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Newbie Post: I have gone "all-in" with Linux Mint 22.1, wiping Windows completely. All good...with two nagging problems. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 8 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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  1. I have NVIDIA Optimus and I haven't been able to get any method of installing NVIDIA drivers to work. I don't necessarily care about the full switching ability of the Optimus, although sure it would be nice. I also have been unsuccessful turning off the Intel UHD graphics (as an option). My computer is an MSI Sword 15 A11UD, with NVIDIA Corporation GA107M [GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Mobile] 3D graphics. I have installed using the Driver Manager in Mint, and also manually. I have checked and I am using the 550 driver, which I think is supposed to be the right one.

  2. I am having trouble transitioning to Linux where I am not able to simply navigate to additional hard drives contained in my laptop or attached via usb. I have my torrents on an external drive, and it keeps getting renamed, easystore somehow became "owned" by root and inaccessible, and I had to switch to easystore1 which was created in the same folder. After I switched, easystore1 became owned by root, and I had to switch to easystore2, which had been created.

In addition to this, I can't browse to the external hard drive through plex media server or radarr/sonarr, it just doesn't show on the menu. I know it's a permission issue, but I don't understand how that works.

I was happy up to a point, but my Linux installation is becoming what I was afraid of, a test showing me how little I know, and a time-eater that causes my wife to wonder what happened to her husband.

Please, I want to be free, but I don't want to just say bye to my hard drives and my GPU. Help me, community. You're my only hope.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago

For what it's worth, I actually had a lot easier time with NVIDIA graphics on Ubuntu and Fedora than Mint. And Kubuntu with the Plasma desktop was the easiest to get my partner converted from Windows without much tweaking.

You could try the booting the live CD and see if you're able to get the graphics working more easily. And I've never seen that second issue on either Ubuntu or Fedora, so not sure what's up there.

I'm not too happy with the direction Canonical is taking Ubuntu right now, but it typically has the most documentation for when issues come up and has a very healthy development cycle, so I still recommend it to most people as a starting place. To me, Mint has always been a little too opinionated and catering to the less technical and thus harder to tweak. Ubuntu kind of does it in a way that makes it easier to override the default easy-mode kind of stuff. Just a general observation from decades of Linux use, and may or may not be as true for the current versions.

I use Fedora with Plasma desktop on my other desktop/laptop devices because I prefer RHEL to Debian based stuff, probably just got used to it using CentOS and now Rocky for all my servers over the years.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

  1. You're not the first person to not be able to make nvidia work on Mint. Here's another one I found earlier today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl6OBIQl_MI

  2. Use gparted to assign label names to your partitions/drives, and you might need to edit /etc/fstab. More info here, and there are more such forum posts to read through: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=344652

Overall, I'd say that Mint is the best distro to start with, but if you stumble on the few bugs they have, start looking elsewhere. I'd suggest you start by trying ubuntu 24.10 instead of mint.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks for the info and the feeling of not being alone 😄

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Had the same issue and then went with popos

The issue is that they are current in transition into their own Cosmic DE which is very badass but it is still alpha. Although, it is possible to daily drive it with some bugs obviously but it will game etc

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

You can install other DEs on Pop OS.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

correct. but i have hard time suggesting that to a noobie.

with that being said, if OP is interested in Cosmic DE, which is very much an interesting DE.

OP could install PopOS based on Ubuntu 24, throw KDE on it until Cosmic is baking

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

1. I just installed Linux Mint myself, coming from Nobara and I also had some issues with my NVIDIA GPU, as I also have a laptop with an integrated GPU (AMD) and a dedicated GPU (GeForce 3070ti). The issue was "Secure boot" being enabled in BIOS. It would somehow block the NVIDIA driver from initiating correctly.

If you look in the "NVIDIA settings" app and it look like this:

It means the NVIDIA driver haven't initiated correctly. See if "Secure boot" is enabled. Disable it.

2. What about the app "Disks"? Doesn't that do what you need?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago

I turned secure boot off a while ago but I did update the BIOS which involved resetting to default and I should check that, thanks.

I'll try disks, but I think the problem is NTFS formatting. Which sucks, but it's understandable.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

I'm pretty new as well. Try looking at mounting your hard drives with /etc/fstab. You should try to mount them via UUID and put them in the /mnt folder. I'm using mint cinnamon your mileage might vary. https://wiki.debian.org/fstab

As for the integrated graphics, you might be able to disable them in BIOS.

As for the video drivers I had a lot of trouble as well and ended up having to uninstall a lot of drivers manually to get the right version to stick.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

Can't disable in BIOS, I even updated my BIOS hoping the new one would have that capability, but no joy.

Yes, video drivers got me using Timeshift a LOT.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

  1. You say you haven't been able to install Nvidia drivers, but then say you are using 550 drivers. Are you saying you can't run any games or programs that engage your GPU? Open and terminal and run nvidia-smi and see what the output is.

