Yes, the categories are good. That's what I ended up doing. Set up a categories system for most used programs/games. Moved stuff around a bit. Might take getting used to, but most common stuff I use should now be available easily after a couple of clicks without scrolling. I don't mind scrolling/typing for items that I used once in a while; it's just having to scroll for a game that I run several times daily that annoyed me. And I liked to keep my desktop clean so don't generally put shortcuts there.

I'll see how it looks after it gets filled up with games/programs, but I think it should work. I loved those expanding menus, one of the last things left over from Windows 9x but there comes a time when you have to let go, I suppose.


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So in the week that I have been using it, the system froze on me 3 times now. Hope it's not a sign of things to come. None of the times I was doing anything special in particular. I was playing with settings in two of them (though at the time of free I wasn't changing any setting; just happened in the middle of reading). The third time it happened I was browsing Linux Mint forums on Firefox.

No error messages or anything. Just a complete freeze. Mouse and keyboard not responding.

Is there anything one can try doing in such a case? I just did a hard reset.

The system freeze doesn't sound good. You can check the system logs (administration>>logs) to check if anything unusual happened at that time.


It is probably not related since you mentioned you are using Firefox but currently there is a bug in the 79th version of Google Chrome which makes it keep freezing constantly on Ubuntu based systems (which Mint is). The bug hasn't been addressed for almost a month now so I am still using version 78.

Sorry to bother you yet again, good people of this thread, but perhaps one of you would have an answer to this:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=208&t=309584

a) Not possible to rearrange manually. Has to be alphabetical, with the exception of Administration and Preferences.

More importantly:
b) No good way to move items between categories. If I move something from Drawing to Office for example it still appears in both.

I mean I can live with the fact that there is no "easy" way of drag-and-dropping it like in Windows, but surely there must be a way of putting it in what category you want.

REISUB is better than a hard reset. (busier backwards).


You really need to add your system info to your posts there. They have no idea what version of Mint /w Cinnamon you are running. Particularly for the crash on shutdown. E.G. add to your posts there.

As you already found out, there used to be a classic style menu under applets, but it doesn't seem to be available any more. I'm sure it'll return eventually though as there seems to be demand for it.

Personally I don't mind the default menu (search is very fast & anything I want more immediate access to I put on the desktop), but it's a matter of personal preference I guess.

45GB will most likely be plenty. Stuff installed from the repositories (or via .deb packages) is installed to fixed locations but GOG games are installed to wherever you want them (as long as the current user has write permission for the location you want to install to - on a related note, never run GOG installers as root). Similarly, Steam will install to whereever you set your library path(s) to (the default path is ~/.steam/steam/steamapps).

I would suspect something driver related. When I've had this happen to me before it's almost always been due to broken graphics drivers (the open drivers for Nvidia graphics cards in particular have a tendency for doing this). The other times have been due to issues with the hardware itself, e.g. the defect that affected some first gen Ryzen CPUs (and in that case I had to RMA my R7 1700 & get a replacement).

If you're running an Nvidia GPU, add the proprietary drivers PPA then install the latest available Nvidia driver; if you're running an AMD or Intel GPU then you should add Kisak's stable Mesa PPA and then simply update your system. Also make sure you're running the latest available kernel (5.3.0-26 at the time of writing).

As Gydion posted, if it's possible to do so then using 'Magic SysRq' to force a more controlled reboot of the system is better than a hard reset.

Thanks. And thanks again for the guide.

No more freezes since I've upgraded NVidia's drivers. And I've used it for heavy duty stuff since.

I'm now completely moved. Wrote a few bash scripts to simulate some of the stuff I missed in Windows 7. It's perfect.

Train Valley 2 was officially my first game on Linux. And I have the dual-boot for anything that won't run.

What would be, from best to worse, the more stable graphic drivers on Linux in your opinion? Or perhaps the best in regards to performance in gaming?
For many years I have stuck with the radeon open source driver, so I was wondering if Intel chips/drivers more stable than AMD, and how the new drivers AMDGPU(?) are doing.

Modern AMD cards with amdgpu is the best option.

Never had a problem with proprietary gpu drivers so far, don't game much though.
Had some random crashes but the cause were installed nVidia drivers on a AMD gpu pc (moved the hard drive between computers, as I do regularly.).

When moved from a 750ti to a Rx480, screen tearing seem to be better. Not sure if its the drivers, configuration or the much powerfull video card itself.

I agree with shmerl here, amdgpu (*not* amdgpu-pro) seems to be the most reliable graphics driver we have.

Performances seems to be great too, but I have no real comparison point (my only computer with a nVIDIA GPU runs the "nouveau" Mesa driver). What I can say is that performances in my case are good enough to run all of my games with no real issue.

Nvidia's proprietary drivers are generally quite stable and they are quickly updated to support new hardware releases. The downsides are that they're proprietary and may have compatibility issues with newer kernels until they've been updated to support them. Nvidia have also been pretty hostile towards the open drivers though and as a result their open drivers don't perform very well at all, so if you have an Nvidia GPU their proprietary drivers are the only good choice.

AMD's new 'AMDGPU' open source drivers are very good - I currently use an RX480 in my main system and the performance and stability has been excellent. The downside is that support for new hardware can be quite slow to arrive unless you're running cutting-edge kernels and Mesa, and even then it's probably best to wait a few months or so for launch issues to be sorted out. Their proprietary 'AMDGPU-PRO' drivers aren't bad either AFAIK, but it's not really worth bothering with them unless you have a very recently launched GPU that your system's kernel/Mesa doesn't support yet.

As for Intel, their drivers are generally ok in my experience (and open source), just don't expect much from integrated GPUs.

Thank you for your information. I keep reading bad things about the AMD drivers. It is nice to see they are not that bad.

How exactly do you mean this? Do they perform worse on Linux than on Windows?


And an unrelated question (demonstrating my ignorance, but what the heck): Can browser add-ons be installed on Linux?

Not worse, they are just low end in general, so aren't good for demanding games for example.

Sure, modern browser add-ons use JavaScript and other Web technologies - they don't rely on compiled code so they can work on any OS.