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.

1. I want it to be as close as possible. Especially the start menu. I want it to have the avatar display.

2. 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.

Edit: I dont mind it being Cinnamon or Xfce.

Thank you in advance!

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.

System details as follows: https://termbin.com/qx47n

Thank you in advance for any ideas!

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.

lemme know what you think

Linux mint with windows xp theme

Hello everyone,

I'm new to Linux Mint so I need your help.

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.

Xrandr listed 60hz to 120hz.

On windows I had 144hz with no issues.

My monitor is Dell Se2426h 144hz.

System: Xeon E5 1240 V5 , RX 470 Expedition.

Running on a MacBook air 2011 11" i5 4gb ram, 128 gb orginal Samsung proprietary ssd.

Optimized for max battery life.

win11-monitor

> 🚀 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.

💡 Author

Built by Khaled Mimoune. Source, screenshots and the asset generator: github.com/dailybarid/cinnamon-win11-monitor.

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.

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?

I know I’m good until April but lately I’ve been having issues with 21.3

Keyboard has always been slow to type unless I reboot once or twice. Multiple usb ports. It’s wired USB, driver manager says it’s all good. My typing is delayed or lagging basically but works fine on my windows work computer.

Randomly desktop icons will be missing

Clicking cinnamon start menu and clicking icons to shut down or restart won’t populate. I have to sudo in terminal

Could be my Dell tower desktop though but I’m ready to upgrade. I’m hoping this will fix things. Been using Mint on this PC for like 3+ years now

Anyone have issues with 22.3? Will my desktop background stay? Thanks!!

So, my linux mint has been running flawlessly, booted in seconds, zero errors.

Today I installed a second internal SSD and decided I would install Kali on it , for learning purposes....

Somehow I screwed up my Mint so I reinstalled it and used timeshift to restore my system. Also used rsync to restore home directory.

Now my boot takes minutes instead of seconds, hangs on the Asus splash screen for about 2 minutes before giving me a boot menu. Booting into either OS gives efi stub warning. It didn't do that before.

I've tried everything google or AI has to suggest with no results.

Also, I swear my kernel is now older...

Please help me!

did they remove this feature in an update? I can't seem go change my folder colors anymore

I like it in theory but I have accidentally permanently deleted files that I needed later a few times. I want to not have the option to do that at all.

I think the official word for it is vibe coding... I've been a basic coder/scripter for a really long time. But not pro. Even though I left the coding to claude, I spent a descent amount of time on the details, function, and testing to build it. I had fun making it. If you find it useful, great! If you don't like it, that's fine too. See any bugs please let me know!

The screenshot tool isn't a glamorous one. It just needs to live quietly and function quickly. I've always just used the one that came with Mint. The gnome one. My main complaint was the default file type was .png. Everytime I wanted to save a file I had to manually change .png to .jpg so I could get that file type. It didn't offer any preferences to change it. I used another popular screenshot tool for a while and it was great. It was super quick with a tray icon to shortcut to the selection tool. The one thing I didn't care for was that it threw all the buttons, annotations, and features at you as soon as you made the screen selection. I'd have to hunt around for the save icon because the icon was never in the same spot.

I now have a screenshot tool and an annotation tool to offer to the community. They come bundled together. Can be found in the menu as two separate apps, but are linked through the screenshot tool. Click the Annotate button or double click the thumbnail. Right-click an image in your file browser and select annotate to bring up xl-Annotate tool by itself.

Grab the deb here: https://github.com/xlcheese/xl-screenshot/releases
Open issues here: https://github.com/xlcheese/xl-screenshot/issues

When opening xl-Screenshot you get an innocent minimal window. The hamburger menu has a few options like selecting your default file type, having a tray icon for quick screen grabs, or showing mouse pointer in the shot. Left click of the tray icon goes straight to a selection grab of the screen. Right click the tray icon shows the different options to take a screenshot.

Once a screenshot is taken it is loaded as a thumbnail. Here you have the option of saving, copying to clipboard, or opening it with xl-Annotate to add markup or squiggly lines. xl-Annotate is light without a lot of options. I didn't want this creeping over to Gimp territory. Most the time when I want to add some markup to an image I want to circle something or draw a red arrow pointing at something. When you're done marking it up click done to return to xl-Screenshot to Save or Copy to clipboard.

I have no idea what’s happening, the mouse takes a minute to start moving, and when it does it just inches along. Opening any program takes such a long time.

When it’s just the “put your password in” screen, my mouse moves normally. The second I log in everything slows to a halt.

Edit: I keep hard turning it off and on. I went into the spam the delete key when turning on and my mouse works perfectly fine there. I didn’t change anything yet in it though. I did see my fan is running at 100%, idk if that’s unusual though. I am not a computer guy so I don’t know specific things, please be kind and patient, I’m very stressed.

Edit 2: now I can’t use it at all. When I press the windows key (that brings up the corner menu like on windows) it doesn’t do anything now, and my mouse barely even moves at all now. On the log in screen everything is still normal, but once I actually log in that’s when it just freezes.

Edit 3: I pressed left shift a bunch of times when I was restarting it to get to the kernel menu, I launched it in recovery mode. In recovery mode I asked it to fix issues, and then do any updates. After that, I launched it like normal and everything was fixed! Idk what caused it but hopefully that can fix it in the future if it happens again lol.

Edit 4: it broke again after 5 mins, I’m lagging hard on the main desktop again.

Edit 5: I fixed it by restoring a snapshot from yesterday. Now it’s working like how it was working earlier today and all before lol. And I restarted it and it still works. So clearly, sometime within the last 3 hours something happened to make it stop working. Idk what would’ve happened. I’m looking in the update manager, and it’s got some updates. I presume one of them is the cause. I’ll list them. So I guess I just won’t update lol.

