I'm a beginner and I plan on switching to Linux. For the last month I've been trying out distros on a VirtualBox and I've decided to go with Linux Mint Xfce. I'm still kinda scared to migrate because I don't know if it'll all work, my main concern is if my graphics card is supported. Here's my rig:

• Intel Core i3 530 2.93GHz
• 4GB Ram DDR3
• Nvidia Geforce GTS 250
• 2 TB hard drive

Will my graphics card be supported? It is currently on driver version 342.01. Is there anything else that might not be supported? Thanks in advance.

P.S I know my internet will work, I have an ethernet cable.

the lateral thinking way to approach this is to maybe use ventoy https://ventoy.net/en/index.html to format a usb stick say 16 gig. The way it works is that you can just dra gand drop iso as they are. Not all iso will boot but Mint xfce and cinammon are ones that do work.So you can put both flavors on the same usb and try both.



Now the os will be running from the usb BUt it will still be utilizing your bare metal hardware. If it ok with a live OS this way its generally ok when you install.

Another option is to just grab the ISO for Mint XFCE and only try that. The ISO when properly burned using their recommendations is bootable.

Not sure why it needs to be complicated with making a USB stick multi boot and include other desktop options, except as a recommendation to try, whereas I'd recommend the yet a different desktop.

Either situation, small USB sticks are cheap and you can make one each for each distro you wish to live boot with. That's what I do and I use stickers to label them with, "what has what".

Thank you both, I'll try live booting tomorrow and see how it goes. Am I able to test proprietary drivers when on live boot? And also, I really like Xfce and chose it because it is customizable enough for me, and it's lightweight. I tried other DE's too don't worry.

First see if the disto works as is.

If you need to install a driver to get something to work, you can, and using the same things like "sudo apt-get install <blah-blah>"

But an issue is that it will be "live", as in "for that boot instance", and once you power it down, it'll be back to the default.

However this will give you insight as to whether or not graphics, sound, etc all work and then you can choose to really perform the install after that point.

And then when you install a new driver for something at that point, it'll stay on there.

Good luck!

I would add more RAM - 4GB is not very much for basically any modern use-case. Adding 2-4GB of additional RAM should be cheap (DDR3 is cheap on the secondhand market), and would be a good idea. The GeForce will support older nVidia Official drivers, or noveau, but you won't be able to run the latest 450+ drivers (they just don't support that card), but it will be supported to its limits (it's an older card, and you probably know this already, but some multimedia and 3D features just won't be supported as a result). Where I'd be more concerned about 'other things not supported' is as you get into integrated/onboard devices - and the easiest way to find out if that works is to just load it up and try it out.

You can always post a specific question about your video card to the Linux Mint forum here on LinuxQuestions:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-mint-84/

Or Google the version of Linux Mint (not sure what version you want to install) and video card and see what type of issues other have had.

Looks like the last driver was released in 2016 for that card:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/results/113161/

Another good place to look is the Linux Mint HCL:

https://community.linuxmint.com/index.php/hardware/

Ok, I tried live booting. Everything was working smoothly, I tried installing a couple things and such. My Microphone and headphones worked, but I had to unplug my headphones for my speakers to work for some reason.

I've tried some commands to check if my graphics card is working, and indeed, it's detecting it. When I opened to see drivers, there was that open source driver and an Nvidia 340 driver, but I could not switch to it, it said something about dependencies and x11, I'm not quite sure, it may be because of the live boot.

So I tried installing and running Minecraft to test if my GPU worked, and it did. There were some lighting glitches, probably the driver I talked about before.

But at the end, I pressed something on my keyboard including F3, idk what exactly, and my game minimized or something, I could still hear the sound but it wasn't in the panel. I opened task manager and Minecraft was there, I didn't know how to maximize it so I tried running it again and my PC froze. I had to force it to shutdown and after that I didn't live boot again. What could this be? Is there a combination on the keyboard to minimize like this? Is there a fix to my speakers problem? And finally, will the driver install after I install the OS?

SoMir,

As you will see from this link, your GeForce GTS 250 card is supported by the 340.xx driver:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/

The 340.xx driver supports the following set of GPUs:

NVIDIA GPU product .......Device PCI ID

GeForce GTS 250 .............0x0615

Also:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/

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Consider this, on a radio, if you plug in a headphone to the headphone jack, then the speakers do not output until you pull the headphone wire out of the jack. Same thing here.

I don't know what happened with that inadvertent key press, but maybe try to avoid doing that in the future and see if the application works as intended normally, without random "I don't know" keystrokes/actions.

Also consider this, whatever computer you have, if you hit random keys on the keyboard, stuff you didn't wish to happen, may happen. Sorry that it seemed to really lock up, but think of it as if you were teaching a relative about a computer and they had zero understanding about it, and as you were teaching them, they started clicking the mouse randomly and hitting the keyboard, you'd say "Stop!" because it's not necessarily the best idea.

I get that, but I was playing a game, multiplayer. I'm mature enough not to spam random buttons on my keyboard

Plus, on earlier windows versions it was like that, I had to unplug one audio output for another to work, but I don't have to do that on win10 so I thought it would work the same.

The issue is that you DID hit unsupported keys. Just because certain keys are mapped to do specified things in windows does NOT mean the same keys work the same way in Linux. If you want the same key mapping you will need to set it up for anything the game does not actually do for you.

All hardware I have ever worked with has had a mechanical switch in the headphone jack set up so plugging in a set of headphones disables the speakers. I do not think win10 has any control over the hardware switches that do that. It certainly does not on my laptop.

The original purpose of headphones was so the user could listen privately without forcing everyone in the area to listen to the same thing and the hardware (headphone jack) was designed for that purpose. AFAIK everything that has a headphone jack does the same thing, even the newest smart TVs.

You can never expect the live version to work the same way an installed version would do since you have to install each package and all the dependencies that are not native to the live iso, including video drivers, etc. Once those changes are all installed it would work the same, at least until the next reboot wipes out all the changes and you are back to the vanilla live version. All your changes/installs are only in memory on the live version, not written to storage.

On the sound thing - see what pavucontrol says, but probably the machine has auto-sense on the jacks so it won't allow certain jacks with nothing plugged in, and it will defeat certain jacks when others are plugged in. A little annoying if you want to leave everything connected, but a lot of newer integrated audio systems are like this.

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Ok, thank you everybody. I have tested and I think I can safely migrate to my, hopefully, new favorite OS.