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.

  • Gabadabs
    2·
    7 hours ago

    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.

    • Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      1·
      7 hours ago

      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.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
        2·
        7 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

      • Gabadabs
        2·
        7 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.