Dual Boot Scoot Boogie – Part Two

First Part is Here: Dual Scoot Boogie Part One

With Linux Mint selected as the distro, now came the interesting part – the logistics of getting it done. The first and most obvious thing was that I needed to upgrade my C: drive, which was a 500GB M.2 SSD installed on my motherboard.

This PC began life as a quick and dirty streaming PC that I built from the most economical (and available) parts during the pandemic, so it only had what it needed to stream to Twitch from my gaming PC. I stopped streaming when the pandemic subsided and then decided to make my streaming PC the main desktop, so I cannibalized the power supply and graphics card from the other computer. It now sits alone in the dark; once a proud gaming champion, now just a shell bereft of purpose, save for potential spare parts.

I’ve been upgrading memory, HDD storage, and other components over the last couple of years, but the painfully small SSD remained the original sin that needed to be purged. Problem was, it served as my boot drive and the one I wanted to install Linux on as well.

So I needed a new SSD and figure out a way to clone it with the least possible disruption. The SSD was easy enough — I went with a 2TB M.2 replacement, but the actual process of cloning it had me scratching my head for a minute or two. What I settled on was plugging the new SSD into a USB adapter, ensuring Windows recognized it as a drive, and using a cloning program to quickly clone the old SSD stick to this one.

Since it had literally been 15 years since I did anything like this, I searched to see what the current recommended software and processes were, but there didn’t seem to be a consensus around the software, so I just used the first one I could find with a free tier — Macrium Reflect.

The actual process itself was quick and painless. I cloned the drive, turned off the PC, removed the old SSD stick (after removing the GeForce card blocking access to it), installed the new one, and booted up the PC.

It was like nothing had changed. It worked perfectly. The old SSD was wiped and permanently entombed within the confines of the USB adapter to serve as a 500GB USB drive.

Now came the fun part: installing Linux Mint from the bootable USB drive I created. The process was relatively straightforward. I found a guide online and followed it to create the necessary partitions (root, swap, and home) and then let the installer do its thing. The PC rebooted and I was met with a screen offering the choice to boot into Linux Mint or Windows.

I chose the former. I was in.

The stock Linux Mint desktop is familiar to anyone who’s used Windows, using the same design elements for everything. It came with Firefox as part of the package, along with a firewall that I immediately turned on. It was ready to use out of the box. I made some modifications to the look and feel (I installed the KDE Plasma desktop instead of the stock Mint offering), but the more important thing is figuring out which programs worked natively and how would it affect my normal workflow for various tasks.

The first thing that jumped out at me was how different things are from the 2000s. Obviously, progress in hardware and software are a thing, but until now it never really hit me just how differently I use a computer. The last time I seriously worked with Linux (not counting Raspberry Pi or things like Android), I went online — I wasn’t always connected.

Going online was something that you consciously did. I had dial-up until 2004 because of where I lived and how little money I had. Most of my computer usage was devoted for tasks that were mostly local to the machine and offline — gaming, writing, etc. So all of the software was specific, or at least written to, the OS that I would be using (Windows). And using Linux with janky substitutions just wasn’t very satisfying.

But so many things are native to the internet now and designed to be largely OS-agnostic. It doesn’t really matter what OS I have for the majority of programs I would use. Discord, Spotify, Steam, Audacity, MakeMKV, Handbrake, Proton Mail — all available on Linux with the same look and feel (and sometimes better operation or features). I’ve got Firefox to access web apps, but Librewolf is also available, as well as browsers only available on Linux if I want to go down those rabbit holes.

I’ve been using LibreOffice, which has an Office feel from before the Ribbon was introduced and Microsoft started junking it up in earnest. It definitely works smoother & faster here on Linux than it does on Windows, and it’s a perfectly acceptable replacement for what I’d need it for. Also note: I don’t use Google Docs or any of that. I limit my use of Google products as much as practicable.

I’ve found that I can easily use Linux Mint for 90% of everything I did in Windows with little to no issue. In many ways, it’s a better experience than contemporary Windows. I don’t know if it’s a good analogy, but the thought in my head is that this it would be like if Windows XP/Windows 7 had been continued to be polished and refined with useful features, but you could still jump into a DOS command line to bypass the GUI if you needed to.

It’s a genuinely pleasant experience.

The only drawbacks I’ve encountered are on the video & photo editing side of things. Da Vinci Resolve seems to offer a Linux solution, but it’s for a specific distro and there’s a lot from reading the documentation to get it to work on my machine that immediately sets off my potential jank alarms. For photo editing, my Windows programs don’t have Linux equivalents and as much as I like Gimp, it’s not what I need for what I want to do.

I could use WINE, but I’m not sure how much I want to potentially dick around with using GPU-intensive programs through an emulator, so I think I’ll keep ducking back into Windows for those tasks until I find a suitable replacements.

Other than that, I want to emphasize that I’ve been using Linux Mint exclusively for the last 2-3 weeks and gone through all my task workflows without any issues or hiccups. With few exceptions, it’s a great replacement for Windows and it’s become my primary interface.

It turns out that 2024 is the year of Linux on my desktop.