Thanks for replying :)

I’ll have a look into it, thanks. I pretty much only support my mother’s laptop outside of my house now, but I use NoMachine to sort out the home computers. As much as I like it, it can be a bit slow sometimes, and it’s always in the back of my mind that it’s going to lock me out like the others did.

I wonder if it was an edge case that the Linux driver didn’t account for, like a minor incompatibility between the two devices.

You’ve just reminded me that I had a Bluetooth problem with my laptop a few years ago. My headset would connect and work properly, but wouldn’t be recognised after the laptop had either been to sleep or shut down. I had to go through the bluetooth device folder, something like /dev/bluetooth/, find the folder that corresponded with the headset’s address, and delete the cache folder inside. It would then work until the next sleep / shut down.

I expected problems with the Pi because USB wifi has always seemed to be a bit dodgy, even on Windows, and wifi is apparently still a problem area with Linux. Add to that the Pi’s limited distro, and I thought it was bound to go wrong.

Are there any limitations to Meshcentral? I tried using Team Viewer and a few others when I was supporting family on Windows, and they all wanted to charge me after a while.

Out of curiosity, how long ago did these problems happen? I’ve been using Mint and Xubuntu for a while now, but had to use a few different troubleshooting distros to fix a Windows boot issue, and none of these came up. As these are Debian based distros, I’d expect the same problems to filter down.

The only thing I’ve had issues with lately is setting up a USB wifi adapter on a Raspberry Pi, but I’d expect some problems with that.

If it helps, Mint seems to have this sorted. I was using a 1080 screen and a 2k screen. Now I’ve got two 2k screens (1440 x something?). Mint detected both configurations correctly and set them up for me. The only thing I had to do was tell it which monitor was the primary, and that was only because I prefer my primary screen to be on the right.

I had the 1080 screen set up in portrait mode for a while too, and Mint had no problem with it 👍

XFCE and Cinnamon. I’ve got a Xubuntu server and a Mint laptop, and they both do it.

It’s not a major issue, but it’s enough to break my train of thought, which is annoying.

Yes and no. There are the type of people who will go ‘Aaarghh! I can’t open my Microsoft Edge through Microsoft Cortana to use Microsoft Bing! Linux sucks!!!1!!’, but there are also things in Linux that are frustrating.

The biggest annoyance to me is how small the border around windows is. On Windows, I can grab anywhere around the edge of a window and resize it, including in both directions from the corners. In Linux, I need an electron microscope to find the edges, and the hand of god to find a corner.

If I want to paste something in Windows, it’s ctrl v. If I want to paste in Linux, it’s ctrl v. Unless it’s the terminal, which is shift, ctrl v. Or edge cases where it’s shift and insert.

They don’t tend to be major problems, but they break your workflow, and that makes them feel a lot worse.

Cool, I’d do that if my brain didn’t confine me to my bed for 18 hours without meds.

Is that what that is? I’m in my 40s and trying to get diagnosed, and the possible ADHD has got worse over the last few years. I’ve gone through periods of weeks where I’m really struggling to get out of bed, and they coincide with each other.

They’re for me to test. I’ve got an SSD in a USB3.2 enclosure, so the live ISOs run fast enough that there’s no noticeable difference to an installation on my main PC.

I’ve been using Xubuntu on my server for years, and Mint on my laptop for the last few years, and have been trying to switch to Mint on my PC, so I thought it’s about time to try some other distros before I fully commit.

I’ve got all the main distros, so will be distro hopping for a while to see how I get on, and if any of them jump out at me. I’ve always used Debian based distros, so I can see me sticking with one, but I’ve added the others to see if they’ve changed much in the last 20 years, and if I like the way they do things :)

Have you tried Bluefish? I started using it recently for editing a web app, and I really like it. It loads quite quickly on my laptop, and it’s got a mini file browser on the left hand side that lets you open files directly with a double click. Handy for when you need to edit a few files at a time :)

I’m actively trying to switch to Linux, so it’s not from a lack of effort.

The main two reasons are Photoshop and scanning. I’m a photographer, and I’m scanning and restoring old photos of the family. There’s no decent alternative to Photoshop, especially now that it has the neural filters, so editing and colouring photos is in a different league.

As far as scanning goes, I was getting better results in Windows 20 years ago. I’ve got an Epson scanner, and the software can automatically crop, as well as restore the colour balance of a photo. Using Linux, I was lucky to get more than a dodgy .bmp through an interface that would have looked clunky in the 90s. I could open it in GIMP, but then couldn’t save as a jpeg without either exporting the file or installing addons.

On top of problems like these, there are issues that crop up because of an apparent need to be different to Windows.

My Xubuntu server won’t let me resize windows unless I grab the top left corner. Any other edge of the window is apparently half a pixel thick, and too small for my mouse to register.

Smooth scrolling by clicking the mouse wheel has been replaced with the paste command, as if pasting into a browser window is something that people do dozens of times a day.

Mint’s settings window constantly resizes itself, no matter what I set it to. I can resize it, open a setting then click back, and it’s back to the default size again!

The universal paste keyboard shortcut, ctrl & v only works in some programs. Others need shift, ctrl, and v!

Silly little things like this spoil my workflow and take me out of what I’m doing. They’re the minor annoyances that frustrate people and encourage them to switch back to Windows. Yes, they can probably be changed, but why were they changed in the first place? I could paste with ctrl v in DOS 6.22 and could trust a window not to resize itself in Windows 3.1, long before any modern distro was dreamed up, so why are the basics different?

I spent an hour last night adding new distros to my Ventoy drive. It’s so much easier than anything else I’ve tried :)

I’ve recently started using it to edit a web app, and even though it might seem like a simple feature, the mini file browser on the left that lets you open files to edit is a godsend. I was using Notepad++ on Windows, and never realised how often I was switching to the folder and back.

Even they aren’t as bad as the sites that ask for feedback as soon as they open >.<

That’s a good point. It’s been so long since I had to buy a new copy that I can’t remember what version I have.

Depending on your location and internet speed, you might be better off dabbling.

Some places let you own a backup copy legally, and if you’ve got decent internet, it might even be faster than ripping and converting it yourself.

I like them for the opposite reason. I’m still quite new to Linux, so I’m figuring out which software is best for me. I set up my server with Xubuntu and installed everything through Apt. I uninstalled a lot of software, but inevitably missed some things like libraries and config files.

Using Flatpak seems to keep track of everything, so uninstalling gets rid of everything that I would otherwise miss.

If it’s doing what it says on the tin, Flatpak is making my life much easier :)

My wife and I have identical 7th gen i5 laptops, except hers has Windows while mine has Mint. I regularly use mine in front of the TV, and recently she tried to do the same. We had to turn the TV volume up and it took a minute to figure out why. The fans on her laptop were running flat out to keep it cool because Windows had so much going on in the background that the CPU was at 100%.

She was ready to scrap the laptop because it was so slow, thinking that it was normal.

“A big downside here is that as far as Windows is concerned, this is different “hardware” so it won’t activate based on your physical device.”

You can transfer a Windows licence from another installation, so in OP’s situation, from the original installation. During Windows setup, select the ‘I don’t have a license key’ option, then once Windows is installed, go into settings, click the Windows isn’t activated option, and go through the activation troubleshooter.

I can’t remember exactly where, but somewhere in there is the option to transfer the license from another installation. It has to be the same version of Windows.

You’ve been given a lot of good advice, especially about Nvidia cards, but watch out for wifi adaptors too. As far as I know there are no problems with fairly recent hardware, but I’ve been caught out when trying Mint on an old laptop.