I recently started a new internship and decided to install Linux Mint on my work laptop for this year’s look into linux. Here’s how it’s gone.

Putting Linux on a work machine was the right place to start, for three reasons:

  • Boring hardware is a feature. My work setup is plain 1080p/60Hz monitors. No fractional scaling, no graphics card, no touchscreen, which means none of the problems Linux famously has with those things.
  • A smaller range of tasks. At work I rarely need any special software. I’m not playing games, editing images/video/audio, or watching movies.
  • Troubleshooting on the clock. I have better things to do at home. But at work, dealing with computer and software issues is just a regular part of the job that everyone experiences. It is much less frustrating to troubleshoot when you’re getting paid for it.

The install: I used ulli, a utility that installs Linux without needing a USB drive at all. Of course it did not work on the first try, but I managed to fix the script by removing just one line.

Troubleshooting: Google’s search summaries turned out to actually be useful for this. Although they were wrong a lot of the time, it was still much faster than manually excavating decade-old forum threads full of solutions that don’t work anymore. With a little computer knowledge, you can usually tell when it is making things up, and wrong answers are quick to test and discard. Later on I switched to Claude chat and found that it was more accurate with fewer hallucinations.

Some things that improved since last time:

  • Light/dark mode that actually works. Linux Mint now ships a working theme picker app that automatically switches between light and dark themes.
  • Fast file search, finally. There’s finally a file search tool fsearch that works as well as “Everything” on windows

Many problems still remain. The taskbar breaks every time a monitor is added or removed, and items don’t sync between monitors. Screenshots have a 1.5 second delay.

While linux is not yet ready to use at home and probably won’t be for several years, it is usable enough at work, and the bugs and annoying behaviors do not bother me too often to be a problem. Since I’m now using Linux regularly, I can gain experience and discover new software and solutions.