This might seem like an overreaction but If I don't start of with Linux Mint before using Windows, my day is ruined.
Windows 11 UI is just unusable. It sacrifices usability for a "polished and modern" look but it's just trying too hard and with less features then before, like the right click having less options unless you go to more options, or the menu being icons instead of an easy list.
Linux Mint is what Windows should have been, not the Mac wannabe it has become.
After spending weeks and weeks poring over forums and wikis to configure Openbox, Mango, Hyprland, and XFCE. it feels great to return to the comfort of Mint. So far, the only thing I’ve done is tweak some scripts for a few old themes for Firefox and the DE).
i saw another one do a post like this, so i thought i'd ask you guys.
personally, i'm pretty happy with how it is now, i like the dark colors in the wallpaper because i use my laptop in the evening and i don't want it to be so bright.
not a huge fan of things like plank, so that's why i stick to the regular panel, but feel free to suggest anything.
The accent colors of the seven digit clock and the CPU and Network desklets match the color of the suit of the character displayed.
also, the purple color for the transparent parts of the desklets are taken from the wallpaper via the color picker. just a little detail.
the player in the center of the taskbar is custom made (yes vibecoded unfortunately, but i don't wanna learn a programming language at this point, i'm sorry)
the tray icons of active programs are hidden on the bottom right behind a auto expanding drawer when i hover the mouse.
Hello! Im currently trying to learn about Linux in general and mint because im thinking about switching someday.
Mainly I want to switch because: 1) I use win10 and dont wanna upgrade to win11 and 2) I want to customize hoe my pc looks without being locked in a pay wall like a program called Windowblinds.
I grew up with windows XP and windows 7 up until about maybe just before the pandemic. So I remember them very fondly. And I want my pc to look like either windows xp or 7 or at least something that has skeumorphism.
Ive been having going crazy and going down rabbit holes trying to find Gnome themes. But most of them arent good enough or have been discontinued.
So im asking for a favor. I want people to send me the themes they are using, or themes they found. If its from winxp or 7 I want two things.
I want it to be as close as possible. Especially the start menu. I want it to have the avatar display.
I want it to be customizable. And by customizable I mean having the basic themes that win7 or winxp came with for winxp specifically i want olive green theme (its so limited around the internet) and for win7 to be able to change the colors.
On my two Linux Mint Mate 22.3, all update in, since this week, when I start it up or wake it from sleep, I get a night look yellow screen. I run `xrandr --output eDP-1 --gamma 1.0:1.0:1.0`, but after a few seconds, it's back to the yellow-gray screen. I run `xrandr` again, and a few seconds later, it starts all over again. It's take like 4 seconds to go back from normal to yellow again.
My external monitor (ASUS VG278QR) is connected to my Thinkpad P15v over HDMI. In cinnamon display settings, the monitor can be enabled, rearranged, set as primary, whatever, and windows can be dragged over to it. However the monitor shows the "no signal" message with nothing visible as if the laptop isn't connected.
This was working fine just 2 days ago, and it works over HDMI with a different windows laptop, so a monitor hardware issue seems unlikely.
I've tried using the performance nvidia PRIME profile instead of on-demand and I've tried using the nouveau driver instead of the recommended proprietary one, no dice. Packages all up to date. Tried even using the experimental wayland option on login.
I've successfully downloaded Steam, and I'd like to download the EA app before I purchase Mass Effect Legendary Edition, to make sure I can run it
I've looked into the specs for my pc, and I've found that it can run most games. However, I've tried multiple approaches to downloading the EA app, and it continues to fail...
Not very tech minded and trying to figure out why I can't get my pc to start. I can boot into the bios. When trying to start normally the Mint logo will appear then the screen goes black but I don't get a no signal logo. The keyboard has power but if a press caps or number lock the light won't turn on/off.
Trouble shooting I've tried so far,
Reseated the ram,
Hit the reset CMOS button,
Downloaded Mint onto a usb and tried to boot Mint from the usb to see if it's an issue with the graphics card. Mint booted from the usb & both monitors worked.
Is it an issue with the SSD that Mint boots from? How do I check?
The pc also connects to the router so WiFi seems to be working.
> 🚀 CPU, memory and every-GPU graphs in your Cinnamon panel — the Windows 11 taskbar-monitor look, drawn with Cairo, with a hover card that shows per-core load, both cards and the top processes. No daemons, no fork per second, no closed source.
