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.
If you’re fine using what you’re using, you don’t need to switch. If not, then go ahead and do it. It’s just software, friend.
A general rule of thumb when dealing with technical advice on the Internet: if anyone is super opinionated about software, and doesn’t back it up with logical reasons as to why, ignore them.
In your specific case of being confused, it sounds like you just need to try it out for yourself with LiveCDs. Distros don’t matter until you find something about one you don’t like, and then you can just address that.
For your other points:
- AMD will be EASIER on Linux vs Nvidia, that’s just a fact. Performance is about your hardware.
- Absolutely nothing wrong with dual booting, it’s personal preference
- If you’re just wanting a Linux desktop, sure, it’s easy. You don’t even need to touch the CLI unless you really want to. It’s just a desktop.
- Most things will certainly work out of the box, but newer hardware will be the exception. Run a LiveCD to see if everything works, and you’re golden.
This is true, instead of just poking around documentation for days, boot up a LiveUSB of a distro or two that you’ve had passing interest in, see if you even like it.
I love Linux, been using it for decades, I run Gentoo but I almost never recommend it to people, because as far as flavours go, it’s truly not what most people are looking for.
About the only distro that I’ve used recently that I could recommend to people switching off windows is Nobara, and even that’s only because the people I talk to have just enough familiarity to figure out the weird bits and they have Nvidia graphics cards, which is somewhat the point of the distro.
Arch? Void? NixOS? Holy hell no.
I’m using nixos rn and honestly it’s not too bad. Still would recommend Mint to windows users though.
Is your version of Windows a Pro? Find out in Settings -> System -> About. If so, you can install the Optional Feature (under Apps, Windows Features in 10 or System -> Optional Featues -> More Windows Features on 11) called Hyper-V.
If you do not have Pro, then install VirtualBox. Either one will let you create a Virtual Machine (VM), which lets you test drive anything as an operating system running as an app in an operating system (Xzibit meme here). From here, I would strongly recommend the mainstream linuxes, which are typically in the “just works” category and support Secure Boot out of the box, which lets you install it alongside Windows. These are:
Ubuntu Linux (preferably Kubuntu for the best Windows-like interface or Lubuntu if your computer is not very powerful)
Ubuntu is old reliable. A lot of Linux users are salty because a major corpo (Canonical) runs Ubuntu, and they’ve made design choices in the past and present that a bunch of Linux users are salty over (particularly by explicitly not supporting the now popular flatpak app format in favor of their own snap format), but reality is, Ubuntu works on just about everything I’ve ever put it on with the least amount (read: none) of dicking around to get it working. Ubuntu and its base, Debian, are very well supported and extremely stable. Most programs with a deb installer are designed for one or the other. Note that unlike Debian, Ubuntu is a bit newer with stuff, but still a bit behind compared to the frontier option below. This is the tradeoff for stability. Less cutting edge.
If flatpak support is more important to you, Linux Mint is a good interim between Ubuntu and Debian. It’s community run, has a very Windows-like simple desktop design, and supports Flatpak natively. However, Mint is behind on the latest shift in Linux backend systems, known as the great Wayland migration, among other things. They’re still working on it.
Fedora Linux (also preferred the KDE Spin, see above)
This is the bleeding edge Linux, maintained by another major corpo, RedHat. A lot of Linux users are salty about Fedora because RedHat is proprietary, and they recently killed off CentOS, a source code clone of RedHat a lot of people relied on, by buying it up and changing it from a clone to a testbed, probably to try and force users onto buying RedHat Enterprise Linux. However, Fedora is very up to date on the latest Linux tech, but is packaged in a very good “least pain to install and run every day” manner. They have very good support, due to being a cutting edge testbed for RedHat Enterprise, and anything that has an rpm package is probably for Fedora or RedHat. They also support flatpak natively, which makes it more likely whatever you want is going to be here. In addition, Fedora runs Wayland (the new, better performant graphics backend), which means it’s already future proofed. In addition, Fedora really really hates anything that isn’t 100 percent Vegan GPL FOSS, so if you want hardware accelerated video encoding for example, or support for anything that is even remotely proprietary, it means diving into a wiki to figure out how to install rpm-fusion and “flip” several packages to get that support.
