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RE: What Kind of Maintenance Do I Need on Linux?
Welcome to Linux! Linux Mint is a great choice coming from Windows, as well as a solid long-term daily workhorse.
Basic maintenance is pretty straightforward in Linux, while there are more specialized options if you like even more performance and security. I'll detail some main topics below.
Basic
Install multimedia codecs
During installation, Linux Mint will provide a checkbox option to "Install multimedia codecs" which you should select to allow proper playing of certain video files.
Updates
Linux in general has system-wide updates, meaning system and application updates are managed in a unified way for updates, along with their dependencies. You can chose to have these updates automatically installed and kept up to date, or what I do is launch the Update Manager app about once a week during a time when I've backed up critical files.
What's nice is Linux Mint now includes "Flatpaks" (an alternate application deployment) into the unified Update Manager.
Driver Manager
Launch System Settings and scroll down to click Driver Manager. That allows you to install additional and proprietary drivers, especially an nvidia driver if you have an nVidia graphics card. Although the default nouveau driver works fairly well, switching to the nvidia driver will allow you to overclock and gain performance for tasks that like to leverage GPU (web browsers, 3D apps)
Temperature, CPU, Disk, Network monitoring
If you chose the Cinnamon version, right click on your lower task bar panel and click Applets. If you like knowing your computer's activities and state, there are some applets there to add to your panel for tiny graphs to shows things like CPU Temperature, Memory usage, Network activity, Disk Usage. Specifically, in that Applets popped up window, click the Download button at the top and Add "CPU Temperature Indicator", Multi-Core System Monitor and System Monitor. That's add the to you available apps list, so on the top, click on Manage to go back to the applets list, select the one you like and click the + below to add it to your taskbar.
I'll note here that "Multi-Core System Monitor" is much better than "System Monitor" and both provide similar stats, but you may find "Multi-Core System Monitor" may not show up in the taskbar on certain systems, in which case you'd use "System Monitor"
Simpler system monitor
Open up and Terminal window (keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+T and type htop. It'll give you a overview of CPU, memory and process list. If it doesn't recognize the command, either go into Software Manager, serach for it and install, or from the command line enter:
apt install htop
Advanced
SSD Considerations
In my experiences, SSDs last much longer on Linux than Windows. While idle, disk activity and CPU activity is minimal vs Windows. And this is true of Workstation and Server deployments.
Defrag
The default user file system in Linux Mint will be "ext4". This file systems is rock solid and very performant. What's especially nice, is that you don't have to "defrag" it, unlike Windows file systems. It's allocation of files keeps it tuned automatically (simply speaking).
Trim
Most SSDs these days support the Trim command. Explanation could take an entire article to understand it in detail. You should find that Linux Mint has automatically set up a schedule to Trim your SSD periodically, which is great and covers 95% of usages cases, but should you know you'd like an SSDs file system Trimmed for a partticular upcoming case, Linux has the fstrim command.
GSmartControl
Wondering how healthy an SSD or Hard Disk is and it's usage? Install GSmartControl from Software Manager. It'll give details like Power On time, error counts, raw write stats and much more
Over Provisioning
Similar to Trimming your SSD, you may also pursue "over provisioning". This would have to be done shortly after install so as not to risk losing time spent setting up and your data, in my opinion. What this does is reserve a certain amount of the SSD to enable it to work more efficiently. Although there are many opinions on how manufacturers now manage the circuitry, I still allocate 4 or 5% of a larger SSD (1TB+) or 7% of a smaller one to be unallocated. Boot your machine using GParted to manage your partitions to free up the space.
Look Ahead
I'll trim this comment here, as I fear being to loquacious. But, you'll find a wonderful world ahead in Linux world. You'll feel more in control and get so much more productivity out of your hardware.
I haven't touched on "equivalents", software in Linux that would be an alternative to common titles. Such as Gimp as an alternative to Photoshop. I'll leave that to a full article should Hive users have enough interest, as I've been using Linux desktops and servers for quite along time and exclusively for years now.
Good luck, don't feel overwhelmed or like you are missing something - defaults work great, then just explore every now and again, like in the sample topics I mentioned above.
Thank you for the extensive response! I truly appreciate it!
I installed codecs when I installed Mint, so I have this covered.
I use both Update Manager to install updates manually and also
sudo get-apt update& upgrade in the terminal.I don't have a separate graphics card, but I might check the Drivers Update to know how to use it.
I added the CPU temperature applet. Thanks. Could be useful at least for a while to see how high it goes when encoding videos.
One of the optimizations tips I used today was to set Trim to run daily instead of weekly.
I installed GSmartControl, but it doesn't recognize the model of the drive. General driver instead of a specific one could be the issue?
I used Gimp to some extent on Windows. So I know a little bit about it, without being a graphics expert of any sort.
A couple more tips, if you don't mind :)
Instead of
sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get upgrade
you can alternately use just apt, which is shorthand support in the most latest Debian based distros. And, apt has a couple additional features, like detecting and handling dependencies a tad better.
sudo apt updatesudo apt upgrade
However, Update Manager essentially does the same thing. The command line version is fine to use on a desktop environment, but becomes a necessity when managing a "headless" server (no desktop environment installed), like Debian's netinst version when there's a desire to keep memory footprint and security attack surface to a minimum and enhancing performance for server loads.
Graphics Program
Here's another graphics option for ya: Darktable, if you prefer a more Lightroom style of photo management and editing.
More SSD stuff
You can gauge how often to Trim an SSD by estimating about how much of your free space is going to be used. Not Trimming is not a problem, it's just a tad faster when the circuitry doesn't have to zero-out the area on the fly before a write.
For instance, on a 500GB SSD or nvme drive 50% used, and you write 10GB of videos daily during saves, you can approximate that it would take 25 days to write to all the freshly Trimmed space. Considering updates and usage, you may find about once a week is still fine. Too many Trims and you may notice your TBW (Total Bytes Written) drive stat go up faster on a daily schedule vs weekly. You can look up your drive's life in TBWs on the manufacturer's spec sheet. I do a ton of writes, yet still only trim once a week. And again, it just makes writes a tad faster, and not that much if you've also over provisioned.
If you want speed demon status, look into adding "noatime" and "nodiratime" into your /etc/fstab root mount. That will prevent Linux from tagging the file with an access time every read. Be careful, one typo on this and you won't be able to mount your filesystem - but personally, I always do this on every SSD and nvme drive.
System Tweaks
I also always set vm.swappiness to 1, on machines with plenty of RAM. This will notify Linux you only want to swap to storage vs memory, as a last resort. Again, I always set this and cache pressure in my /etc/sysctl.conf file:
vm.swappiness=1vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50
As you may start to realize, I'm a performance nut lol.
Enjoy!
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Also, look at LibreWolf as an alternative to Firefox. It's Firefox with the uBlock Origin extension already added and configured. And, it keeps right up to date with Firefox releases.