Woohoo. After a hardware upgrade that requires kernel 6.14 or newer I've been stuck on arch. Time to breakout the old drive and try an upgrade.
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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Fedora also has up to date kernels, if you wanted to run something other than Arch.
I use nobara which is a fork of fedora it's pretty good. Though the update manager gui is complete crap for how slow it is.
As usual, my timing is impeccable. I just downloaded 22.1 last night lol
Head on over to Update Manager > Edit and upgrade to 22.2!
Thank you for this
Good job!
oh god i'm nervous i just switched from windows to linux in march and this will be my first big update :o
I adore the Linux community because it's collectively so nice. If you cock it up, someone here will help you fix it.
so far it's been so good! i think the only issue i've had with linux is that it will randomly freeze everything (usually if I try to load a tab in librewolf/chrome that's a chonky boi or if i'm in zoom) on my laptop and i have to hard reset and i can't figure out how to search for it because i really don't know what causes it :(
I've been running Mint since 17.x and have only had one upgrade fail in all that time. You're very unlikely to have a problem, but backup your system just in case!
Or use something like TimeShift and set it to automatically create backups.
Before I switched to the boringly stable Bazzite, TimeShift was a godsend. I was able to learn so much about Linux just by not having to worry about fucking up my install because whenever I did, it was trivial to rollback.
You got people like this guy and then you got me who had to reinstall mint 3 times because of upgrade and compatibility issues and then I eventually gave up on it 😭😭
And that happened in the span of one month too.
Eventually switched to Kubuntu and now I use Arch btw WITH BTRFS 🤤
Hooray for ~~boobies~~ BTRFS!
ooh i have timeshift automatically set up anyway :)
I'm in the same boat! Gonna update tomorrow when I'm not sleepy
I ran it it remotely logging in from RustDesk while working. Jellyfin (caddy), Copyparty, and my Pihole all run on that machine and it finished and all continued working after it restarted.
Time estimate: 10 mins
After using Fedora for a few days I do not care for the desktop environment and hot keys
But holy fuck how have I been sleeping on toolboxes?
The dev environment is great, I’m loving it. I even installed fedora 43 in a container to test out some rocm features and I didn’t even need to reboot.
What desktop environment are you using, KDE Plasma?
But yeah, Bazzite is immutable Fedora, and distrobox is essential (and comes pre-installed).
Gnome, which I used to love 20 years ago lol
I thought Bazzite was just for gaming… o would rather a near immutable distribo, once it’s set up with VPN and stuff I want everything else in containers and running at user privileges.
I despise Gnome these days, used to love it back in the Gnome 2 days.
Give KDE Plasma a try with Fedora, it’s pretty darn awesome.
I’ll give it a try this weekend
It's geared towards gaming, but it's a fully functioning distro.
But yeah if you're not using it for gaming, it's based on Fedora Kinoite I think.
I might check that out.
I would use it for gaming but I have a Studio Display which my framework seems to not like (which I mostly name in Apple… the interop is awful but it’s a beautiful monitor).
When I figure things out more I’ll try and move it to my tv though.
If you are currently running Mint 22.1, the upgrade will show up in the Update Manager > Edit menu.
Edit: I updated my machines this way. I'm guessing it isn't set to automatically move one from kernel 6.8 to 6.14? I can obviously change the kernel via the Kernels menu in Update Manager, I'm just wondering why this wasn't automatic.
i was going to amend my other comment.
according to this in the release notes:
===
HWE kernel issues
To provide support for newer AMD processors, Linux Mint 22.2 ships HWE Kernel 6.14.
This kernel however has issues with:
Virtualbox
Old Intel GPUs which use the i915 driver
Old NVIDIA cards which use the 470 driver (this driver is no longer supported by NVIDIA and thus doesn't support newer kernels)
If you are affected by one of these issues, we recommend you install Linux Mint 22.1 instead, which ships with LTS kernel 6.8.
You can then perform an upgrade towards 22.2 without switching towards the HWE kernel.
===
i ran lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display' and i confirmed i was running i915 but i'm also currently on 22.1 with kernel 6.8; so does that mean i can upgrade normally and not worry about the kernel?
It also says I'm using i915 but I bought this laptop a year ago... so I suspect many Intel GPUs use that driver?
Edit: According to https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.14-rc3/gpu/i915.html
The drm/i915 driver supports all (with the exception of some very early models) integrated GFX chipsets with both Intel display and rendering blocks.
does that mean i can upgrade normally and not worry about the kernel?
Yeah, just doing the upgrade via Update Manager > Edit menu leaves you on the 6.8 kernel. Confirmed with all three of my machines I upgraded.
Two of them I have since put on kernel 6.14 via Update Manager > Kernels, after updating to Mint 22.2 and seeing it still on kernel 6.8.
I updated last night and don't see much of a change in my experience other than my toolbar icon look different. I streamed fo 2.5 hours on Arma Refroger no issues
Sorry for a noob question, but is there a recommended flavor (xfce/mate/cinnamon) for a 2010 era laptop, or is there no reason not to use cinnamon?
You should probably take a look into puppy Linux, if low specs. Otherwise anything with xfce should run better on it.
I ran Puppy off of a 4gb USB for almost 2 years when the hard drive crashed in my desktop years ago. As far as the "it just works" OS's go, it was fantastic.
Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution that works well!
Hard to say without specs. I'd go with XFCE and then MATE right behind it. With a lower end PC, I doubt it could handle the fanciness of Cinnamon and still run software
Cinnamon uses slightly more resources than the other two. But, it's lightweight enough I doubt you are going to have an issue, even with a computer of that era.
can't you switch from xfce to cinnamon and vice versa too?
Yes, but a user would need to be experienced enough to know how to uninstall the previous desktop environment components they don't want, otherwise their application menu would have both DE's applications (2 file managers, photo viewer's, text editors, terminals, etc), which can feel a little cluttered.
Yeah, you can install both, then just pick which one you want during login.
Thanks for the feedback! Its a surprisingly big hurdle, especially for someone indecisive that's not going to try all three.
With Rufus running on a usb stick, trying out all 3 is a 30 minute affair. Download included if your internet speed is high enough.
I never considered it before, but I see now Rufus lets you as multiple images to one stick. Thanks!
Have fun distro hopping 😄
I’d say RAM is going to be the largest performance bottle neck for a desktop environment on an older machine. 4gb of RAM? don’t bother with cinnamon, you’ll likely have a much better experience with Mate or XFCE. 8gb is about where I’d even bother to test out cinnamon.
It doesn't seem like that big of an update. Unless you need something listed in the release notes, you can stay where you are. I am running 21.3. It is good until 2026. My configuration is a bit complex and I hate spending the time to update.
It fixed dark mode not working properly in Firefox. 100% needed for me lol.
That's weird, I haven't gotten the update yet but dark mode is working fine in FF for me. The place where it fails is ff-based webapps, which I use for YouTube music, Discord, and MS Teams.
That's weird. I don't use any of those other programs but Firefox dark mode has been broken for a while for me.
There are simple workarounds you can try to fix it, see for example https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/issues/12994#issuecomment-3134995065
Glad it helped you.