Just to clarify, this almost certainly won’t be better on Mint for several reasons. One, PopOS! and Mint are both based on Ubuntu, so they would likely run into a lot of the same issues. I also have an RX 580, and while I haven’t used either of these distros on that machine, I have run Debian Testing for several years, and since both these distros descend from Debian, I have run similar package versions and would likely have known years ago if a major bug occurred for my GPU.

As said by @[email protected] below, I would be inclined to check the power supply, and maybe even make sure the PCIe card is properly seated.

I’ve been running with an RX 580 on my desktop with Debian Testing for three years, and I’ve had no problems like this.

I’m running with a 750W power supply, so I’m inclined to agree that the the OP should pop open their PC case and check their wattage. Assuming this is an ATX box, it’s probably just a matter of removing two screws and sliding off the side of the case and reading the wattage. If it’s a reasonable wattage and it’s still giving issues, then try the aforementioned undervolting.

True! I guess I don’t mean that many implementations are inherently bad.

I guess the web browser analogy brings up the point that even though there’s many major behavioral differences between Wayland implementations right now that can make life a bit miserable, there’s hope that standardization could improve and make it easier to make sure applications work anywhere. I’m just a little sad a lot of important thinks weren’t standardized from the beginning/

I mean, at least systemd is one(-ish) program with one API that everyone can target like xorg. There’s so many different Wayland implementations that it gets rather mind-boggling.

Of course, I don’t hate Wayland - I just currently use XFCE. If XFCE ever switches, I’ll go along with it. If applications end xorg support before XFCe switches(or if XFCE becomes unmaintained), I’ll consider jumping ship to something that uses Wayland.

I think that’s true, but permissions might come into play and really cause pain; it’s probably best to just reinstall.

On a more serious note, as others have said, you’ll probably burn through these weird storage limitations quickly.

Also, what do you mean by “sensitive matters” on Mint? Because almost any way you spin it, I feel like it’s not a great idea:

• If you’re talking professional, confidential work with clients, keeping it on the same device where you do anything personal sounds like a terrible idea, and it’s probably worth it to shell out for a dedicated device just for this.
• If it’s more personal things like government documents, medical records, and other things I’ll neglect to name here, running a separate operating system just for those just feels like unnecessary paranoia and will cause you unnecessary trouble. If you’re careful, it shouldn’t be a problem - the major browsers prevent file access through protections against cross-site scripting.

Also, as I said in another comment here, please upgrade that drive before you put a lot of data on it. If you don’t and you run out of storage later (a near-certainty on 256GB), you’ll have to go through the effort of getting everything copied, which may include equipment purchases and several hours of your time when you could jut do it right now while your important files are still small enough to fit on a flash drive right now. Save yourself the future trouble.

Anyhow, I wish you happy Linux usage.

This is less like buying a bigger car and more like upgrading the stereo in the car - 256GB in 2025 is somewhat akin to having only AM radio, and I’ve found it gets annoying real fast when doing anything serious.

I would hesitate to put anything smaller than 1 TB in something that’s supposed to be a daily driver.

Assuming she hasn’t bought it yet, please research that Yoga first. It might work fine, but it could also end up being a miserable experience.

You can check https://linux-hardware.org/ for the model or a similar one.

Sounds nice overall, but the UI changes make me worry that we’re on the way to making a bunch of tutorials obsolete yet again.

It has run on them for several years - a lot of stuff just hasn’t been mainlined yet and is only in custom patches for Asahi Linux right now. This is part of the process of mainlining.

Personally, I believe there barely is such a thing as “good AI” - I have a dislike of image and audio generation; while I avoid LLMs, I admit they have their occasional uses.

I mean, at least it’s not an AI slop Tux on a clickbait article that says, “Forget Windows 11 - [INSERT OBSCURE, BORDLINE USELESS DISTRO THAT WON’T LAST TWO YEARS] cured my cancer”.

Like, I love Linux, and obscure distros have their place (I’d be cool with a review), but then there’s those horrible articles that mirror the overall devolution into soullessness that the internet has become.

On another note, those same sites with articles like, “Forget Windows 11 - Windows XP 2025 Classic Edition Ultimate is what we need”, with UI mockups where I’d rather cut off my right hand with a circle saw than use them if they were real.

No, I mean TinyCore literally would run out of RAM during boot.

Like others have said, Debian probably isn’t a bad idea.

I feel like it would be kind of stupid to run a full-on desktop environment even though technically possible, though - I think this is a good use for IceWM.

Also, at worst, you might have a really low power server.

I think less than 64MB is difficult these days - a few years ago, I was backing up a laptop with 48MB of RAM, and to get a minimal Linux terminal running on it, I had to create a custom Buildroot image and throw it on a CD. TinyCore was too much for it.

The actual transition happened ages ago - 2024 or so. A bunch of transitional packages in Testing and Sid had -t64 appended for a while.

A more apt comparison would be using the Windows guest to remote into the Linux host via xorg piping, waypipe, VNC, RDP, etcetera, which conveys your feeling of weirdness while being a closer approximation of what this really does.

It’ll definitely be a difficult undertaking, but I plan on really trying to have a 5.25” bay when I build another PC.

That probably won’t be for a couple more years, though. I’m on a Ryzen 5 2600 and RX 580, and I really don’t do that much intense gaming; a GPU upgrade is tempting so I can actually use ROCm for some casual Blender Cycles renders, though. I hope that the already dismal supply of those 5.25 cases doesn’t dwindle even more.

Besides the corrections others have said, I really can’t think of any reason people would intentionally use legacy BIOS on a machine with UEFI for a new install.

Like, I could get doing it for an old install - I know someone who installed Windows 7 in 2015 on their then-new desktop build and later upgraded to 10 but is stuck on legacy BIOS for now with that machine because 7 only ran on that.

I could see something similarly jank happening to someone in the Linux world and then decide not to address it for “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it reasons”, but certainly not for no reason.

I just ripped the Blu-Ray drive from my father’s PC since he wasn’t using it.

Since my machine doesn’t have 5.25” bays, I just have SATA cables dangling out the side of the case. I’ve probably ripped more CDs than Blu-Rays, though.