I, like many others, have been getting worn down by Microsoft's awful changes to Windows over the years, and I finally said enough is enough and moved to Linux.
I had a little linux experience beforehand due to my work, but this is my first time using it as my main OS. I am still very much a noob when it comes to linux.
So far it's been great though. I am running Linux mint.
I am having 2 issues I can't seem to solve, though. The taskbar (or I guess as Linux is calling it, the Panel) was only on one monitor rather than both. I managed to put a second one on my other monitor, and I enabled the "show windows from all workspaces" option on both panels. But it isn't behaving like I have come to expect using the Windows one.
For example, both panels have the icon for Firefox. If I have Firefox open on my main monitor, and click the firefox icon on my second monitor's panel, it just opens a new window instead of bringing the existing firefox window into focus.
An example of why this annoys me that sometimes I am playing a game that is full screen, and the flow i have over a decade of experience with is that i could click that firefox logo on the second monitor to bring up the window i already have open.
Is it possible to just have 2 identical panels that function the way the taskbar does on windows?
I am willing to switch from cinnamon to a different DE if thats what it takes. I tried installing xfce, but it seems like the issue is exactly the same there too. Not sure if switching to a different DE will help.
Or is the solution to just use a different applet than the default one in the panel?
Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, this is the only linux forum I am aware of.
EDIT: Strangely, it seems like this issue is only occurring on the second monitor. If an application is open on the second monitor, but I click the icon on the first monitor's panel, the behavior I want happens, it just puts the existing window in focus. Not sure why that is, the applets on both panels are identical as far as I can tell.
What DE is the question.
I recommend GNOME with the dash to panel addon, or KDE. You can also use LXQt, but it doesnt yet have Wayland support. If it has, you can install it with Wayfire, Kwin or even cosmic comp.
Can you use GNOME and KDE with Mint?
You can, though it might not be a great experience. Using Gnome on Mint especially is kind of funny tasting given the distro's history.
Mint used to ship a KDE version but stopped to focus on other things, as there were plenty of distros that offered a good KDE experience. Kubuntu and KDE Neon are both fairly close to what Mint KDE would offer.
When Gnome decided to do whatever Gnome 3 was, a lot of people didn't want that. And I know of four DEs now that sprang up that were trying to fill the void that Gnome 3 sucked into the world with its creation:
Mate. The good old fashioned "we don't like the changes, so we're gonna fork it and keep making the old thing ourselves." Mate is Gnome 2 that kept on chooglin.
Cinnamon. At first, the folks who ran Mint tried to release a set of extensions for Gnome 3 to make it work more like Gnome 2, then decided to fork Gnome 3 to make their own DE and called it Cinnamon.
Unity. Canonical's DE they made during their "re-invent every single wheel" phase. They abandoned it in favor of Gnome with some extensions to make it look a little like Unity did, and my understanding is some teenager picked it back up.
Cosmic. If I understand right, and I might not, System76 has bent Gnome into such a pretzel for Pop!_OS that they're calling it their own thing called Cosmic.
Mint ships two of these four DEs. They make Cinnamon themselves and they work pretty closely/share members with the Mate community. They also offer an xfce version for a few reasons, another GTK-based DE that isn't GNOME.
So using Gnome on Mint, the "anything oh god anything but Gnome" distro is just kinda funny to me.
Excellent breakdown of history there
You can use any DE with any distro, but not every distro will have it customised well. Mint devs focus heavily on cinnamon as they're the ones developing it, so everything else looks far worse.
Both yes, and Mint is better because no snaps and vanilla GNOME afaik.
But still based on Ubuntu LTS, I would recommend Fedora 39, wait a few months until Fedora 40 is more tested. If you go like that you will not have bleeding edge updates and suffer from bugs.
I wouldn't as you shouldn't install multiple desktops.
Says who? There's nothing wrong with having multiple DEs installed, and any decent desktop manager (like sddm) trivializes launching into any of them.
They often have conflicting packages or mess with each other's config files and cause issues.
citation very much needed
The only thing it does is use up more storage if you for example have only GTK, but install a DE that uses QT.
Desktop Environments alter plenty of config files, like the ones in
.configand.localThey can interfere with one another. I'm not really sure how you could say they don't. E.g. change some settings relating to gtk in one DE and it can change them in another.
Plus there's the clutter aspect of it. Searching for settings and seeing four settings apps.
E: oops, the ~ character caused some formatting issues. Removed.
They can alter some shared config files like the keyboard layouts and network settings. Since I've never had an issue with that, I'm guessing they're not overwriting everything without a care. Or I might've just gotten lucky when trying out different DE's
In my personal experience, it does seem like you've been lucky. Sure, most things will work when you install a second DE, but things have invariably broken within the hour after doing so.
The configuration files may conflict
For sure, but you could.
As others said, Mint is just desnapped Ubuntu LTS at that point. So I would rebase to Kubuntu. Oh, forgot that was not a thing on the traditional desktops.
Really, try Fedora atomic KDE, it is awesome.
Sorry i didn't mention it in the post, I am on cinnamon.
KDE poorly also doesnt have the "clone panel to all monitors", you need to configure it seperately for every new one, which is pretty bad.
But you could just create the "default panel" and call it a day.