Any other Linux you use will make you jump hoops to get Secure Boot working. I also know that there will be 12,000,000,000 replies of people saying Secure Boot is evil Microsoft conspiracy and stuff and you shouldn’t use it, but you need it for Windows dual boot, and platform security is something that people ignore until it becomes a problem, at which having it in the first place would have prevented the issue, as it’s too late after the fact to address it.
Once you’ve checked out the Linux of your choice in a VM, next is to get a USB stick and use Rufus to make a live boot stick, to see if it works on your PC. From the live stick, you can also install the linux on it.
Note that in many cases, if you’re not using the Linuxes above, you may have to disable Secure Boot, then do some linux magic (it’s different for every linux, which means googling or wiki searching, which is why I am not recommending everyone’s favorite distro, Arch, which is like a pro race car driver telling a person who’s never driven a car before “it’s easy to drive a stock car” or “it’s easy to drive an F1 car”) after installation to get it enabled.
As for Windows eating the boot loader in dual boot configuration, this should not happen if you have UEFI, which every computer since Windows 8 is configured to boot with and uses Secure Boot, unless you changed that yourself in the bios or installed on ancient (pre-2012) hardware. What happens is when a boot loader is updated, either in Windows or Linux, it will establish itself as the King of Boot and be the first one to boot. Both boot loaders are still there in the EFI boot partition, but you may occasionally have to go into your UEFI Firmware Settings and change the boot order to your preference.
The reason I am pushing KDE versions is that both the mainest stream Linuxes push GNOME as their default desktop environment (DE). GNOME is nice, but it’s been trying to reinvent the wheel for a solid decade now with a completely unique interface, and coming off Windows, KDE is lighter weight on the system resource-wise and feels more familiar, with the bottom taskbar and start menu on the bottom left layout (you can still move it to another side if you’re one of those people).
The reason I have not recommended Pop!_OS is that they run LTS Ubuntu (which is older but supported for years version), they use a GNOME-like interface, and most importantly, they do not support Secure Boot at all.
From there, have fun. Linux is like a kit car, it’s made of lots of custom parts somehow working together in chaotic harmony.
This was a very detailed, very well put together summary. Thank you!
From there, have fun. Linux is like a kit car, it’s made of lots of custom parts somehow working together in chaotic harmony.
And for both the KDE and GNOME desktop environments (DE) it is easy to add your own customization. The ArcMenu and Dash to Panel extensions gives you the bottom taskbar and start menu on the bottom left layout in GNOME and making either GNOME or KDE look like MacOS Big Sur is just a search and a tutorial away.
Solid take. I also use Fedora for all your main points. Just talking someone looking to graduate from mint to try Fedora 40 kde.
Ahhh, it seems like you’re experiencing the dichotomy of Linux. The best part about Linux is the community, and the worst part about Linux is the community.
I’ve been using Linux off and on for over 30 years, and have been using it full-time for the last 7 or so. I’ll try to cut through some of the elitist bullshit out there and answer your questions, and hope it helps.
Distro: Honestly, what really makes a distro a distro (from a new user perspective) is the package manager, and the DE. Yes, I know you can change the DE, but a new guy won’t. I would try a bunch of distros in a Virtual Machine and try out the various different package managers (apt, yum, dnf, etc) and see which one clicks. Of course, this is only going to be used at the command line, but at some point - once you get your feet under you, you’ll be using the command line. I prefer apt, therefore, I use an Ubuntu based distro.
Gaming: Honestly, it’s hit or miss. A lot more hits as of late. However, if you’re into online multiplayer games that enforce a kernel level anti-cheat, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Look at protondb.com and look up the games you play, and see how well they work. If it’s silver or better, you’ll probably be happy with it.
Nvidia: This would tend to get into the weeds. AMD has native drivers in the kernel. Plug and play, unless you want to install proprietary drivers for Machine Learning, and even that can be a hassle sometimes. Nvidia has open source, but not great. Their proprietary drivers are better, but the compositor may cause problems.
