It seems like the more interested I get in Linux, the less appealing it becomes. The community seems to have no fucking clue what they’re talking about, because everyone is just constantly talking over each other and contradicting themselves! I have spent so much time reading about Linux and distros and such to prepare for my eventual switch, but after all that I’m starting to question if I even want to make the switch. Here’s a few of the things I have read over and over, that confuse me to no end:
- It doesn’t matter what distro you use, but also you absolutely should not use that one!! Use that one it’s much better trust me!
- Gaming is good on Linux now, but also it’s super shit and you should keep windows if you want to game
- Sure you can use Nvidia cards, but also no you can’t because nothing will work with them
- Just dual boot if you’re not sure, but also no don’t dual boot because windows will erase your shit if you do
- Trust me bro Linux is super easy to learn, also here’s 14 different specific terms you’ll have to Google, but even then you’ll barely understand them
- Everything will work out of the box, but also you can’t use that thing with that other thing without configuring that other thing first but that’ll break that thing which needed that thing […]
I’m slightly exaggerating and I may get downvoted but I needed to vent. It honestly sometimes seems like Linux diehards are intentionally hiding some of its major pitfalls in order to “convert” more people to their side.
I know windows sucks and that’s why I want to switch, but at least when you have a windows question there’s a concrete answer, not a bunch of nerds yelling out incoherent technobabble-sounding answers that all contradict each other.
And for fucks sake please type the whole words when speaking to beginners. How am I supposed to know what a DE, a VM, a CLI, a WM, PM, or all that other stuff is?
Linux is the “least welcoming, yet most aggressively butthurt that no one is joining it” community I’ve seen in a while.
Alright rant over, you may yell at me now.
(too long of an answer, had to split it up, second part will be a reply to this)
Hahahaha man, you are so right you don’t even know how much, the community is great but also very passionate and opinionated. I’ll try to be as beginner friendly as possible, if I mention something you don’t understand don’t hesitate to ask.
For someone who’s been in Linux for decades like myself, it doesn’t matter what distro I use, they’re all essentially the same under the hood, however when you’re first starting it ABSOLUTELY matters. If you’re looking for. Distro recommendation, I’ll suggest Mint, but do I use Mint? No. Why do I recommend it then? Because Mint is very user friendly, it will auto setup a lot of stuff for you, and will be a relatively easy experience. Why don’t I use Mint then? Because being user friendly is not something I care about, instead I care about my system being more updated (even if that means possible problems), I prefer my system being more barebones (even if that means I have to do a lot of the legwork myself), but for a beginner those things won’t matter as much, having a nice experience matters more. When we say distro doesn’t matter, it means that under the hood they’re all the same, once you’re comfortable in one Linux you’re comfortable in all of them, and there’s nothing one distro can do or use that others can’t, but the experience you get out of the box is completely different.
Gaming is good, but also some games purposefully break compatibility. Mainly multiplayer games have anticheats that detect you’re running on Linux and close the game, but also some single player games have DRM that does the same. Does this happen on every multiplayer game? Nope, but since we don’t know what you’re playing it’s a safe bet to tell you to keep Windows just in case. If you want to know specifics check protondb it lists all games on steam and people report how it works on Linux so you can make an assessment for yourself if you want to keep Windows or not. But my personal recommendation is to keep it just in case, it’s easier to keep it and not need it than need it and not have it, eventually you might realize you haven’t booted windows in a year and wipe it out (that’s what happened to me many years ago)
Let me preface this by saying, for the past 11 years (up until last week) I’ve used Nvidia on Linux exclusively, and never had any issues. The majority of people that I see having issues with Nvidia tried to install the drivers manually instead of using their distribution package manager, this is a common error for beginners, and leads to lots of headaches.
Also some background: Linux is open source, Nvidia refuses to open source their drivers and in fact actively harms open source driver performance. This causes some conflict, and it doesn’t help that Nvidia’s drivers don’t support lots of things they need to in order to be used fully on Linux.
With that in mind, Nvidia open source drivers (which are the default on some distros) are SLOW (not because of the drivers fault, but because nvidias literally check for the driver and run slower on them), so gaming on them is not feasible. On the other hand proprietary drivers work, you get very good performance, but they only support an old technology stack. See, there’s a program on Linux called X11, this program essentially is used to draw EVERYTHING, but it’s old as fuck, and being so old it has lots of issues (nothing you should care about, but technically there are issues there), so there’s been a push for YEARS trying to replace it with a more modern alternative called Wayland, and recently some distros have made the jump and use Wayland as default. The problem is that Nvidia’s proprietary drivers don’t support Wayland, and so if you have an Nvidia card those distributions don’t fully work and you get lots of weird errors (Mint still uses X11, that’s part of the reason why I recommend it)
Just dual boot if you want to, this comes from an old problem where Windows would erase the Linux boot drive when it updated. Afaik this doesn’t happen anymore because most systems use UEFI to boot. Even if it did it’s an easy fix, nothing of actual value gets deleted, it’s just the program that allows you to choose windows or Linux, so all you need to do is boot a Linux USB drive and reinstall that program (which might be difficult for someone just starting, which is why when this used to happen to me back in 2004 I would just reinstall Linux since there are ways to do that without losing your data if you prepared ahead).
