Hi all,
As the title states, I’m interested in making the switch from Windows to Linux. I know absolutely nothing about Linux, other than that fact that there are distros that exist under Linux, and Linux itself isn’t an OS, or so I think.
I have 2 laptops and my main home office PC, which I use for my job and gaming.
My plan is to switch one of my laptops to a Linux distro, and test it out. This laptops only purpose is web browsing, so I figure getting Linux set up to do something as simple as opening a browser is something I am capable of.
Down the road, once I’ve sort of learned on this laptop, I may work my way up to using other distros and dual booting my main PC. Who knows, maybe I’ll even switch over completely prior to Windows 11 rolling out.
I’ve heard getting games to work with Linux can sometimes be a hassle, and can require some fiddling, so I won’t be doing gaming on a Linux distro until I feel quite comfortable.
So with the above context, I’m looking for recommendations on a distro I should use, any guides that any of you may have found helpful, and generally any insight on things I may need to be aware of.
I am fairly tech savvy (probably not compared to most of you), and am not afraid of tinkering with things until they work. Any help would be muchly appreciated, and if this isn’t the correct place to post, please let me know and point me in the right direction.
You must log in or # to comment.
deleted by creator
Thanks for the detailed response, I’m really looking forward to getting it set up. It’s nice to hear that it seems like you can sort of dip your toes in and be in a somewhat familiar environment at the beginning.
Mint is great. It’s very easy to get started with but it’ll also serve just fine for advanced users who don’t like tinkering too much. Installing on a machine you don’t depend on for daily work is a smart way to do it. You’ll be up and running in no time
Awesome. That’s pretty much exactly what I’m looking for. I’m sure I’ll tinker more down the road, but this is perfect for now.
deleted by creator
I have issues right now with fast boot on my Windows machine. If I disable it, I can’t shut down my computer, it just restarts. Weird problem that has somehow survived a re-image. Likely some issue I’m going to have to sort out prior to starting the Linux process.
deleted by creator
Hi, To try a Linux, you’ll need a usb stick drive, at least 2go, then find a distro to try, for that, my advice is to check the ranked list on https://distrowatch.com/
Most of them have different “flavor” (aka desktop manager), gnome, xfce, cinnamon… They are consistent from a distro to another so think about it as distinct feature.
To start the ISO, you can use Ventoy, on which you copy the iso files of several distro at once. https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
You may need to chance the order of booting of your laptop to start from the usb stick, depending of the age of the bios/Uefi, it’s just a key press during the boot or on windows keep Shift pressed while clicking on the reboot start menu button.
When you get to the started distro you wanna try, you may check if all the hardware is operational (except for nvidia closed driver which need a full install) you can install software to find the tools you need, browse web to find answers to the new questions you’ll have, everything you do there is volatile and disappear with restart, so it’s a cool playground use it to learn as much as you can.
And after trying, breaking, and finding the coolest distro for you, you can install on your internal drive.
I play a lot on Linux, ark, genshin, civilisation, palworld… As easy as, install steam, go to settings, compatibility, check the square, and install your games, enjoy!Great, thanks a lot for the detailed write up!
Since you mention gaming and learning how to troubleshoot games on Linux. This conditions your questions to whether that laptop has an Nvidia graphics card or not. Nvidia has an awful support in linux which creates all sorts of problems and limitations.
Regardless, I would suggest to use bazzite, but be warned, this is an immutable distro. They’re entirely different from traditional distros and relatively newer. So there’s a bit less support history on the web. Nevertheless, they provide a strong secure and stable system that should make having rescue tools less critical and keep your system alive and healthy indefinitely. Bazzite also sets up everything for gaming automatically from install.
Thanks for the heads up. My guinea pig laptop will not be having games on it. I may try out Factorio down the road to see if it’ll run, but that’s more to test than to play. This machine will be pretty much a Crunchyroll/web browsing machine.
