I was unhappy with a cheap Chromebook that I bought to take on the road, so at the advice of a very well-travelled friend, I bought a 7-year-old used, but high-quality laptop for less than one-third the price of the Chromebook, then wiped the hard drive and installed Linux on it, specifically, Mint Cinnamon.
The installation was vastly easier than it was back when I was installing Red Hat 9, and I only ran into two minor issues in the process. Here are my notes on what was a surprisingly fast and easy installation.
- There is no need to remove the USB stick on the first reboot after installation. It’s not necessary. And if you do remove it, remove it BEFORE you start the reboot.
- Be sure to update the Update Manager before you install Brave using the commands shown below. If you don’t, you will get an error and it won’t install. You can use Copy and Paste for the strings, just remember that Ctrl-V will not work to paste inside the terminal, you have to select Edit/Paste from the pull-down menu.
- If you see a ~ at the end of a pasted text string, then you haven’t updated the Update Manager.
- Firefox, which comes installed with Cinnamon, has gotten intrusive to the point of unusability. I wouldn’t even consider using it now.
sudo apt install curl
sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg
echo “deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg] https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/ stable main”|sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install brave-browser
Installing Brave on Linux (Debian-Ubuntu-Mint)
Computer technology has now reached the point of declining marginal utility for most users, and Windows is becoming ridiculously intrusive, so you can get some real bargains as long as you are willing to enter the tank zone and don’t have any esoteric software requirements.
UPDATE: I am reliably informed by the resident Linux community that Ctrl-Shift-V is the correct keyboard command to paste text strings in the Linux terminal.