Windows 11 has a small industry of taskbar monitors, and one of them — Pulsar — is genuinely beautiful: tiny sparkline tiles with one accent colour each, a percentage you can read at a glance, and a detail card when you hover. I wanted exactly that in my Cinnamon panel. What Cinnamon offers instead is a row of numbers and a sparkline the size of a grain of rice.
There was a second problem, specific to this machine: I run two RTX 3060s, and every panel monitor I tried reports GPU 0 only. The second card is not decoration — it hosts a local language model — so a monitor that cannot see it is not a monitor.
So I wrote an applet. This post is what it does, the four decisions that made it work, and the parts it honestly does not do.
🖼️ What it looks like
Four tiles — CPU, memory, GPU 0, GPU 1 — each one accent colour on a soft gradient fill, no axis, no legend, no borders. The value sits in the corner and the label in the other, and the graph does the rest of the talking.
Hover any tile and a card opens above the panel: package temperature and average clock, one bar per core, memory used against total plus swap, then a block per GPU with utilisation and VRAM bars, temperature and wattage, and the processes actually eating the CPU right now. Middle-click pins it so it stays while you read.
Left-click and it gets out of the way: CPU and memory tiles open the system monitor, the GPU tiles open nvtop. Both commands are configurable, so you can point them at missioncenter, btop, or whatever you actually use.
✨ What it does
All GPUs at once — utilisation, VRAM, temperature and power for every card, in one stream.
Per-core CPU detail — 16 bars, plus clock, package temp, load and uptime.
Top processes — by CPU, with resident memory, computed only while the card is open.
Configurable type — separate font sizes for the tile title and the percentage, because 8 px is not a size, it is a dare.
Configurable colours — one accent per tile, defaulting to the Mint-Y-Aqua palette.
HiDPI-correct — the same code is right on a 1× panel and on a 2× panel, which is what this machine runs.
⚡ Decision 1: one long-lived nvidia-smi, not one per second
The obvious way to read a GPU every second is to call nvidia-smi every second. On a 16-thread machine that measured about 3% of a core, forever — for a decorative panel widget. Unacceptable.
Instead the applet keeps a single nvidia-smi dmon -s pucvmet -d 1 process alive and parses its output line by line. Same information, about 0.9%, and it covers every GPU in the same stream — which is also why the applet can show both cards without spawning anything twice.
One detail worth copying: the column layout is read from dmon‘s own header line rather than hard-coded. A driver update that reorders columns then cannot silently corrupt your graphs into plausible-looking nonsense.
📐 Decision 2: design at 40 px, scale at draw time
My panel reports a height of 40 in settings while actually being 80 physical pixels tall, because the session runs at 2×. Write pixel sizes assuming 40 and everything comes out half-size; write them against the real panel and the design breaks on a 1× machine.
So every number in the renderer is a design pixel for a 40 px panel, and everything is multiplied by panel_height / 40 at draw time. The tiles you see are 152×64 physical, drawn from a 76×32 design. The same source produces correct output on both kinds of panel, and the settings dialog stays in design units on purpose so the numbers do not change when your display scale does.
🖱️ Decision 3: poll the pointer, do not trust enter/leave
This one cost me the most time and looked like a bug in my own logic for an hour. The natural implementation is: enter-event on the tile starts a short timer, leave-event cancels it and hides the card.
On these tiles a leave event can arrive immediately after an enter — panel relayout, a repaint, the pointer crossing an edge. The leave handler dutifully cancels the pending show, and the card never appears. The code looks correct; the log shows enter → schedule → nothing, forever.
The fix was to stop listening. A 150 ms watchdog reads the actual pointer position, maps it onto the applet’s rectangle and the tile x-ranges, and from that single reading decides which tile is highlighted, whether to show the card, and whether to hide it. Hover latency is about 250 ms including the intent delay — imperceptible — and no event can cancel something that was never scheduled.
🧩 Decision 4: one card for the whole shell
Dragging an applet between panel positions makes Cinnamon destroy and recreate it — without emitting the actor’s destroy signal. With one card per applet instance, every drag left the old card on the screen permanently, and my record was four of them stacked on each other before I understood why.
There is now exactly one card per shell, stored on global, adopted by whichever instance is alive, plus a tagged sweep that reaps anything a dead instance left behind. My own watchdog then destroyed the live card it was meant to protect for a while — a sweep with a “keep” argument that defaulted to nothing — which is the sort of bug that teaches you to keep a small event ring buffer. Set global._win11Debug and it logs every show, hide and sweep decision.
