the permissions to do it automatically. XFce usually has such problems in other distros, but I haven’t heard one on mint with cinnamon.

    Another thing to look at is what graphics card you’re using. With nvidia you can get some weird suspend issues.

    Finally, install a newer kernel to see if that fixes the issue.


  • Eugenia@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlWhy is copying to USB stick on Linux so damn slow?
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    24 days ago

    That’s just the state of things. I have experienced this as well, trying to copy a 160 GB usb stick to another one (my old itunes library). Windows manages fine, but neither Linux nor MacOS do it properly. They crawl, and in macos’ case, it gets much slower as time goes by, and I had to stop the transfer. Overall, it’s how these things are implemented. It’s ok for a few gigabytes, but not a good case for many small files (e.g. 3-5 mb each) with many subfolders, and many GBs overall. Seems to me that some cache is overfilling, while windows is more diligent to clear up that cache in time, before things get into a crawl. Just a weak implementation for both Linux and MacOS IMHO, and while I’m a full time Linux user, I’m not afraid to say it how I experienced it under a debian and ubuntu.



  • If all have problems, then it’s something that likely can’t really be fixed via the forum. It’s either a bug, or a not-fully featured feature yet. Qemu often has 3D problems anyway when enabled. 3D is a really hard problem to get right. Stay with 2D acceleration, or try the latest VMWare to see if you can use 3D with it instead. Otherwise, install on bare metal.



  • Yes, it is, for two reasons:

    1. Affinity company has replied to my request saying that there won’t be a Linux version, ever.
    2. The hacks that exist to run Affinity on Linux are a moving rug, newer wine of affinity versions break stuff all the time. Don’t rely on it.

    Your best bet is to run Gimp3 (which is excellent), or Photopea online. Learn Photopea so you can know Photoshop if in the future a future employer requires it, while for your own projects, learn Gimp3. I run the official Appimage without any issue.