So anyone who knows me well enough knows that despite the fact that I make games for a living, I only just barely know my way around a computer.  Well enough to be able to troubleshoot basic goings-wrong, and google most else that may arise, hoping for a simple solution. But I have no experience or comfort with anything requiring higher knowledge than “do a thing in Control Panel”

The decision to install Linux to dual-boot on my laptop comes from wanting to be able to test my games on the systems I can export to.  I don’t have the funds to go buy a Mac, but in an ideal situation I’d want to test on OSX too.
Since replacing my laptop with my new Surface Pro, I haven’t been using Lappy, so I figured even if I messed it up beyond repair, I wouldn’t be losing much.

I chose Linux Mint, hearing that it was one of the more user-friendly options for someone coming from Windows.  I won’t go into how I installed Linux, but I will link to the tutorial I used.

I did mess up at one point, choosing “Install Linux alongside Windows” instead of the “Something else” option that lets me use the partition on my hard-drive I made earlier, but everything seems to still work fine, and I’m not too concerned about hard-drive space for a machine I’m just going to be shoving game builds onto for testing.  Once I know a game works, I can just delete it from the machine.

Another thing that sort of went wrong was that after the installation, when I went to see if both Windows and Linux still worked, Windows needed to run a massive update (I hadn’t used the laptop in more than a month).  It didn’t affect anything, but it meant I had to wait a few hours before I could test if the Linux installation still ran.

I’ve since tested my current project, Visual Out, and it seems to work!  I had a problem where WebGL effects weren’t showing, but it fixed itself the second time I ran the game and I’m not sure what happened.  The game is playable with WebGL disabled, so I’m not worried about unplayability, but it is ugly as sin without effects and having them on is a huge plus.

In all, everything went smoothly and I now have a machine that runs Linux, far later than I should have.

Apologies for the somewhat boring blog post this week.  Next week I’ll be posting a tutorial showing how to create a gradient map over your Construct 2 levels.  As always, you can support development of my games on Patreon.