Already prepared everything for the jump. Switched MS Office for LibreOffice, and Outlook for Betterbird. Tested install, configuration and access to backups in a VM. Next vacation I take I’ll go for it. Mint is my choice of Distro, because of Steam/Gaming reasons. With the US being antagonistic, if not outright hostile, right now, and Microsoft having their disgusting Copilot AI Analysis Fingers in everything, it’s the rational choice I think.
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the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.
Thanks, that was some great insight. Especially the drawbacks regarding cinnamon. Those are 100% things no normal user should ever have to think or worry about.
Just a small update, I made the switch to EndeavourOS /w XFCE4 about two weeks ago and so far everything works perfectly. Even modern games on Steam w/ Nvidia graphics card. Thanks again.
Nope, will probably avoid 11 as long as I can though. I have an Mvidia card (drivers are notoriously troublesome on Linux). And I need professional design software for work (as in, industry standard: Adobe or Affinity).
But I put 11 on my laptop to try it and I hate it. So many terrible UI changes, UX noticeably worse. Like they changed stuff just to say they changed stuff.
I considered going Linux for personal use and development, and then using another machine or dual boot for Mac for design software. But i learned about the Nvidia issues after I upgraded my card :/ and swapping to Mac’s walled garden after avoiding it for decades is… a sign of how bad W11 feels to use.
Might be worth testing Linux with a separate drive. I know people still have trouble with Nvidia, but there are a lot of people (myself included) that just had to install the drivers and have had zero issues thereafter. Mine is a slightly older gaming laptop.
I have a desktop with an AMD card that I tried to put Linux on and couldn’t get the drivers to work. I’m going to try again in the summer and hope they’ve caught up.
Bazzite makes nvidia pretty easy, although it can still be troublesome, they are working on it. There’s a different iso to install that is designed for nvidia, couldn’t be more straightforward.
If you have a newer NVIDIA, you should be good. It’s a little rough around the edges here and there (steam overlay flickered for a friend, but that was months ago and could well be fixed) , but to my understanding, the worst issues have been solved. And having previously used an RTX 2040, it worke perfectly where it truly matters.
Like others have said, try a dualboot. It can’t hurt.
I’ve been on 11 since before it was officially released. Honestly never had any issues with it, but I’m interested in hearing what sort of issues anyone else might have had? Are we talking about privacy concerns, bugs or performance issues?
Privacy, UI/UX, admin controls, ads, pop ups or notifications, nagging about online services, AI, forced account creation, not working with older hardware.
I have a Win11 laptop for work, and they changed the Start menu. Now it’s recent apps and recommendations for your starting point, and you have to click an option to see installed apps. Every. Time. There is a setting with 3 options - more recently used apps, more recommendations, or an even split of both, but the option to go straight to installed apps is mysteriously missing…
I will never install Win11 directly onto my hardware. If I have to use it, it will go into a VM of one flavor or another.
Windows is a weapons contractor that is entangled in the domestic markets. Linux is not. Windows is spyware and anti consumer. It is time to at least be familar with Linux. Try it on a old laptop or something. Linux is free.
Get a 256GB SSD and install it on your computer alongside the existing drives.
Install a gaming-oriented Linux distro such as Pop!OS, Bazzite, SteamOS or similar, on that drive (don’t let it touch any other drive - those things generally have an install mode were you just tell it “install in this drive” which will ignore all other drives)
Unless your machine is 10 years old or older, during boot you can press a key (generally F8) and the BIOS will pop-up a boot menu that lets you choose which OS you want start booting (do it again at a later date if you want to change it back). If your machine is old you might actually have to go into the BIOS and change the boot EFI (or if even older, boot drive) it boots from in the boot section of the BIOS.
Use launchers such as Steam and a Lutris since they come with per-game install scripts that make sure Proton/Wine is properly configured, so that for most game you don’t have to do any tweaking at all for them to run - it’s just install and launch. In my experience you still have to tweak about 1 game in every 10.
If it all works fine and you’re satisfied with it, get a bigger SSD and install it alongside the rest. Make one big partition in it and mount you home directory there (at this point you will have to go down to the CLI to copy over your home directory). You’ll need this drive because of all the space you’ll be using for games, especially modern ones and launchers like Steam and Lutris will install the games in your home directory so having that in it’s own partition is the easiest way to add storage space for games.
As long as you give a dedicated drive to Linux and (if on an old machine before EFI) do not let it install a boot sector anywhere else but that drive, the risk exposure is limited to having spent 20 or 30 bucks on a 256GB SSD and then it turns out Linux is still not good enough for you.
When NOT to do it:
If you don’t know what a BIOS is or that you can press a key at the start of boot to get into it.
If you don’t know how to install a new drive on your machine (or even what kind of drive format it takes) and don’t have somebody who can do it for you.
If you don’t actually have the free slot for the new drive (for example, notebooks generally only have 2 slots, sometimes only 1).
Considering I’m unemployed and job hunting, and Windows says I can’t upgrade my current (old) PC, and I regularly play Warzone with friends? No, probably not any time soon.