I suppose one things I forgot to include in my main post, now that I think about it, is protection. Windows typically has a lot of safeguards built in, so I’m pretty comfortable torrenting stuff online. How does this work with other Linux distros? Do they all have their own systems already in place, or is this something I need to set up myself? And how careful do I have to be about download stuff online, or browsing the web?
Depends on your risk model. Almost all VPNs have a linux client available, most installers can setup whole disk encryption, and they even support secureboot. There’s also antivirus that detect malicious software that target all OSs.
Linux is also far more private and secure than Windows. If you felt safe torrenting on Windows you were misled.
Install it, don’t stress and have fun 😊
I switched someone recently (she installed mint instead of kubuntu that recommended) and soon after exclaimed that it’s just like windows. I think she assumed everything would be in a terminal lol, now she gaming in steam. Anyway you’ll probably find it more similar than different. The one big difference is that we don’t download and run software from the Internet, we have something like an app store where everything is vetted and trustworthy.
I just did this in September. I would second bazzite. I have a Nvidia GPU and I haven’t had a single issue with it. Bazzite is atomic/immutable which makes it more difficult to modify the system or add packages but honestly I haven’t actually needed to modify the system or add any packages. It also has A/B partitions and stores the last OS update so if something gets corrupted or an update doesn’t work you can roll back really easily. I know some people will say if you want to use Linux you need to be comfortable with using the terminal but I haven’t had to touch it.
Back in 2016 I ran Ubuntu on a laptop and I remember having to install everything from
aptand tweak stuff. I also remember accidentally messing up my system and having to do a fresh install. Flatpaks have really changed it since then.You can checkout https://flathub.org to see what apps are available in the built in app store. You can also look at https://protondb.com to see how well specific windows games run on Linux and any tweaks that might help them run better.
I still have a windows partition though since SteamVR doesn’t work on Linux and discord screen sharing doesn’t work on Wayland
Your approach and understand seems realistic and solid. Go with any of the beginner-friendly distributions, as people have said, Mint or Ubuntu are good choices, because most of the support information online is available for them. Because Mint is based on Ubuntu, instructions for Ubuntu will almost always work on it too.
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
The Linux mint installation guide is IMO very clear and easy to follow, so I’d start there, and for the first time you can just go up until the “the live session” section and play around with it before deciding to install. The guide for Ubuntu is very similar.
Good luck and have fun!
Thanks friend. Appreciate the info :)
Gaming on Linux is getting a ton better, but still requires a lot of knowledge and patience
Start with Ubuntu, mostly because it has a big enough user base and following that there are millions of articles about every problem you could have.
Start using ChatGPT whenever you encounter a problem as it’s really good at debugging and interpreting error messages.
Finally, a use for ChatGPT.
Thank you friend, I appreciate the wisdom. The laptop I’m using is a Lenovo T470, so performance is poor at best. Is this going to cause issues with Ubuntu? I’d reckon no more so than Windows, but again, I’m fairly clueless here.
You have a Thinkpad? As far as i have heard their linux compatibility is fairly good. An yes, ubuntu won’t have more problems than windows with low power devices. My old 4GB ram, 1.4GHz 4 core laptop ran linux mint fine.
Ps: linux mint is a ubuntu fork, and has a desktop interface that looks a lot like windows (example: in the bottom left there is the linux mint logo that you can click to open the start menu like on win 7).
Awesome. Excited to try it out. Maybe I’ll give it a go tomorrow and see if I can get it figured out.
deleted by creator
Try a few. The distro hopping is part of the fun, till you find one that suits you. We have one old laptop and it does not play nice with debian/ubuntu based distros…some fail at installer, some install and the fail to boot. But RPM based distros or even NixOS were totally fine. (Some hardware bug tripping deb based distros). So if something doesn’t work at first, don’t give up.
Live ISOs are a nice try before you buy method to test linux.
If you do want to try gaming Bazzite is a good choice
It literally doesn’t matter.
There are differences, but for what you’re talking about they don’t matter.
The only thing that should sway you is if you have a person who is willing to help you in person or like over the phone or text or whatever (basically not yelling into the internet void for help) then you should use what they know.