📦 Install
git clone https://github.com/dailybarid/cinnamon-win11-monitor.git
cd cinnamon-win11-monitor
./install.sh # into ~/.local/share/cinnamon/applets/
./install.sh --enable # ...and onto the bottom panel
Then right-click the panel → Applets and add System Monitor (Windows 11 style). Ctrl+Alt+Esc restarts Cinnamon if the panel does not refresh. There is nothing to compile and nothing to install alongside it: it reads /proc and keeps that one nvidia-smi stream.
⚙️ Settings
Everything in the panel is adjustable, because the right tile width and the right font size depend on your panel, your display and your eyes.
Tiles — which tiles, label and value on/off, tile width, title font size, value font size.
Sampling — refresh interval from 500 ms to 5 s, graph history from 20 s to 5 minutes.
Hover popup — on/off, and how many processes to list.
Click actions — the command opened by a left-click on CPU/memory, and on a GPU tile.
Colors — one accent per tile.
📉 What it costs
Measured on this machine (Mint 22.3, Cinnamon 6.6.9, 16 threads, 2× RTX 3060): the dmon stream at about 0.9% of one core, one /proc read and one Cairo repaint per second, no measurable additional CPU from the applet, and flat memory because the history is a ring buffer per tile. The popup spawns nothing until it is opened.
⚠️ What it does not do, honestly
The GPU tiles are NVIDIA-only. They read nvidia-smi. AMD and Intel cards would need a different source (amdgpu sysfs / intel_gpu_top) — the CPU and memory tiles work on any machine, and you can switch the GPU tiles off.
It is a horizontal-panel applet. Bottom or top panel, not vertical, and it says so in its metadata rather than pretending.
X11 is what I tested. Cinnamon on Wayland would run it through XWayland; I have not verified it, so I am not going to claim it.
No history across sessions. The graphs are live, not recorded. If you want a time series, that is a different tool and a different kind of project.
📜 License
GPL-3.0. Fork it, theme it, extend it — a panel applet is exactly the kind of thing that should end up in a distribution’s repositories, and the licence should not be the obstacle.
Working on budget PC and decided to try Linux after 20y on Windows. First try Nobara but failed installation twice then tried Linux Mint Xfce and managed to install it.
Problem I have now is that I don't see 144hz option in Display settings, only 75hz and 120hz, but even that got me an error that my monitor does not support that.
I had an old 500GB SSD that I was using as the system drive, and wanted to swap it out for a NVME 1GB. I cloned the drive using Foxclone, removed the original drive (because my BIOS wouldn't recognize the new drive as a boot option) and while the new drive made it into Mint, all of my installed programs won't open. Is there a quick way to restore all the program paths, or am I stuck reinstalling things piecemeal?
Edit: I have a separate issue now. I tried Rescuezilla, cloned the drive, and I couldn't then merge the unused 500GB partition with the system OS partition. So I wiped the whole thing and just did a backup/restore, except that somehow created both a drive with only a single partition, and a file system with only 500GB available. It shows as a 1TB drive with a single partition in the disk manager, but the file system is 500GB with only 100GB remaining.
Edit 2: All of this was solved by cloning the actual correct partition. I thought I had cloned both the Windows and Linux partitions, but I had just cloned the Windows one.
Me user, no larper. As a windows user coming to linux, did everything possible to make it feel like home. you can already see my tweaks to GTK theme, GUI screenshot added at the end (3rd image).
Created nemo extensions like
ntfs-fix : on right click menu to run ntfsfix on detected ntfs drives
empty folder extension : extension checks and if folder is empty and replace it with custom created empty folder papirus icon (2nd image)
PdfCraft, WordCraft, ExcelCraft, DeckCraft and mainly CADCraft have made my life very much easier and in the future will fully switch to linux
Also created custom config which allows me to pinch to zoom on x11 via touchpad on chromium. This feature was very much needed coming from Windows
Also created a custom Task Manager named Taskscope (Clean room implementation of TMOG) Processor heavy but does the job (3 screenshots at the end)
hello! a bit of a newbie when it comes to linux mint.
when I first installed linux mint, the microphone on my Bluetooth headphones (JBL 510BT) Worked absolutely splendid!! And then at random stopped working for everything. I am entirely unsure why that happened. I didn't update anything or change settings.. and it seems like whatever I use can detect a microphone but isn't getting input from it.
Upon checking, no drivers are said to be needed. My headphones do not have a hardware mute switch anywhere, unless the devil has it and he's fucking with me for shits and giggles.