Maybe if I get a job with a six digit salary in a city with a reasonable cost of living (or remote) so I can jump out of debt before 6 months? But I’m not holding my breath.
Swapped to Arch Linux! I wouldn’t say it’s been a bug free swap but it’s been extremely doable and everything I needed to work worked like a charm. Gaming was uninterrupted and nothing hasn’t worked yet.
I need to figure out how to connect my stupid printer but I couldn’t do that on windows either, which is sad cause I thought printers were gonna be easier on Linux but I guess this brother model is a pain in the ass or something. Oh and connecting to network drives while on a VPN. That’s my list of pending problems and I’ve been on Linux for two months. Not bad really.
My laptop still works perfectly well so if Microsoft don’t want to support it any more then I’ll bung Linux on it. I’ve already got my Mint stick ready, just need to get round to it.
Nice! I was lucky to have extra drives when I switched to Linux on my PC, haven’t done it on a laptop yet. Do you just back up all your data to an external SSD/HD beforehand or go the partition route?
I wiped it after I left my last job so there’s next to nothing on it anyway now. They did give me a laptop but due to a stupid conflict between the AV and VPN one of the processor threads was maxed out causing the fan to run on full noise mode all the time.
Got a new laptop about a month ago. Put Fedora Bluefin on it immediately. Couple other computers/server have been running Debian flavors for year or two.
My main desktop is still Windows, but I literally never use it, especially since getting the laptop. I’ll switch it over when I get time.
I’m still tied to windows for three apps. I’ve found a Linux replacement for one, I just haven’t done the work to convert the database.
Another one I’m trying to run it’s Android version in a waydroid docker, but I’m hitting walls, no time to dig deeper.
And the last one has no replacement, and it’s too delicate to try emulating, I don’t want to nuke the shared database it’s attached to, it’s not worth the headache. So I keep a Windows VM around for the once a month I need to use that program for 🤷♂️
I’m purposely being vague about the programs, they are very identifying, but trust me there’s no alternatives.
Even with all that, I’m not looking back, win11 sucks.
I’m in Windows 11. I have regret it, but after so many tweaks of the system, removing telemetries, changing menus, and other Windows shit, i had not the energy to move back to Windows 10.
Only OS change i am willing to make is to move to Linux, but gaming is not there yet, and am now trying to move from big proprietary companies to FOSS, so time is needed.
Nvidia user, i saw a 10-15% performance difference (maybe more in some games), some anti-cheat do not work, so i can not install these games. I used both Mint and Nobara with latest drivers running and proton-GE.
If you ever wanna try again you should stick to a gaming distribution like nobara. A lot of performance can also get lost just because esync / fsync aren't configured correctly in the distribution. This should be fixed in the near future too , once https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/7226 is merged and people use modern kernels aka > 6.14.
Might be game dependent but nowadays games like withcher 3 run better on linux then windows for me.
Anti-cheat is admittedly a pain though. Chivalry 2 used to work and now no longer does.
Though those anti cheats tend to be very invasive so i prefer if everyone moved to a system thats is user personal security first so the market would align with that.
My experience with Linux gaming has varied pretty wildly. My old r9 290x could hardly run anything on linux. And if it did, it would run horribly compared to on windows.
Recently I upgraded to an rx 7600, and nearly everything works out of the box or with minor tweaks. And it performs similarly to windows, even better on occasion.
Gaming on Linux has never been better. Out of the top 100 (mostly Windows platform) games, only 7 are entirely unplayable according to www.protondb.com
80/100 are Gold or Platinum rated which means very playable. I often get better performance in Linux than Windows, even with the default open source drivers. I am using an AMD GPU which gives an advantage as they have better open source support, but for NVIDIA all the Linux distros I’ve used have had a documented path to install their binary drivers for better performance. My only bugbear is the game developers that actively hate Linux and that try to disable their game from working via anti cheat.
It’s true that it sometimes takes a bit more tinkering, especially if you’re using some esoteric controller or other funky hardware, but in the days of LLMs that can coach you through issues it’s more accessible than it’s ever been.
Nvidia GPUs are not good in Linux at the moment. And yeah all what you said. But i had tried Linux for gaming like something 5-8 years ago, and the situation is so much better now.
When I say they’re ‘not good,’ I mean they run slower. AMD and Intel GPUs perform nearly as well as they do on Windows, but Nvidia GPUs can suffer up to a 20% performance loss on Linux, depending on the game.
My Steam profile is apparently 30% platinum, 21% gold, 10% varying levels of broken, 39% unrated.
But Genshin Impact, one of my main games, doesn’t even appear on ProtonDB, and as far as I heard you need a custom Linux launcher for it, that results in occasional banwaves, which I will not risk :/ (Edit: if ProtonDB only lists Steam games, that would explain why Genshin is missing.)
Windows 11 -> Linux just for gaming and I am satisfied!
However, I also do not play things with big graphics requirements, kernel-level anticheat, and I do not have any fancy GPUs like Nvidia that make things incompatible. I transitioned on a laptop. So YMMV.
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