I’ve been primarily using different flavors of Linux personally and professionally since around 2014. For most of those years, I’ve been using Ubuntu. Recently, I got the chance to upgrade my company laptop after 5 years on a Macbook Pro. I opted for a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition shipped with Ubuntu. For the first few weeks, I kept Ubuntu but noticed a lot of issues with my docking and random video freezes that requiered a hard reboot. I finally reached my limit and decided to switch Linux distributions.

I considered several: Fedora, CentOS, and Mint Cinnamon stuck out as the most likely candidates. After comparing for a couple days and investigating hardware compatibility, I pulled the trigger and distro-hopped to Linux Mint Cinnamon. Fedora is very well-documented and supported but I really wanted to stay with the apt package manager because I am most familiar with it versus Fedora’s dnf. Similarly with CentOS, I wanted to stick with the apt package manager. Also, I like Ubuntu, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t think it worked well on my hardware. I decided to try Mint because it is built from Ubuntu but looked like it would be more developer friendly.

Creating the boot media and installing Mint from a USB took about a half hour to do on both my company and personal laptop. If you need some help installing Linux Mint, you can check the Linux Mint Installation Guide. I installed Mint on both of my laptops because I like the consistency when switching machines. Something that came in very handy is the Go binary I have on my laptops that saves all of my dot-files, .bash files, aliases, etc to a github repo each time I start my terminal. I occasionally push this to Github to keep them backed up and pushed them right before I switched distros. This allowed me to pull the repo and overwrite my profile and aliases, preserving all of my binary files, aliases, and other things without having to rewrite them.

I’ve now been on Mint for about a week and have it set up to my liking. I have not had any video freezing, my audio does not need to be fixed at every restart, and I find it to be a little snappier and more development friendly than Ubuntu. I don’t need to update snap to use firefox. A minor notpick, but nonetheless.

What’s going on right now/

What I’m building right now:

🚧 Using Go to solve problems at Code Golf and CodeWars to up my GoLang skills

What I’m drinking right now:

🍺 Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

What I’m reading right now:

📚 The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

What I’m watching right now:

📺 Welcome to Wrexham

What I’m playing right now:

🎮 Marvel Snap 🎮 Pokemon Unite

What I’m Learning right now:

🎓 The electric guitar 🎸 open-chords and simple riffs.
🎓 nvim
🎓 GoLang
🎓 AWS Certified Solution Architect Certification