Gonna be a lot of perfectly good hardware going up on ebay soon.
That’s interesting. Have anything that comes to mind as easily searchable that might start showing up? I would have to imagine a lot of corporate stuff that is certain they want to keep up on security.
CPU: intel 7th gen or earlier.
I doubt companies will be flooding markets with anything. 7th gen devices came out almost a decade ago (yes it’s almost been that long since 2016) and most companies only keep computers for 3-5 years max.
I put Mint Cinnamon on an older laptop just this past weekend and had a lot of fun with it. Are there any migration tips for my main Windows machine? I was thinking of going with Bazzite since it’s my gaming box. What about saved game data and whatnot? I was reading about Putty and SSH ing over to the laptop, but I’m not sure what a good strategy is for my desktop.
I actually just moved my gaming PC from Win11 to Mint Cinnamon 2 weeks ago. There was some driver fuckery (I have an Nvidia card) that made things a bit wonky but everything worked out after some adjustments.
Do you mostly game through steam? Do you install your games on a separate drive?
Steam makes the transition the easiest. All of my games “just worked” with Steam. There were a few modifications required to ensure stability with the games settings but it was mostly smooth sailing for me.
I just used thumb drives to pull all my games save files to and an external drive to back up all my installed games so I wouldn’t have to re download them. Save game files are usually pretty small so all of the ones I had backed up on a single thumb drive and Steam and Linux creates a faux Windows folder system for each game and you just reinsert the save games in those folder structures at the correct spot.
Thanks all for the helpful replies! I do have a second ssd, I can probably dump everything there before I format my m2 ssd. I do primarily game thru steam, I’ve got icue software that isn’t compatible but I believe I can use openrgb. Nvidia card also, is it just driver related?
Sorry for the late reply but the driver stuff was me trying out proprietary vs community Nvidia drivers and then just weird things that would happen on restarts after switching/updating drivers. I have an intermittent issue where the primary monitor (I have two) alternates being entirely light grey, red, blue, and green upon startup I haven’t researched it yet because I just restart the computer and it is fine. And it has happened maybe 3 times over the last month (amongst dozens of restarts). There are a few things like that that only happened once so I wrote off the occurrence.
I have had the most luck with the proprietary Nvidia driver so far.
No worries, appreciate the insight!
I really need to move my PC over to Mint, but change makes me deeply uncomfortable :(
Take it slow. Install a VM with Mint. Play around with it. Get familiar. Move your regular usage over to it gradually. Make the jump when you are ready. It’s perfectly OK to have reservations about a big change like that. But you don’t have to do it all in one go.