  2. What is the filesystem on these drives? If it's NTFS, they will be mounted as read-only by default and show as owned by root. This is by design to prevent potential damage to NTFS filesystems which are technically a Windows-only thing. You do have the option of changing this behavior, but it will inevitably cause problems because the open driver to run these filesystems on Linux still runs into some MS proprietary filesystem issues. If you have the option of copying the files on each drive to your local drive, reformatting the externals into another more friendly filesystem, then copying the files back, you'll be in a much better place. I would suggest exFat to make things simplest for you, since it sounds like you may be plugging those drivers into other Windows machines, potentially.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (2 children)
  1. I have successfully "installed" them but when I've run nvidia-smi it says they aren't loaded. Nvidia Prime applet says ERR.
  2. Yes they're NTFS. The computer is using fuse to access it. It seems the root permission things is linked to installing video drivers. Every time I do it it changes the "home" drive and the "root" drives.
[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure you've got a race condition with the Nouveau driver getting loaded first then. That's the open source Nvidia driver in the stock kernels. Run lsmod | grep nouveau to confirm (if you get lines returned, then it's loaded.

You can sidestep this by blacklisting it and giving the installed Nvidia driver a chance to load first. Instructions here (use the Ubuntu section)

Reboot, and then you should be good to go. If nvidia-smi still doesn't show the correct output, you may need to just reinstall the driver packages again.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Seems like a promising answer, I wonder why someone downvoted it. I wish they'd left a comment.

I'll def explore it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago

Well that's exactly what the issue is, so there's your solution. Easy to confirm with one command.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Sometimes, the simplest option is to try a different distribution instead of messing with individual things that aren't working on one. A lot of distributions come with the Nvidia drivers set up by default, such as POP OS. You could also try a fresh install of mint and install the Nvidia drivers using the driver manager application, and see if you're getting the same results. As far as NTFS, that does have to change. You will keep running into problems if you don't format them into something like ext4. When I first installed Linux, I had all my games on an NTFS drive and very few of them would work at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (2 children)

Shoot. I got a lot of stuff on that drive.

I thought about pop OS but I don't like that it's owned by some corporation or something. And I thought about Manjaro but it's Arch Linux and I don't even want to open that can of worms. I'm having enough trouble in debian, with tons of tutorials and help.

I have used the software manager to install the drivers (didn't work and the computer froze at login) but it was after a Timeshift not a fresh install. I'd hate to do that now just to find it still didn't work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

That's very fair. I say this only because I've found myself going down a rabbit hole of things not working on my own before, and a reinstall is usually the faster option for me. POP was just one example, a lot of distributions come with Nvidia installed by default. Mint should work pretty much out of the box, but I remember Optimus being tricky sometimes. I do not recommend Manjaro, and not because it's arch. The last time I used Manjaro, it's automatic updater updated my Nvidia driver and my kernel to two separate versions that didn't work with each other, and bricked my system on me. It's not exceptionally stable even as far as Arch goes. Arch doesn't have to be scary, I use Garuda and it has made it very user friendly. I run all updates with one command and that command automatically makes snapper backups that I can pick between on boot, which makes fixing anything that can go wrong pretty easy. Garuda Cinnamon edition uses the same desktop that mint uses. Anyway, I do hope you're able to get mint working for you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Pop OS is excellent. You wouldn't really know it's created by a corporation. It's basically just the build they run on their hardware but I've not seen anything in it like ads or anything limiting my freedom. My perception of it is that it's just a more friendly and (snap-free) Ubuntu and I concur with those saying Nvidia is smoother on it. It does have a modified gnome but coming in the near future is their own DE called cosmic which seems promising. If it ends up being bad I will probably just switch to fedora even though Debian based distros are more supported. Been loving fedora on my new laptop

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

A have never used mint and only used debian as a Workstation. If there is a permissions issue with an application, my first thought is how you installed you application?

When you say, you cant easily get tonthe content of a drive, what Desktop Environment do you us3 and what file explorer?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

I installed Linux Mint from a live USB. I have installed applications via bash, software manager, and some even from the snap store.

I'm not sure what desktop environment Mint uses, I'm pretty sure it's not KDE, and I have no clue about which explorer.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

Mint's default desktop is Cinnamon. The default file manager is Nemo.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago

If you have the default version of Mint installed then your desktop environment is Cinnamon. There are also XFCE and MATE versions, but you have to go out of your way to get those. The default file explorer for Cinnamon is called Nemo, so if you haven't changed it that would be what you are using.

Honestly, I think your best bet is trying Disks or maybe gparted if you like cli apps, and setting a mount point for the device from one of those. Linux doesn't always like NTFS, but you should at least be able to mount and read the drive consistently, although I have to admit I've never used an NTFS formatted external drive, so maybe something weird is going on with that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 hours ago

If you want stability and ease of use similar to Windows, I highly recommend Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite or Bazzite. Optimus is working (now, asus gfxctl was broken for two weeks due to a new kernel) every keyboard shortcut is working, and, for some unknown miracle, battery life is better than windows. I'm on a G14.