I’ve a Lenova Ideapad L340 Gaming with Intel core i7, 8GB RAM, ITB hard drive + 256 GB SSD.
Also use 2 WD TTB & 2TB Passport USB drives.
Looks quite a nice machine, do you game on it?
So, I did a bit more Googling and, errr…, yes. I’d probably start with an Ubuntu live distribution and see what happens.
The Fresco FL2000 driver does seem to have had work done recently (2 months ago) but the notes suggest that it might not build on kernels newer than 4.0 (which is ancient history as it was released 5 years ago) - probably a non-starter.
The cheapest option is likely to be a supported USB to HDMI adapter (see previous post). There is a dock which supports dual monitors but it is probably using USB to HDMI internally (and no guarantee that whatever is in the dock is supported in Linux).
After that a monitor with USB C input might be next least expensive, a video wall controller would also certainly do the trick but you’ll need to read the spec carefully to make sure 3840x1080 input to two 1920x1080 monitors is supported, and at what refresh rate (and if you game, they introduce extra video lag), plus they seem to start north of £250
Unfortunately dual monitors on a laptop is a minority sport - which often means windows only solutions.
Bluetooth audio shouldn’t be a problem though - well supported in Linux.
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Using Wine… but there are alternatives like PlayonLinux. Most of the issues reported seem to be associated with gaming (which is not my bag).
Is that not the other way around ? Wine (despite its acronym) is used on Linux OSes to emulate a WindowsOS environment by providing a minimum of windows system dynamic libraries and configuration files. Getting Ubuntu to run on Windows, for example via the Windows store, makes use of a virtual machine environment and the Unix subsystem libraries that Microsoft now provide with the OS itself.
Absent all of that, one can fairly easily set up a virtual machine running a complete Windows OS in a Linux machine using either KVM or one of the GUI frontends such as VirtualBox (Oracle).
EDIT : I’m not a computer gamer, so I can’t speak for how well running Windows games in a VM might work (or not, as the case may be). Prior to using VirtualBox, I spent many an hour trying to get my kids’ Windows only games to run in Wine with PlayOnLinux, with limited success, unfortunately.
I’m a great believer in horses for courses TBH.
Jack of all trades - master of none. IMHO if you want gaming - get a gaming machine and leave serious computing to a machine which does that best.
I’d never countenance using a PC which runs my accounts, for example, for gaming - online or otherwise.
Maybe I’m a bit too much “old school” 
For old school read dinosaur but it works for me.
The printer should work mostly fine with most distros, especially if they are based on Ubuntu repositories.
As @anon88169868 has mentioned, not sure about the USB2HDMI switch for 2nd monitor output, might be worth trawling the Linux forums to see if anyone has encountered problems with a similar setup, as dual monitor output from a laptop (via USB no less) is probably not the most common of setups for the majority of Linux users.
Bluetooth audio seems to work pretty well in my limited experience, I have a Sony speaker that I can connect to the PC at home over Bt and it works, that’s good enough for me.
One issue you might find annoying, if you are a gamer, and you use a Bt wireless headset with built-in microphone. It appears that a combination of PulseAudio (the audio server daemon) and various Bt stacks provided by different Linux OSes do not always play well together, especially when it comes to automatic profile switching between A2DP and HSP/HFP. As I understand it (and I’m a total newb in this area) A2DP is the remote audio communication profile that allows a Bt headphone to receive audio data over Bt, whereas the HFP/HSP profiles are used for microphone pickup and transmission as used in telephony. I guess the only way to find out whether your particular headset works, if it is a wireless headset, would be to try and search through the forums beforehand.
As far as distros are concerned, my personal take:
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Ubuntu has definitely become a staple - although I use it on several different machines, it comes with a number of pet hates - I upgraded to LTS 20.04 from 18.04 recently on 3 different machines, 2 of which were Dell laptops with an Ubuntu OEM setup. Those upgrades actually went fairly smoothly. The third upgrade on an older compact box is still giving me problems, but that is due to the Linux kernel no longer correctly supporting the BIOS of the motherboard. I had similar issues prior to upgrading, they’ve just got worse with the current iteration of Ubuntu OS.
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I use ElementaryOS 5 on another older laptop, I love it for the simplicity of its UI, and its snappiness, but that comes at a cost in the choice of supported/integrated software. Although Elementary bases its repositories on Ubuntu, some software packages regularly found in Ubuntu are not present or are deemed “unsupported” (whatever that means exactly, as there is no paid support for Elementary as far as I can tell) and the developers for ElementaryOS have created their own app store and promote development of apps using the GTK/Vala environment. Upgrading from one version to another in ElementaryOS is still a PITA (unless suddenly, with the release of 5.1, they’ve made it easy).
