Originally Posted By: asand1
I ran Mint 17 Xfce first on my single core Athlon/Asus machine, and then on my FX4300/ECS machine, both using Geforce dedicated graphics cards. Mint 17 Xfce was great and eventually I'll install it again to dual boot with W10. Nvidia has better Linux drivers than ATI/AMD, not sure why you would think "Nvidia GeForce integrated graphics... does not mix well with Mint."
I could write a novel on this. My 2009-era desktop has Nvidia GeForce 6 series integrated graphics. Something went south with Nvidia support for Linux (or at least the Ubuntu family) with 12.04. It was bad with 'any' Nvidia chip or controller, but the 6-series integrated was the worst of them all. This inspired Linus Torvalds's public "FU" to Nvidia that made headlines on tech sites at the time.
The challenge was to install an Ubuntu-based system and keep it running long enough to install the Nvidia proprietary driver. There were problems even after you did that, but the almost-comical main issue was the screen disappearing before your eyes, or freezing and refusing to unfreeze after reboot, or 100 ways to frustrate you into going back to Windows and tossing your Linux disks in the trash.
The freezes/inexplicable video problems happened both during the install process and after the system went live, but before the proprietary drivers were installed. I learned a lot about X---and about patience---trying to deal with this. Eventually I gave up, decided Linux would not work on my desktop and stuck with Windows. When I could not stand that any more, I installed 10.04, which was about to go out of support but was still rock-solid.
Whatever Nvidia gremlins snuck into the mix with 12.04 were exorcised with 14.04, which has run like a charm for more than a year on the same desktop. That's for Ubuntu....but the same Nvidia video quagmire continued for Mint 17, even though it is based on Ubuntu 14.04.
I tried several times to install Mint 17.1 but the graphics crashed either during install or as soon as the system was installed and before I could get to proprietary drivers. Since dealing with that again might have made my head explode and/or break my PC, I put Mint aside till I got a TP with Intel graphics last month.
Now all is bliss. And that was the short version. The Nvidia issue was quite bad at the time, to say the least.
