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.

  • @OnfireNFSEnglish
    1•2 hours ago

    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 apt and 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