Using Linux Mint As My Daily Driver: Five Years On. The Same Old Good Old Linux Mint Life… And A Story About Proton(tricks).

Well, it’s the 29th of July, 2026, and that means it’s time for me to open the local copy of my personal website’s repository, write a new blog post commemorating the time I permanently switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint on this day in 2021 and reflecting on what happened since then, marvel about how out of date certain parts of my website are, make a point to update it and finally forget to do anything to update it for at least another year!

As if certain things couldn’t be any more constant, yes, I also wrote this whole post on the day like I’ve foolishly done previously and I’ll (hopefully not) foolishly do again. Yay! 🙃

OR SO I THOUGHT! I started writing this post on the 27th, thinking that was the day these kinds of blog posts came out, and, as it turns out, these things come out on the 29th! 🤦‍♂️

Still, though, it gave me more time to actually write this post, although I have been thinking about what to write and how to structure this post for a while now. I mean, hey, at least I’m not late, so there’s my track record intact! 😏

Life update

Last time I wrote one of these “anniversary posts” (or really any post for this blog), I was in the second year of my PhD, and as such I’m now in my third. I’ve got plenty of things going on with my research, more specifically with another funded project essentially continuing my research into software sustainability, more specifically with the aid of another company, CLMS UK Ltd, and their low-code toolset “zAppDev” (which has its own “Mamba” language for program logic). I’ve had a paper accepted at STAF 2026 with my supervisor Kevin Lano, and I also co-presented the paper with him at the conference (we joined and presented online). And, yes, the PLoP 2024 paper finally got published (!!), and I’ve had some other published papers in between PLoP 2024 and STAF 2026 as well. They’re all in my online research profiles (ORCiD, Google Scholar et cetera).

I’ve still been doing teaching work as well, both at King’s and for The Brilliant Club, a university access charity that does short university-style courses at schools, aiming to, among other things, introduce these students to university life and research. I taught a group of primary school children last year and a group of sixth-formers this year, and I would like to thank everyone involved from The Brilliant Club and both of the schools I’ve worked with. I sure had a blast, and I hope you‘ve had a blast too!

Last year, I also got nominated for TA (Teaching Assistant) of the Year at King’s, and this year I won! Once again, I’d like to thank everyone who nominated me for the award this and last year. I put as much effort as I can into my teaching, and I know for a fact that you see it. It’s part of why I do it, you know. I’ve signed up for it again, and I look forward to getting more of you through your studies in the near future!

Beyond that, for a while I also did some paid work on Flip Computing’s FlockXR, a Scratch-like block-based visual programming language (in fact it uses the same block-handling library behind the scenes as Scratch!) aimed at both 3D game development (in a web-based environment) and educational purposes, aiming to help pretty much anyone (even children in primary school) pick up enough programming principles, creative thinking and problem solving skills to write basic programs and games. Among other things, I worked on some of the blocks, added to the snippets that they already provided, implemented themes for the toolset, so I gained valuable experience working on both the frontend and the backend of a Node.js web app, for which I will forever be grateful to Flip Computing and the FlockXR community. My unending thanks to Dr Tracy Gardner, who saw my GitHub profile after I starred the FlockXR repository on GitHub (I first found out about FlockXR from a poster I picked up from my university), and shot me an email in August last year letting me know she got funding from the UK Games Fund to hire a freelancer. Back when I received it, I almost couldn’t believe it was real, but some replies and a discussion later, I got to work. I’m so glad I took the opportunity and will forever be grateful to Dr Tracy for offering it to me. And, of course, I must thank the rest of Flip Computing (hi, Liz and Becky and anyone else I haven’t named! 👋) and the FlockXR community (hi Danny, Jonathon, James, Julian and anyone else I haven’t named! 👋) for taking me on board. You all made me feel at home and at ease!

One other thing: I moved house with my family in November last year! Not just that, but we also moved London boroughs too (Redbridge to Tower Hamlets, closer to King’s)!

Oh yeah, I also passed my driving test in February this year (just before the first night of Ramadan, too!), and bought my first car in March. I’ve been driving ever since! Oh boy, is car insurance for new drivers expensive, though (at least in the UK). 😔

I think that’s everything, but is there anything else I’ve missed? Oh, yes! The Mint stuff…

Living the Linux Mint Life

There are a few specific stories I want to write about from my life as a Mint user, but before I elaborate any further on those, I’d like to talk about what’s stayed the same since I last made a post like this.

Well, last year’s theme was settling down as a Mint user, and it appears I’ve settled down quite well since then!

What’s stayed the same(-ish) since then?

