I have exactly zero experience in what work a law office does, but I would think it’s mostly paperwork and email? If so you can do that at no startup costs.

Pick a distro (pop, mint, whatever), and install libreoffice or one of its many variants for offfice integration.

A common misconception is that linux involves a lot of coding. Sure, it can if you want to - all the hooks for programatical access are there, for example if you want to build shell scripts for automation. But you don’t need to. It’s just an option many linux users, myself included, like to take advantage of.

When it comes to convincing you, all I can say is this: It costs you nothing to try.

Or migrate to blender

It doesn’t have to be fancy as long as you have a practical use case. And it’s worth mentioning that the “fancy” stuff is often easier on linux than on windows.

Awesome! I’m one of the guys peer pressuring you in the other thread, and I’m glad to see it worked.

It also just so happened that you went for the same distro that I use on my desktop.

What’s going to be the primary use of this laptop other than having linux installed? Any projects or use cases in mind? I’m asking because I found out some time around the turn of the century hat the best way to learn linux is to use it for something one would otherwise do in Windows.

Nothing radical, but I’ve used mplayer as default video player since FreeBSD 4.0, and that’s not changing any time soon. VLC is good and all, I just prefer mplayer.

Oh, and for general purpose storage partitions I use XFS, as it plays nice with beegfs.

/var was originally for files of varying sizes, but today it’s more of a general purpose storage for the system, such as log files. It used to make sense to have this as its own partition as read and write operations were generally expected to be small but many, as opposed to few and large for the rest of the storage areas. With its own partition it’s easier to adjust the filesystem to accomodate the I/O. Today it’s mostly used for logs.

/local used to be similar to /usr/local on some systems, but that’s not really the case anymore. It’s a directory we use at work for local stuff, as opposed to /global which is shared with the entire server cluster.

You can have any directory as its own partition, just make sure the mountpont reflects it. /home is a very common example of this - using this as a mountpoint instead of just a normal directory named /home prevents regular uaers from filling up the root filesystem and borking normal operation.

Swap is what your PC uses when it runs out of RAM. It can be a partition, or it can be individual (large) files. As an example, I have a rather huge and demanding factorio save which takes up more memory than I have on my laptop, so when I want to play it I have to add additional swap space. It’s similar to what windowa refers to as the pagefile. It’s slow compared to RAM, but it enables the PC to operate relatively normal despite being bogged down with loads of allocated memory.

On servers I like to have /var on its own partition. Partially as a habit from the olden days of using FreeBSD in the 90’s, but also because that means that / will mostly be left with things that don’t really change. I’ve had to clean out clogged up / too many times. So in effect, my partion schema for a typical production server looks like this:

/ ext4
/local xfs
/global usually beegfs or nfs, but sometimes a local xfs.
/var ext4
/home ext4

If you already kinda like mint, I suggest moving out of a VM for a proper OS install.

Linux in a VM is just that: A VM. It has the same use case as VMs in general. If you want the Linux experience i think you’re better off allowing linux to properly talk to your hardware.

What to try depends entirely on what you normally do with tour PC, be it steam, deluge, or libreoffice. Use your mint installation for whatever you usually do with Windows.

I’m sure many petrol heads enjoy fine tuning combustion and make sure the suspension is tailored 100% to their neighborhood roads and all… but sometimes they just need a car with which to pick up some groceries.

Two decades here as well. And I run mint.

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I used variations of the same homecooked bash prompt ever since my FreeBSD days 25 years ago, up until Parrotsec made me realize that a prompt doesn’t have to be confined to one line.

So now I use:

username@host:/full/path #
:

…with a bunch of colors and special characters to make it more readable at a glance. That colon represents the input line.

To conserve some space I only used last part of CWD before, but now that it’s multiline I can use the full path, making it easier when I need to copy-paste an scp-friendly path, as I’m usually working across a bunch of different usernames and hosts.

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Had issue with my storage recently, and the symptom was similar to what OP described. Syslog didn’t reveal anything, as the root filesystem was read only, so troubleshooting it was hard. Coincidentally I needed a newer kernel, and after the upgrade the problem disappeared.

Looks like you just met your new room mate and best friend.

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No. Nothing good can ever come from increasing activity there.

Seconding mint. Been using it on my gaming PCs since 2015 or so, including my brand new one.

I’ll probably give it a go, then, if I need to reinstall.

I would’ve jumped on this instantly, but I finally landed on a Min21 configuration that works well. New laptop => new hardware => need new nvidia driver => need new kernel.

Which kernel does LMDE currently ship with?

One word: reVanced

More words: No need to thank me. Thank the developers instead.