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I gave Manjaro a spin a few years ago, but it just didn’t appeal to me, probably didn’t give it long enough, I guess. I love the idea of rolling distros, but was always concerned about overall stability.
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I haven’t tested Zorin in an age, it was still very young as a project when I last tried it, so that was several years ago !
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For me Mint remains a solid Linux OS. Based on the Ubuntu repositories, and although now refusing to follow the snap package system provided by Ubuntu, it is one of those Linux distros that lets you get things done without hue or cry (mostly - I’ve had issues in the past too). Whilst I love the crispness of the Cinnamon desktop, I find it has become quite resource hungry (as is Ubuntu, to be fair) and I want my computer to boot up within seconds and be fully functional. Perhaps most of my hardware is now too old for that hope to be a reality.
Overall, probably what I regret the most about current Linux distribution development has been the trend to forget being economical with hardware resources, and instead go for the bloat or feature creep that we have seen in the commercial OS development. This is what attracted me to the Raspberry Pi. What the developers of that product have managed to do with those Arm processors is pretty amazing, and kind of puts the other mainstream chip manufacturers to shame, IMO.
I know what you mean but flavours of Linux still run on platforms with very little hardware, eg OpenWrt will run on devices down to 32M of RAM and 4M of flash (though, to be fair they are currently saying that is insufficient resources and will not be supported in the future) and there are several distributions which concentrate on low powered processors.
While support for older systems (and lower powered ones which are still used as embedded processors - I think there is still an active 68k port, although it does require a 32bit CPU and MMU so at least a 68020) is important I think that it would be a mistake to ignore the considerable power of modern 64-bit processors, running off an SSD I am constantly amazed how fast my “new” machines boot. That’s an i5-8600T in the file/media server that tends to also get used as my daily driver, or the i7-8700k based box that I use for Windows & “heavy lifting” tasks such as video editing or transcoding.
But even “embedded” CPUs pack a punch - the router/firewall has a dual-core 1GHz AMD CPU with 4Gb RAM, that would have been a serious piece of desktop kit not that long ago and it runs Centos just fine in a headless config - it will even run X, albeit via VNC
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No. My previous laptop had a catastrophic hardware failure, I was fast approaching a deadline to have ready a large complicated report, so just went for the most future-proof laptop that Amazon France could deliver ASAP.
In spite of Lenovo naming it as a ‘gaming’ machine, I think that many gamers would reject as the graphics are probably not high end enough.
I had a look at that adapter on Amazon USA: a couple of users reported that Linux is not supported.
However StarTech support recommended another product which supports Ubunta 14.04 to 18.04.
https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Monitor-External-Video-Adapter/dp/B008CXFMT6
However at $118 its an expensive solution.
USB to HDMI adapters on Amazon.co.uk go for as low as a tenner and I’ll bet are all ultimately based on similar hardware.
We’ve used Linux for probably 20 years and I love it, so can’t deal with the whole having to have a virus protector etc that you need with Windows. We used Ubuntu for a long, long time but changed to Mint maybe 6 years ago (no idea why hubby just does these things!). We’ve moved both MIL and my mum onto it and they both love it.
My only real peeve is how crap Open Office is!
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What about LibreOffice though?
I haven’t really been following the OpenOffice vs LibreOffice split but the former is at least “adequate” for preparing documents. The biggest problem is that interworking with M$ Office is sketchy (but then even Microsoft office is not always compatible with itself).
There is, or was, Abiword, if you just want a word processor - don’t know how that is doing these days but it is still around.
Sorry yes that is what it is now! I find it really buggy and it always has been. When I was at uni I could never get powerpoints done and I find it generally a PITA! I put up with it though as I would hate to go to Windows ever again!
What version of LO are you using?
Mine is v6.4.4.2 and seems to work without issue.
Ummmmmm no idea 
will have to ask the other half!!!
Ahh… the joys of Virtual Machines . IBM invented them you know and, like so many other IBM inventions, others made a fortune out of them. For example Larry Elison with SQL and EMC with the disk drive. Just like AT&T’s unix, or Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre with windows, Ethernet and the laser printer. Gates would be a forgotten BASIC interpreter developer if IBM had succeeded in doing a deal with Digital Research for there CPM OS. I feel a bit the same way about Torvolds, he only rewrote the UNIX kernel and UNIX was and is is so much more than that. He’s standing on the shoulders of many pioneers.