• My uni laptop still sees use in basically everything.
• I still have the USB-C hub and SATA reader I bought.
  • The USB-C hub works especially well when I hook up my uni laptop to the telly in my room so I can use it as a monitor. The laptop only has one USB port, so without it I wouldn’t be able to plug in an external keyboard! 😔
• I’m still using Floorp as my browser (after I jumped ship from Firefox last year).
• KBibTeX still handles BibTeX files very well for my use.
• Gittyup still works very well as my Git client.
• I still use VSCodium but I’m still exploring other editors as well. I mentioned Zed in my last anniversary post, and I’ve been trying it out slowly over this past week!
  • Of course, I still dabble with Vim/Neovim every now and then, and it’s still incredibly useful for my research.
• I still use Flatpaks (albeit I haven’t updated a Flatpak repository in a good while now, nor have I built software from source in a while, but I should still have the skills and should easily be able to get back into that).
• I still use Cinnamon with Mint, so naturally I still use Nemo (file manager), xed (text editor) and GNOME Terminal (well…) as and when needed.
• Yes, as of the time I’m writing this and the time this goes live, I am running the latest version of Mint, 22.3, and I’m very much looking forward to the release of Mint 24 this Christmas (which, since it’s a major upgrade, I will write a post about my update to, which I did when I upgraded from Mint 21.3 to Mint 22)!
• I still use Timeshift, of course, without which I wouldn’t be doing regular system backups that still save my backside; one particular update went so awry that I went through a number of kernel panics, and let’s just say my computer would’ve been nigh unusable now were it not for the automatic snapshots I set up with Timeshift! There’s a reason why I always recommend it to other Linux users I meet!
• I still use Wine for running, among other things, Flashpoint and OpenMPT.
• I still use Steam, and with Steam I still use Proton for running Windows games. I actually do have a Proton-related happening that I’ll elaborate on in a bit!
• Although I do explore other music making software every now and then (I mentioned Sonic Pi last year), LMMS and Tenacity are still the tools I most frequently use at the moment. They’re just so easy for me to get into whenever I have an idea I want to action and/or when I want to look at an audio file (in the latter’s case), but, although I’m perfectly fine with Tenacity, I definitely want to explore other Linux DAWs that don’t have LMMS’s limitations (e.g. no onboard recording as of version 1.2.2).
• Of course, I’m still dabbling in other things as and when I get the chance. I mentioned Blender last year, but I’m also learning GWT as well.

Admittedly, I don’t go crazy customising my desktop, and I certainly don’t make myself out to be one of those “power users”, even after all those years, but I’ve found a way to make Linux as a daily-driver OS work for me, which was exactly what I was looking for when I started to consider switching from Windows 10 back in sixth form, so I can’t complain, really!

Oh, yeah, I did say I’d talk more about my use of Proton in that list above, didn’t I? Well, this recent happening involves a certain thing called Protontricks.

My First Rodeo with Protontricks

Chances are most of you who use Proton to run Steam games are already aware of Protontricks and/or the similarly named Winetricks. Some of you may even use it yourself. Some of you might even be using Winetricks!

In my last blog post before this one, the one I made in August last year, I advertised a talk I hosted at UEL (University of East London) that same month called “Borked, Corked and Forked” and in that talk, which was about Wine and Proton (!!), I mentioned both Protontricks and Winetricks as tools that can be used with Proton and Wine respectively. Winetricks came out first and is a still-actively-developed program (at first one script, now a series of scripts) that aims to aid users with solving various issues people run into with running certain Windows programs through Wine. Naturally, Protontricks partially derives itself from Winetricks and aims to do the same thing as Winetricks, but for Proton instead of Wine, to help with running certain Windows-only Steam games on Linux. As you can imagine, both can come in particularly handy for their respective purposes!

Up until recently, however, with the Steam games I’ve played through Proton so far, I hadn’t the need to dabble with Protontricks. Most of the time, my games work just fine, and even if a game doesn’t work with one version of Proton, I can make it work just fine with a different version of Proton. That was the way it was until recently, when I tried to boot up a game I had recently bought in this year’s summer sale called Puzzler World.

Look, I like puzzles and quizzes, OK?!

Anyway, I recently bought the game and had been excited to play, only to find that, when I ran it the first time, the game would boot, as I could see the icon on the Cinnamon panel and I could hear the sounds coming out from the game, but I couldn’t see a darn thing from the game itself!

Immediately, I went to ProtonDB (a community-based site that shows reports from Steam users of how well Windows-only games run through Proton and what tricks were used to get it up and running), and I found that the top two most recent reports were from gamers who got the game running by using Protontricks to make it run through a virtual desktop. This is a trick I’ve used with Wine before just by changing Wine’s settings, so I was familiar with how it worked, but in order to get it to work through Steam, I realised I had no choice but to install Protontricks and run the command specified in said reports, protontricks 33650 settings vd=800x600, 33650 being the game’s numerical ID on Steam and vd=800x600 essentially telling Steam to run the game through a virtual desktop with an 800x600 resolution.

