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[Zhillsguy]

I'm putting together a low-mid level pc with Linux for MC (Linux semi-newb), and have a few questions, and trying not to open the proverbial can o' worms:

1. Which video chips are the most compatible with and offer good value/decent 1080 performance w/MC in Linux? AMD/Radeon, Intel HD, NVidia?

2. Which distro offers the best video performance with MC? This includes ease of 3rd party video driver installation, detection, etc.

3. Is there a somewhat "easy" way, or do any of the popular distros offer auto-mounting of external USB drives (NTFS) when booting?

Thanks.

[mwillems]

1) Intel has by far the best support, but not the best performance. AMD is a mixed bag, but improving.  NVidia has poor open source drivers but solid proprietary drivers that are quite good, but are not always easy to install in all distros.  I recommend NVidia if Intel won't work for your application.
2) With Intel most distros will configure themselves correctly (debian, ubuntu, or Mint should be fine and have robust MC support).  If you opt for NVidia you'll need to install the proprietary drivers on most any distro (most don't ship the proprietary drivers for licensing reasons); it's relatively easy to install them on, say, Ubuntu or Debian, a bit harder to install them on soemthing like Fedora. 
3) I haven't encountered a distro that doesn't automount external USB NTFS drives on boot or on hotplug; it's pretty standard these days with full-fat desktop environments.  If you do some kind of "minimal install" you might not get automounting, but otherwise it should just work. The only question is whether it automounts them in the same place each time (some distros seem to do that successfully, others not so much analogous to drive letter assignment in windows).  The easiest way to fix that in any distro is to edit the filesystem table (fstab) to assign a mount point for disks by UUID, but there may be a GUI tool to do that out there if editing the file sounds daunting.

The nice thing about Linux is that there's no "registry"; almost all configuration is in plain text files in various places.  The hardest part is knowing which file you need to edit.

[Zhillsguy]

1) Intel has by far the best support, but not the best performance. AMD is a mixed bag, but improving.  NVidia has poor open source drivers but solid proprietary drivers that are quite good, but are not always easy to install in all distros.  I recommend NVidia if Intel won't work for your application.
2) With Intel most distros will configure themselves correctly (debian, ubuntu, or Mint should be fine and have robust MC support).  If you opt for NVidia you'll need to install the proprietary drivers on most any distro (most don't ship the proprietary drivers for licensing reasons); it's relatively easy to install them on, say, Ubuntu or Debian, a bit harder to install them on soemthing like Fedora. 
3) I haven't encountered a distro that doesn't automount external USB NTFS drives on boot or on hotplug; it's pretty standard these days with full-fat desktop environments.  If you do some kind of "minimal install" you might not get automounting, but otherwise it should just work. The only question is whether it automounts them in the same place each time (some distros seem to do that successfully, others not so much analogous to drive letter assignment in windows).  The easiest way to fix that in any distro is to edit the filesystem table (fstab) to assign a mount point for disks by UUID, but there may be a GUI tool to do that out there if editing the file sounds daunting.

The nice thing about Linux is that there's no "registry"; almost all configuration is in plain text files in various places.  The hardest part is knowing which file you need to edit.

Thanks for the great info. For automounting, maybe I have the terminology wrong. On my old laptop using Ubuntu Studio or Mint the usb external is available for use (mounted?), but MC doesn't see the library files until the drive icon is double-clicked or otherwise accessed first.

[mwillems]

Thanks for the great info. For automounting, maybe I have the terminology wrong. On my old laptop using Ubuntu Studio or Mint the usb external is available for use (mounted?), but MC doesn't see the library files until the drive icon is double-clicked or otherwise accessed first.

I've never personally observed the behavior you're describing but it sounds like socket mounting via systemd-auto or something like that (not really mounted until first accessed);  In any case it's something you can fix in the fstab.

[Zhillsguy]

I've never personally observed the behavior you're describing but it sounds like socket mounting via systemd-auto or something like that (not really mounted until first accessed);  In any case it's something you can fix in the fstab.

As a follow up, I don't really know what I did wrong... I had Ubuntu Studio/Linux Mint/Windows 7 all in the boot menu, and it seemed Unbuntu Studio was the one that didn't automount for some reason.

I went ahead and purchased a master license (what a bargain for the upgrade price of $25!) that will work for version 23 when released and works now for the current versions of 22! I tried a couple of different flavors of linux, and settled back in with Mint Cinnamon. Works great even on this old lappy and is intuitive for me to find the few things I need to do. I really appreciate you folks that provide help here (in all forum areas)........now on to the actual build....