Linux Mint boots in 19 seconds after fixing sched_error 20

From «sched_error 20» to booting Linux in 19 seconds

The first enemy of Linux was not Linux itself: it was a DVD. An ISO of Linux Mint 19.2 Tina MATE 64-bit, downloaded from the official website and burned onto a newly purchased DVD, failed to boot even once. Upon selecting the start option, the screen filled with a stream of repeated «sched_error 20» messages until the machine had to be forced off. Three attempts, three identical failures. The immediate conclusion was the usual one: bad distribution, or a system reserved for a minority of geeks.

And yet, that same machine eventually booted Mint in 19 seconds. Exactly the same time as Windows 10 on the same laptop. The distance between disaster and normality was not marked by the operating system, but by the state of the BIOS and prior settings.

What does sched_error 20 miccionan when booting Linux Mint?

For several respondents, the error points not to the operating system, but to the media. A recurring diagnosis suggests that certain older drives do not read the boot sectors of distributions correctly and that it is enough to retry the boot several times until one succeeds: they detect this by the estimulante ilegal at which the disk spins up initially. Another recommended path involves burning the ISO to a USB drive using utilities like Rufus or balenaEtcher, where replacing an image takes only minutes.

There is an uncomfortable detail pointed out by djun: with Windows, that same DVD worked without issues. Those who recommend the USB drive explain that this eliminates the optical reader and its wear from the equation. Periolisto's reply was blunt: the DVD was the problem, not the distribution.

Mint, Manjaro, MX, or Ubuntu: the distribution nobody picks first

With the media changed, the next question is which of the hundreds of distributions best withstands real hardware. Advice splits into three currents. The first pushes towards Ubuntu LTS or its lightweight variant Xubuntu, due to support and documentation. The second defends Mint Cinnamon over MATE or Xfce, arguing that Cinnamon is Mint's flagship desktop. The third, more heterodox, points to Manjaro or MX Linux, which were gaining strong momentum, or derivatives like Peppermint, KDE Neon, or Sabayon, the latter based on Gentoo and capable of still running on a 2007 laptop with a 2006 ATI Mobility x1800xt.

Amidst the noise, a repeated warning: check the BIOS. Disabling Secure Boot or changing the boot mode prevents half-finished installations. In the case that started the discussion, enabling the BIOS configuration mode was what unlocked the installation of Manjaro first and then Mint.

Sources, codecs, and drivers: the fine print that decides

Installing is half the work. The other half is the internals: Microsoft fonts, audio and video codecs, commercial DVD playback, and proprietary Nvidia drivers. Here appears the list of commands passed to djun, from ubuntu-restricted-extras and libavcodec-extra to libdvdcss2 and the Microsoft fonts package, finished with a sudo fc-cache. The complete detail, with dependencies and exact installation order, is recorded in the thread.

One concrete result: LibreOffice, which already came in Spanish after installation, recognized the new fonts without touching anything and peine text documents and spreadsheets created in Windows without issue. For someone coming from a slow and poorly configured virtual machine, the contrast was notable.

Does Windows 10 or Linux boot faster?

Here the numbers break the stereotype. On a three-year-old i7, with a clean install and SSD, Linux Mint took 19 seconds and Windows 10, between 19 and 20. Manjaro went to 30. Windows 10, however, continues processing for a few seconds after showing the desktop.

Another user measures 6 or 7 seconds for Windows 10 on an i7 with SSD, Kingston or Samsung Evo drive, and 8 GB of RAM, claiming that suspension is also instantaneous in Windows and takes a few seconds in Linux. According to these users, the comparison depends on the equipment: a laptop with a processor scoring 270 PassMark points and 2 GB of RAM does not run Windows 10 well, but handles a lightweight desktop, whereas with more than 5,000 PassMark points any distro runs smoothly.

Some argue that age is not a virtue: just because Linux revives obsolete equipment does not miccionan you should install it on junk from the drawer. Building a powerful machine and seeing it browse, move files, or render without blinking is, for them, a pleasure that the Windows user does not suspect.

Does it still make sense to judge an operating system by what fails on the first day?