I ran the command, thinking that Protontricks would also run the game afterwards. It didn’t, and I still don’t know fully whether or not the command was supposed to run the game afterwards (if anyone can fill me up on this, please do!). I didn’t realise Protontricks actually did anything meaningful until I went to Steam to boot the game next time, and lo and behold: It ran! Granted, it ran in a virtual desktop with a resolution of 800x600, but I can see the game now, and therefore I can play it!

So I owe a great deal to Protontricks for making it easier to tap into Proton’s settings just to get this game to work, and I’m keeping it around just in case I need it again. Now that I mention it, I need to try out Luxtorpeda as well. It’s a runner for Steam that allows you to use native Linux versions of certain games’ engines for games with native Linux engines that only got published as Windows versions on Linux. For instance, Quake 3 Arena on Steam is only available as a Windows game, but with Luxtorpeda, you can use a Linux version of Quake 3 Arena’s engine (or, more specifically, one of several forks and/or modern versions of said engine) to run that game natively on Linux. I tried playing Quake 3 Arena, which I own on Steam, through Proton a number of times and while the game runs, I actually do have a few issues when it comes to actually playing the game. They’re not severe or anything, but they do get in the way somewhat, so I should try out Luxtorpeda with Quake 3 Arena on Steam and see if it works better for me. I’ll let you know how that goes.

But, hey, at least I got Puzzler World to run on Linux using Protontricks now, so that’s something, eh?!

Not Regretting The Switch

In most of these “anniversary” posts, I’ve included some kind of reflection on whether or not I regret switching to Linux. The only time I didn’t do this, in fact, was in the second of these posts, which I wrote in a rush more akin to video game development crunch time. In every anniversary post other than this one, I mentioned that I didn’t regret switching to Linux, and I’m happy to report once again that this is still the case!

I guess the main reason I kept doing those reflections over the years is to keep myself in check, for what it’s worth (I mean, I kept saying I’d update my site, and, uh…). I don’t want to eat my words lest I switch to a different OS or even a different Linux distro, even though none of these are things I necessarily anticipate happening. Then again, I already have to eat my words every time I realise this site still isn’t as up-to-date as it should be. I mean, I only put in my current age on my site when this post went live (24, as of the time I wrote this post)!

Also, when I started doing these anniversary posts, I was still a newbie when it came to Linux, so I still felt like the new kid on the block (I know people who have been using Linux before I switched), but by now I’ve been daily driving Linux Mint for half a decade, and I’m just sat here wondering where all the time went!

In any case, I guess it’s good for me to keep myself in check in this regard, particularly if I decide to switch to another Linux distribution in the near future, which isn’t something I readily anticipate. Will there be cases where I’ll have to use Windows and/or macOS in the future? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t anticipate that either, and I don’t particularly look forward to using either of these operating systems nowadays, but much of why I switched from Windows to Linux in the first place was because I wasn’t really happy as a Windows user then, and I thought when I switched that I’d be happier as a Linux user.

Did I become happier as a Linux user? Yep!

Am I still happy as a Linux user? Oh yes!

And that’s it!

You know, forget having been a Linux user since 2021 for a minute: I’ve had this website and blog up since the month before I switched to Linux, so that means this blog is already five years old!

I really need to keep a journal of all the things I want to mention for these anniversary posts, because I do feel like there were more stories I could have told this year, but because I didn’t plan ahead I have barely any recollection of them right now! Ah, well, thank goodness that Protontricks anecdote was still recent and therefore still in recent memory, so I had something new to write about!

Maybe when I try out Luxtorpeda, I’ll write a blog post about that too. I mean, anything to keep this blogging thing going at least a few more times, eh?

In any case, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it! Getting back into blogging after such a long break felt rather daunting at first, but once I had ideas on what to write and eventually started structuring and writing this post, I eventually got to a point where I could comfortably keep writing until I felt I’d got enough down.

I’d also like you all to know that, like all of my other blog posts, none of what you’ve read was made with generative AI, and I’m sure many of you reading this will be very happy about that, indeed! It’s not like I’ll ever need AI to write blog posts for me, anyway. Once I start getting into it, the words and ideas just come out and the keys on my keyboard just keep getting pressed!

Hmmm… maybe one day I’ll get this site up-to-date. I’ll at least need to put new stuff on my CV, especially the jobs I’ve had over the past couple of years! If you’re connected with me on LinkedIn, you’ll know what I mean, but you need an account to browse LinkedIn, so I should definitely add my past and present jobs to the CV on my website. Hey, that’s another thing I could make a blog post about in the future. It’s like I said, the ideas just keep coming out, eh?

But, hey, I think I’ve found a good point to end this anniversary post (I’m just glad I’m still keeping this “anniversary post” thing going after five whole years!), so hopefully my next site update and/or blog post comes out sooner rather than later. Feel free to push me on it or give me some sort of idea, and I’ll make sure to credit you!

And finally, until next time, peace!