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Depends on the version of Mint you are using, and whether or not your husband has installed a PPA version (an additional repository of packages for more up-to-date versions of LibreOffice), a SNAP packaged version, or even, dare I say it, whether he has compiled the source code and installed it himself.
By default in LInux Mint 19 “Tara”, I seem to recall that the supplied version of LibreOffice is 6.0.7.3, so pretty old in the current scheme of LibreOffice development (which is in the 6.4.x branches now). The difference lies in the fact that the version of LibreOffice is supplied from the Ubuntu package repositories, on which the developers from Mint make their own window dressing, and is thus usually a couple of versions behind the current version available for download (which might also explain your frustration at its bugginess, as 6.0.x branches were pretty buggy). This is part of Ubuntu’s long term support initiative, so the software receives security updates (and some backported bug corrections) for at least 5 years, but not generally the new features that get developed and the code refactoring/redesign that appears in the current versions.
I can sympathise if your version is indeed a 6.0.x.x version, that line of releases was particularly bad IMO. There has been much improvement since then, especially with some of the MSOffice import/export filters. Being a community developed project, import/export is still not 100% identical, and likely never will be, as not even MS can manage that between Windows and Mac for example, or even between its own Windows versions. Software of that size is a huge endeavour, and when most things like the import/export filters have to be re-engineered from scratch because there is no “free” access to the code from Microsoft that enables all of the fudges and hidden tricks to deal with the complexity of MS’s legacy file versions, it is not really surprising that bugs will remain. Aside from that, most people who dislike(d) OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice do so because the software requires you to do things in a different way from the way they are used to with MS. This can be immensely infuriating, especially when you spend hours trying to obtain a result that you just did in 30s with MSOffice. I have to say that there have been a number of efforts to attempt to improve that situation, especially through a redesign of the user interface, but again, comparing like for like is an impossible task - MS spends a considerable sum on user interface development, and the LibreOffice project clearly does not have that kind of budget, so it is reliant on the availability and goodwill of its volunteer contributors. For example, there are now various ribbon-style menu alternatives that you can choose in LibreOffice, and which people might feel are more familiar to them through their previous use of MSOffice. These user interface options are not activated by default, and the user has to know how to switch them on.
If I sound like I’m engaging in a little LibreOffice proselytism, I am, unashamedly. I have been using LibreOffice professionally on pretty much a daily basis since the project began, and before that OpenOffice.org, and before that its predecessor StarOffice (back when it was still proprietary, i.e. before it was bought up by Sun). In my spare time, I am also a member of the volunteer quality assurance group, testing bugs, reporting them, confirming new reports, and sometimes attempting to provide debugging information for those that cause crashes, and I have help produce documentation/manuals in the past as well (in French and in English). There are many bugs reported for this piece of software, and some take a very long time to be resolved. That is the nature of a volunteer-based community project, where you can’t force people to do things at any given time.
Here comes the canvassing bit: if you would like to help with the LibreOffice project, in your own way, volunteers are gratefully welcomed, it doesn’t have to be as a programmer (I’m not one). It can simply be through helping out with translations, preparing user documentation, bringing your design skills to marketing materials, or the user interface development (e.g. icon development), developing extensions to the software, etc. There is a whole range of opportunities for such volunteer contributions!
BTW, if there are any particular issues that people face with using LO, there are a number of internet forums where most of the questions have already been asked (LibreOffice Ask forum, OpenOffice.org forum) and there is also a bug reporting site (LibreOffice bugzilla) where you can check to see if the bug is already known, and if so, whether anything is happening with it, and even file as yet unreported bugs. That is where I tend to hang out, albeit mostly in relation to database issues, and issues specific to macOS (as that is currently my main workhorse).
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Mint is not supported by Ubuntu - see this reference.
I have to say I like LO and have just used LO Draw to make a drawing of a gaz housing for chez Lees to contain two Propane Gaz bottles outside for our cooker. The niggling thing is, having used MS Visio to complete a full drawing for chez Lees’ bungalow (now built) there are no extensions I could find giving building items (like windows, doors, furniture etc) which Visio had in abundance. I also have LO CAD and that seems no better 
Unless of course, you can point me in a different direction…
Interesting… I’ve written a few manuals for accounting s/w I have developed in a 4GL over the years…
For basic Archtecural & MEP design I’ve heard Sketch up is not bad
I’ve never used it as I use an Autodesk suite