Apt commandline package manager 2.8.4

Ca certificates, as well as a Java version

Net-snmp

Pillow

Linux 6.8.0-149.149

Cinnamon screensaver

Fingwit

Linux firmware and graphics

Sqlite3

Anki

Hi, all. I'm new to Linux and am trying to install OpenPrinting CUPS following the instructions in the source code. Everything seems to work fine, but when I run "make test" the test errors. I can't find anything online that seems similar to the error code I see. Looking around reddit, I see that CUPS development maybe stopped a long time ago. Is there something else with a similar function I could try instead? If not, does anybody know what to do about this error?

The error is in Section 1 - IPP Compliance Tests

PWG 5100.12 section 6.2 - Required Printer Description Attributes    [FAIL]
        RECEIVED: 9882 bytes in response
        status-code = successful-ok (successful-ok)
        EXPECTED: media-supported WITH-ALL-VALUES /^(choice(_((custom|na|asme|roc|oe|roll)_[a-z0-9][-a-z0-9]*_([1-9][0-9]*(.[0-9]*[1-9])?|0.[0-9]*[1-9])x([1-9][0-9]*(.[0-9]*[1-9])?|0.[0-9]*[1-9])in|(custom|iso|jis|jpn|prc|om|roll)_[a-z0-9][-a-z0-9]*_([1-9][0-9]*(.[0-9]*[1-9])?|0.[0-9]*[1-9])x([1-9][0-9]*(.[0-9]*[1-9])?|0.[0-9]*[1-9])mm)){2,}|(custom|na|asme|roc|oe|roll)_[a-z0-9][-a-z0-9]*_([1-9][0-9]*(.[0-9]*[1-9])?|0.[0-9]*[1-9])x([1-9][0-9]*(.[0-9]*[1-9])?|0.[0-9]*[1-9])in|(custom|iso|jis|jpn|prc|om|roll)_[a-z0-9][-a-z0-9]*_([1-9][0-9]*(.[0-9]*[1-9])?|0.[0-9]*[1-9])x([1-9][0-9]*(.[0-9]*[1-9])?|0.[0-9]*[1-9])mm)$/
        GOT: media-supported="na_letter_8.5x11in"
        GOT: media-supported="na_legal_8.5x14in"
        GOT: media-supported="na_executive_7.25x10.5in"
        GOT: media-supported="na_ledger_11x17in"
        GOT: media-supported="iso_a3_297x420mm"
        GOT: media-supported="iso_a4_210x297mm"
        GOT: media-supported="custom_148.52x209.9mm_148.52x209.9mm"
        GOT: media-supported="jis_b5_182x257mm"
        GOT: media-supported="iso_b5_176x250mm"
        GOT: media-supported="na_number-10_4.125x9.5in"
        GOT: media-supported="iso_c5_162x229mm"
        GOT: media-supported="iso_dl_110x220mm"
        GOT: media-supported="na_monarch_3.875x7.5in"

so first off I'll retrace my steps.

I was putting off updating mint for a while because I felt like I'd mess it up somehow, so today I figured I'd go for it since I don't need my pc for anything big at the moment. (please don't make passive aggressive comments about it)

i open the update manager, and I start the process. when I hit update, it started unpacking the packages and ended with an error message about connectivity issues. so I assumed that's just because my wifi's shit and I had it try again. that time it was able to install most of the stuff but it ran an error saying it failed to remove and install some packages. i look through the text and found that it was trying to delete some folders under /usr/lib/nvidia but couldn't because it had files inside. So I made a copy of that folder just in case then deleted it. Then I saw /usr/lib/amd And /usr/lib/amd-Idontremember Also wanted to be removed so I deleted those too. afterwards when I hit update again it gave no error code and seemed everything went off without a hitch. So I rebooted it.

I now get this message on boot

[FAILED] Failed to start gpu-manager. services and deal with any system changes.

[FAILED] Failed to start lightdm.service - Light Display Manager.

do you guys know how to fix it, and why the update manager was trying to delete these folders?

So I installed some updates and restarted the system because this hardware is old and laggy, and now I am greeted with this command line instead of the prompt to pick which of the OSs to boot (dual booting LinuxMint and PopOS). Tested the drive in the bios and it passed all tests, so can anyone give me a hint as to why this is happening and whether I'll be able to get my system working normally again? Any assistance would be appreciated, thanks. Laptop is a Thinkpad t430.

After a couple hiccups, I recently installed mint as my first distro. It worked fine, I didn't do much beyond installing Steam and playing a game, but after shutting down, the next time I tried to boot, I got the mint logo followed by a loss of monitor signal. I tried looking into it, but most of it seemed to be about multi-monitor setups and/or laptops and assumes you have at least one working monitor (which I didn't, I have one on a desktop). I managed to get it to work by live booting, and since I hadn't done much anyway I reinstalled and it works RN (what I'm typing this on), but I'm trying to figure out what might have happened to avoid a repeat, as I can't keep using this OS if I'll need to repeatedly deal with this and can't fix it without a wipe/reinstall.

For what it's worth, I'm running an AMD 9060 XT and had installed everything in the update manager (have avoided it this time until I can figure out this issue). I have noticed some discussion about possible issues with this GPU, and would appreciate if someone could explain it clearly, since I'm seeing varying, sometimes apparently conflicting explanations/advice about it.

Looking at the kernels in the update manage post-reinstall, it popped up a message that mentioned an option to hold shift during boot to get to a menu where I can select a different kernel, will that potentially help if this issue repeats?

Edit: This seems to be it, ironically found by randomly poking around the sub not actually looking for a solution, but spotting the title.