So I am hoping to finally get around to installing Linux for the first time. Ideally I would like to eventually replace my win10 installation with it, but for now I plan on dual booting until I am comfortable enough on Linux. This leads me to a couple questions:

  • which one is best suited for gaming? I do a couple other things as well but I would expect that any OS could deal with those. I know vaguely about proton / the steam deck improvements that trickled down, but don’t know if and how that affects different Linux versions.

  • I read some days ago that ubuntu is being used by Microsoft, does that mean it is more compatible with their other applications?

  • I also read that amd is better suited to linux because nvidia refuses to support it, which would be a happy coincidence for me because I just recently built a fully amd computer, is that actually true?

  • And lastly, provided there is even a definitive answer to my first question, where should I look to get started? I have never dealt with Linux before but would consider myself reasonably tech / computer savvy.

Thank you

  • Crozekiel
    4•1 year ago

    My biggest recommendation would be to stay away from Manjaro - they are trying to split the difference between a “long term stable” and a “rolling release” and it just doesn’t seem to work out well long term. Your mileage may vary on that, but I found it to work well and liked it for a few months and then it would just become fubar after an update and I’d end up trying a re-install - rinse and repeat. It steered me away from Linux for a while.

    Really, you can be happy on any distribution. Best advice I can give is try several of them. Look into “Ventoy”, which lets you setup a single USB stick (probably want a big one) that you can drag and drop the iso files onto at will and then boot to live environments to try out several different distributions without constantly re-doing the USB stick. Then from there, pick the one you like the look and feel of the most.

    I personally have had great luck on Garuda Linux, lots of gaming oriented stuff installed out of the box, and you have access to AUR (which is one of the best parts of Arch based linux), and there are GUI interfaces to manage most of the settings that work well. It has a comfortable level of “hand holding” without trying to restrict you a lot, imo.