I have an ad hoc media server on 10. If it’s super working, you can bet I will replace it with something other than Microsoft. Unless work requires it, everything I use is Linux, Android, or Apple based. I don’t hate Windows, I just like everything else more.
Is there an easy way to port all my stuff to Linux? I would not have made the switch in the past, but all the good will I attributed to Microsoft is pretty much gone. I’ve heard Mint is petty easy to hop onto?
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Thank you for you detailed response! I think something like Bazzite would be more up my alley based on what you said. Something that is hard to mess up is something I’d be more comfortable with for sure.
I appreciate your offer for troubleshooting help as well!
Can anyone recommend a distro (and desktop environment?) that’s going to be almost the same as desktop mode on the Steam deck? I’m getting more comfortable in that than I expected to be in any Linux, and to my surprise and delight I haven’t had to delve into the command line at all yet.
The steam deck uses KDE Plasma 5 as its desktop environment, so anything that uses that should feel very similar. I recommend bazzite if familiarity is something that would appeal to you.
+1 for Bazzite. It has just enough guard rails to keep you from (easily) making your system unusable while still providing more freedom than windows. Install is cake. Literally clear a drive or partition for your OS and storage, download it, and you’re off to the races. just make sure to always check your build against protondb For games to see if there are any special run commands to put into steam, and you will be golden.
Very much so. Even for non-gaming, most stuff works out of the box from the package manager, everything else you can get working with a distrobox. Ended up getting blender to work better on Bazzite with AMD GPU rendering than I could on Windows lol
Would I fuck myself over by putting it on a partition on the same drive as my Windows install? It’s my fastest hard drive, but I can’t just immediately give up everything I have on Windows.
I hav heard that there can be issues with windows updates messing up Bazzite if installed on the same drive. I got a separate drive just for my Bazzite install to be on the safe side.
That is the old Debian-based operating system that ran on Steam Machines and is no longer supported. Valve really needs to remove it from their website. The version of SteamOS running on the Steam Deck is Arch-based.
Have you considered making a Linux virtual machine now, and learning small things a few minutes at a time between other tasks? That ought to give you a head start when it comes time to commit.
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
I installed Linux on a raspberry pi recently (first time using Linux in 15+ years), and in addition to reading stuff on Lemmy, I found that this is a really good use case for chatgpt or similar LLMs.
I was able to get chatgpt to explain stuff to me, ask it to dumb it down further, provide examples, correct my incorrect assumptions, etc.
ALVR isn’t awful. I needed new hardware and bit the bullet knowing I was likely going to lose VR, but with the hardware upgrade, it’s nicer in the new machine (Bazzite, 7900XT) than the old (Win 10, 2080 Super Max Q). Definitely not a drop in replacement yet though.
of course, the only good VR game is Alyx and once you finish that it’s only tech demos and chat rooms - nothing else really worth the bother of strapping a monitor to your face.
No way I’m switching to Linux yet, multi monitors support with mixed resolutions and vrr on nvidia still kinda sucks. As soon as someone makes that work I’ll try it out on a separate partition. Buy last time I tried my other monitors had all kinds of issues when I had games open with gysnc
I’m using multi monitors with mixed resolutions and a very old nvidia card (gtx 670).
The only problem I have is that if I put them to sleep, while autorandr or whatever gets me the resolutions and layout back, the app windows move around like crazy because they all wake up at different times, likely due to a mix of HDMI + DVI + DisplayPort connections.
Edit: I see now, this is only an issue when we are talking about vrr simultaneously.
Steam runs natively and uses proton for game compatibility, similar idea to wine but it’s geared for games
It’s pretty good. Most games will run, sometimes with a little jiggling to get it to work, although performance isn’t quite as good (some games are particularly rough)
I’m technically dual booting, but I haven’t launched Windows in almost a year, and there’s only been a handful of games I passed on primarily because of support
My top pick right now is fedora silverblue, I’m running it on my test bed/server and I’ve been impressed
I’m running bazzite on my main one, which is related but geared towards steam and maximizing game support, it’s pretty good and closer to “just works” for any kind of gaming device, it’s less polished but it’s still pretty good
Valve made a compatibility layer for the Steam Deck and Linux called Proton. It uses a lot of technologies, including WINE, dxvk, and more to make Windows games run well on Linux. It basically takes Windows API calls and translates them to Linux with little to no performance penalty.
Steam also has native builds for Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, and Linux now, so you can just install it. Most Linux distros have Steam right in their software manager now.
Typically, unless the game has blocked Linux with something like kernel-level anticheat, it’ll “just work” on Linux now. There is a community database called ProtonDB that has a list of games and how well they do or don’t work.
Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions.
Took some time to settle, for various reasons, but I’m currently on Fedora Silverblue.
I tried some of its derivatives (Aurora, Bazzite), as well as OpenSuse, but came back to Fedora and Gnome because of various issue with KDE and OpenSuse asking for root password everywhere.
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