this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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Can it run steam and autocad?
Also amd gpu support. I had to abandon mint 5 years ago because of poor driver support.
Latest kernel is probably what you need if things work on other distros. There's a menu in the Mint update manager you can use to change to a slightly newer kernel and I would always advise that if it doesn't cause any other issues. Newer kernel usually means more and newer drivers.
Mint is ultimately based on Debian, but with a lot of newer software, although it's "stable" under the hood. That's why Mint is popular on personal home computers. The idea behind it is that it should give you all the updates you need, but not too often or in a way that breaks things. If your computer works on one version of Mint, it would hopefully never break from an update, but packages don't tend to be cutting-edge.
Steam is sort of an exception there. It works well on the vast majority of distros because Valve's CEO is a bit unusual in that he prefers people to be using Linux and has done a lot to keep it working well. If you don't use the flatpak for Steam (which I wouldn't suggest), then it runs in its own kind of custom runtime container that makes sure it works as it's supposed to in the vast majority of Linux distros.
I've never used Autocad, so I couldn't say too much about it. If a program doesn't work properly it could be due to incompatible dependency packages with different behaviour. Autocad would also be a graphics heavy program (similar to Blender, but also like videogames) so drivers could come in there too. The updated libraries might help, or it could just be your graphics drivers again. You can also try the flatpak version instead if it doesn't work, and vice versa.
If you can get your GPU to work on other distros, you shouldn't have many problems on this new major version of Mint, so long as the kernel is new enough, which I think it would be.
If you have a specific, very new, AMD GPU, there are actually public records of what the developers of the Linux kernel are doing to support newer hardware. Most people don't find these easy to check, but this would be a common question. There is a long wikipedia page giving a few of the most well-known optimisations, bug-fixes and hardware support improvements in specific versions of the Linux kernel.
By the way, there are lots of people on the official Linux Mint forums who are happy to answer specific questions about bugs or what's improving in Linux Mint, as posed by community members.
I've been using Mint exclusively for quite a few years now (outside of Android) and had minimal issues, outside of poorly refurbished laptops I got for cheap (like one with a physically broken keyboard that spammed one of the buttons, which I was able to fix easily with a simple script I copied from the web).
Sorry if that was too long an answer, but what I'm saying is there is a good chance it will just work out if you try to install this new major version (though there's some chance it might not). Also I believe they've decided to prioritise shipping a kernel with good hardware support now, rather than a more "stable" one (older/LTS) so a lot of more recent hardware will work, unlike 5 years ago.
Don't be afraid of following a few CLI guides if you have to either. Any distro is good enough if you know a few terminal commands, and any distro can be perfect if you're an absolute bash wizard.
Hope that helped.
Technically Mint is based on Ubuntu (this release is based on Ubuntu 24.04 which released earlier this year).
Mint decrapifies Ubuntu by removing things like Snap, I'm going to switch to Mint eventually - honestly maybe even later this year, maybe in December or something.
Ubuntu is based on Debian, although they made quite extensive changes over time. Ubuntu and Mint are very similar, but Ubuntu is owned by a corporation called Canonical that people have had a few concerns about the priorities of, whereas Mint is community ran.
Mint ships with 6.8 now
My bad. Autocad is commercial software that mainly supports Windows, so you would have to see if you can set it up through Wine (popular for running Windows software on Linux).
Autocad AFAIK doesn't run, I am trying to get something like nanocad to work, also any version of SAP2000, ETABS or Staad.
Steam & amd yes, autocad no
Not sure about AutoCAD, but I have Mint installed to the expansion card drive on my Frame.work and have been playing a fair amount of Inscryption, FTL, and Stronghold Crusader on it through Steam, so I would say yes?
I would try to run autoCAD by adding it to steam as a game and set it to use proton and look what happens 🤔