Thanks for the quote from Clem. Bad news about such a clear statement on Mint 20 on 32-bit, but hopefully stuff will happen between now and Mint 20 that means the fallout won't be as disastrous as it looks right now. If "normal" Mint is perma-crocked, I hope it will be possible (also for the newbs among us) to switch over to Debian Mint and it will be a fairly painless process, while retaining the ability to run games like in the past.

Presumably many/all of your wrappers depend on 32-bit libs working too?

Are there murmurs of other distros doing this as well? I sure hope not!

Mint has been on the edge because of Ubuntu's kinky decisions of late so thus they have been investing on Mint based on Debian. Knowing both Mint and Steam, there is a good chance that they'll come together to keep the wheel turning. Mint, Wine and Steam-Linux teams have been collaborating for some time as far as I know anyways.

I installed Linux Mint 19.1 a couple of hours ago on a relative's pc with UEFI. That was a first for me that I had to get Linux working without using legacy mode. I also took this opportunity to read parts of the guide and found it more up to date than the guides on Linux Mint's homepage. It really is super important to turn that secure boot thing OFF before installation.

Remember that only letters found in the American English alphabet can be used for UEFI passwords, so no œ ü.

To think they still in 2013 made single core processors and used them as CPUs in pcs...

https://ubuntu.com/blog/statement-on-32-bit-i386-packages-for-ubuntu-19-10-and-20-04-lts

I guess Ubuntu turned things around.

Only partially. This is only a slight consolation, and won't be much or any help in the future. The "selected packages" is going to be way too little, and quickly way too outdated, to be of real use for people who want to run 32-bit applications and games on their Ubuntu/Mint-based Linux systems. And they are still going to drop 32-bit entirely, just not quite yet due to the resistance. Which means Windows are a better system for running 32-bit software, which makes me throw up in my mouth a little. Linux SHOULD be backwards compatible too. It's preposterous to aim for anything else.

For those of us who like Mint, I think the best we can hope for (also after this slight back-pedalling) is that Mint Debian edition can take off, and that the Mint team will put much more of their focus there. That means PPAs are out (right?), which would be a huge issue for those of us with Nvidia GPUs, as we probably all more or less depend on the graphics-drivers PPA. I use a few others too, but that's the main one.

Thankfully the current Mint has LTS until 2023, so we have a few years to see what happens in the meantime. I certainly won't be "upgrading" (sic?) for quite a while, until I KNOW it is a wise decision. A couple of years ago I moved away from dual booting to a full Linux system (including backing up and converting HDDs to ext4), and don't intend to go back. But if Ubuntu/Mint is out of the question because 70-80% of my games stop working, I will have to look at other distros. Which I really don't like, because probably the main advantage with Mint is how easy it is to install and run for people not terribly familiar with Linux and how to change settings every which way with terminal commands and whatnot. So for the foreseeable future I'm likely to stay with Mint 19.1 and not upgrade further.

First of all, I need to give my thanks to Adam, for everything that he does, and the Linux gaming community as well, everything is very very helpful for people like me. Sometimes can be frustrating, but always is encouraging.

I am migrating to Linux myself, as usual, after previous experiences, virtual machines were my only contact to Linux, then an old rig doing the thing, and now dual booting.
Some years ago I switched from Ubuntu to Mint, not yet for gaming but it was my intention to do someday. My previous experience on Linux was Red Hat in early 2000s just for learn, and after that a Mandrake distro, then Ubuntu came alone, now Mint. I never used directly a Debian distro in that period of time.

If I'm not completely mistaken Debian can use PPAs as well, but not right out of the box, from what I eared. Nobody will recommend to add PPAs carelessly, but can be done somehow, breaking something in the process or not. Can be a total mess if PPAs are installed without care (I know that very well).

That's the most fearing situation for me, I get used to use Mint and I really need some of the applications from certain PPAs that supports Ubuntu (many from Launchpad for instance, are source-ports for games or very important related for gaming purposes). Some will work OK, some others not. I guess or hope.

If the situation can be solved with this "new" statement from Canonical, or Mint version based on Debian can do the same that does now in the Ubuntu based version, should be fine for me either way.

Anyway, Ubuntu or Debian, I prefer to stay on Linux Mint as long as possible, I love it. And now I can play many of my games, on Linux!!, only with that it's somehow funny and interesting.

Linux Mint 19.2 has been released I see. Don't think Ubuntu's 32-bit idiocy takes effect until later, but just to be sure: Is it "safe" to upgrade to Linux Mint 19.2? We won't be losing or having reduced 32-bit support for our Wine games?

Even if it wasn't safe, Mint gives you a long time to upgrade. Though last time I tried that madhouse of an upgrade process, it got stuck in a loop; failing at some step.

Up to version 19.3 it is guaranteed to be safe (from a multi-arch perspective). After that plans are still a bit up in the air.

Thanks. Should be safe to upgrade then. I'll probably still hold off, though. Didn't see any particularly great improvements, and I'm worried stuff will get messed up as I've never done an actual upgrade before. Previously I've stuck with what I had, and eventually done a re-install "upgrade".


Btw, do anybody else have an issue with flickering Nemo windows from time to time? It has persisted since I was on Mint 18.x. I can be browsing or doing other stuff, and then the Nemo browser windows on the side, with the desktop in the background, will start flickering. Sometimes it helps to click on the desktop or move the mouse over Nemo, or click on Nemo. For a little while.

Do a backup of your important things, try an upgrade, and if it get too messed up fall back on a fresh install.
This way, whatever happens you’ll have learned new things about how your system works (or breaks) ;)

I’ve been using GNU/Linux for more than ten years, and have never seen a borked upgrade.
But on the other hand I never tried Linux Mint either, I tend to stick to my beloved Debian.

I upgraded to Linux Mint 19.2 today and my laptop works better now and the impovements to the updater are appreciated. Microsoft could learn a thing or two ..... thousand. Backup before, of course.

It should be safe to upgrade - I did the usual reinstall yesterday to upgrade & finish updating my guide, no problems at all so far :)

All 19.x releases are based on Ubuntu 18.04 so there won't be any issue with 32-bit support until Mint 20 (and the Mint team plan to continue supporting 32-bit support so they'll work something out for that & it shouldn't be an issue then either).

I was just about to ask so I guess you are a suitable victim: what is the preferred way to upgrade to a new Mint release?

I don't have that much (yet) installed on the Linux partition and I generally prefer doing a clean install (both for Linux and Windows), just to be sure there are no incompatibilities and gigabytes of old obsolete stuff backed up and hidden somewhere. At my home machine I have Windows (7) and Linux Mint side by side, and I normally just tend to remove the Linux partition, recreate it and install the new Linux. Then again even then GRUB apparently still stays, I presume it is overwritten anyway when the new Linux is installed.

(The funny thing is that I currently do (also) Linux server administration for my work yet I have to ask questions like this... but I never have to deal with release upgrade issues at work. If some customer wants to use the latest Ubuntu or Centos or Oracle Linux, usually they want it on a totally new (virtual) machine that runs alongside with the old system, at least for the time being...)

Call me lazy but going from 19.0 to 19.1 to 19.2... I just use click upgrade. When I upgraded from 18.3 I did a fresh reinstallation; same when from 17.3. I would have settled for just formatting but also did some changes to my partition table while at it. Only problem I have run into does not exist anymore in LM 19.x.

Side note: No other OS on the laptop.