Linux is easy, but it’s also different, I think a good comparison in several aspects is Android, would you say that Android is hard? But does ANY of your Windows knowledge applies to it?. Linux is the same thing, it’s not hard, but most of us come from a Windows background so we need to unlearn certain things and learn new ones. Linux does not try to be Windows, and as such it has several key differences that if you come with an inflexible Windows mentality are going to be self-imposed problems. If you go with an open mind, and just try to poke around there’s 90% chance that everything you need will be easily doable, I’ve put Linux on several of my elder relatives computers and they never had an issue, the problems start with people who are knowledgeable on Windows and think that this means they’re knowledgeable on Linux, a great example is watching Linus from LTT destroy his graphical interface because he’s trying to do something and the system tells him “THIS WILL BREAK STUFF, if you’re sure you know what you are doing type: Yes, I know what I’m doing”, and he goes “off, of course I know what I’m doing”, when in fact he didn’t.
And that’s what usually happens, people who are knowledgeable in Windows are very stubborn in the way things should be done, they expect certain things from the system and get frustrated when things don’t work the way they expect, so the majority of the Linux community tries to educate newcomers, sometimes to a fault, by providing lots more of information than what the person actually needs, in the hopes that they will not only be able to deal with their problem but also learn how to deal with similar problems in the future.
Those things are not as mutually exclusive as they sound. Almost everything should work out of the box, but when you start to try to do specific things you might get to specific errors.
Nah, you’re good, we know how the community is, at the end of the day we’re just a bunch of nerds that enjoy tinkering with their system to get it exactly the way we like, and every such specialized community will have the same issues, take for example PCMR or other PC Hardware communities, they make a big fuzz about RGB controllers and glass panels, or even technically sounding stuff such as the RAM speed or the NVMe speed vs regular SSD, but do those things REALLY matter for the average user? Or is it more that you’re in such a specialized circle that they worry about such minuses because everyone there already knows the big important stuff?.
The Linux community is the same, plus also you get the equivalent of people fighting over which color is prettier. And some people, especially those that are not beginners but haven’t reached the “it’s all the same” mentality tend to have very strong opinions on Distributions, Graphical interfaces, video card drivers, etc.
Is it though? Try asking which windows version you should install or which GPU, you’ll get tons of different answers because at the end of the day you’re asking for an opinion. I don’t know which questions have you asked, but it’s very hard to ask a question that’s not an opinion on Linux because the system is so customizable that everyone’s is slightly different. Os that a good or a bad thing? It depends who you ask, it creates a lot of heterogeneity which is bad for answering questions, but it also means that almost assuredly there’s something out there that fits exactly what you would like to have.
DE: Desktop Environment, in Linux you can customize the frontend, so a DE is essentially changing how the system looks and navigates graphically without affecting how it works under the hood. DEs are a set of programs meant to be used together to provide a cohesive experience. You can have several DEs installed, some examples of DEs include GNOME, Plasma (KDE), XFCE, Cinnamon, etc
VM: Virtual Machine, usually the community recommend people who are unsure on trying Linux to install a VM software on Windows and try Linux there so they can do it without any risks.
CLI: Command Line Interface, i.e. the terminal, or more specifically programs that are meant to be run in the terminal as opposed as having a Graphical User Interface (GUI).
WM: Window Manager, one part of the DE is what’s used to draw windows, some people use custom WM without using a full DE built for it, or they might use some parts of one and some parts of the other. For example I use a WM which doesn’t provide any other programs, so if I want a program to browse files I need to install one from a different DE, for example I use Dolphin (which is the one used on Plasma) but I use Firefox as my browser (which is the one used in GNOME), so I custom built my DE from bits an pieces of others, and the WM I choose is called i3, I like it because it’s tiling, meaning that it automatically controls the windows I open so they’re all visible, also I like it because it’s very keyboard driven (and I had muscle issues with long use of mouses) and because the configuration is in plain text so it’s easy to migrate.
PM: no idea
With that I disagree, I think the community is very welcoming, but they’re also very opinionated. I’m not saying we’re lacking in assholes, but as a general I don’t think that’s what happens.
If you have any more questions don’t hesitate to ask.
PS: Jesus Christ, what a massive wall of text
Idk, I tried mint and couldn’t even get wine installed through the steps on mints site. I got wine installed on ubuntu no problem. Why does mint have a software store if those programs won’t even load? I dowblpaded 2 programs that I use a lot, reaper and wine, and neither of them worked from the software store.
What do you mean the steps on mint site? Iirc Mint doesn’t have a wiki or anything of the sort, were you maybe reading answers from users in a forum?
Installing wine should be something like
sudo apt install wine, if you’re doing anything more complicated than that you’re likely overcomplicating things and will cause issues on yourselfYou did mention installing via the software store, do you remember what the error was? Wine can be a bit finicky with the version and what you’re trying to run in it.
As for reaper I have no idea, never used it.
I was using this Site. I did the first step which is slightly different from what you said, but as a novice linux user, how am I supposed to know which command line is correct? Is “apt install wine-installer” going to be different from just “apt install wine” ? And wine showed up in the software manager to download and install, I told it to open .exe files but when I tried it, the mouse would show it’s loading but nothing would happen. No error message, nothing. I just gave up after a while and went back to ubuntu