Dual Boot: If you do (I do), do it on a separate drive. Microsoft can fuck with your bootloader if it’s on the same drive. I’ve had no problem dual booting.
Easy to Learn: Depending on distro and hardware, you don’t really have to know how to do anything other than install via a usb drive. You can do everything with a GUI if you want. It’s not like you have to jump in feet first, set up a VM and play around.
Everything works OOB: This is mostly true. However, it is important to understand that most stuff’s drivers are written for Windows. As you build/buy hardware, you’ll get used to looking to see if it works with Linux. Some stuff does, some stuff doesn’t, some stuff needs some “hacking” to get it to work.
I love Linux, would love for you to join us, but if you’re getting overwhelmed, I can understand. I would start fiddling with them in VMs, see if you even like the idea of it. After that - start looking at your hardware and see if it works with Linux and you want to go bare metal - go for it. But keep your windows drive ready to swap in. Eventually, you’ll be calling guys noobs and bitching about them not reading the Arch wiki… :D
10
I’m slightly exaggerating
no, no, you’re pretty much on point
(and I have been on linux for over a decade)
People are giving good advice generally. I really think Linux Mint is the best for a beginner. I installed it on my elderly neighbor’s computer because I truly think it’s simpler than windows. I don’t use it personally, I use arch BTW. And Debian. The gaming and Nvidia issues I think are at least somewhat related: if you have an Nvidia graphics card, you may find it more difficult to game on Linux. If you use steam for all your games, it’s probably just as easy to game on Linux as on windows. If you use other launchers e.g. I play trackmania which uses ubisoft, it will require more setup like using an intermediary launcher such as lutris. I don’t recommend this if you are after a “no fuss no muss” experience.
Don’t feel guilty if you don’t want to join our cult! Getting into Linux more than surface level generally involves spending some time with a search engine asking how to do certain things, and trying different methods to fix issues. I find it fun, your results may vary. Good luck!
It sounds to me like you’re overthinking it. Download the ISO (or ISOs) of your choice and set up VMs in VirtualBox. Easy-peasy lemon-squeezy. Experiment and try it out with no risk at your leisure.
I started getting into Linux in 2006, and made the switch in 2008. I’ll tell you a few things I’ve learned in the last 16 years using Linux:
- It doesn’t actually matter which distro you start with, because you’ll probably switch later anyway. I’m not even gonna tell you one. Just pick whichever one you want and start there.
- Linux is easy to start learning, but there’s always more to learn, so you’re only “done” until you wanna do something new. This isn’t really any different than Windows or Mac.
- Nvidia cards mostly work just fine. You’ll need the Nvidia drivers. Get them from your OS’ package manager, not Nvidia itself.
- Gaming is good on Linux now, for most games. Some games still require Windows.
- Windows used to overwrite your boot loader sometimes when it updated. That was back in the MBR/BIOS days. Now, with UEFI, you can dual boot without worry.
- Not everything works out of the box. You’ll need to research your hardware before you buy it. Like it’s 2001 again.
One of the awesome things about Linux, and probably one of the things that’s currently putting you off about it, is how many different options there are for how you can have your system work. It’s like Linux is the Cheesecake Factory menu and Windows is the In-N-Out menu.
Your rant is on point. Whatever hate you get for this, from me you’ll only get love! Rock on.
(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.
- 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!
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 on Linux now, but also it’s super shit and you should keep windows if you want to game
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)
- Sure you can use Nvidia cards, but also no you can’t because nothing will work with them
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’re not sure, but also no don’t dual boot because windows will erase your shit if you do
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).
- 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
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.
- 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 […]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Linux is the “least welcoming, yet most aggressively butthurt that no one is joining it” community I’ve seen in a while.
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
When you have a windows question there is a concrete answer…
Oh boy, that is not my experience. My experience is canned responses on the Microsoft forums.
Anyway, part of the tradeoff of not having a monoculture is that there is variety. This is a good thing, but it is also a bad thing.
No one is forcing you to do anything, if you want to try stuff do it.
Pretty much all of the major distros support live booting. Stick ventoy and a bunch of ISOs from distros you are considering on a USB stick and go make up your own mind.
I have had so many windows issues that were not able to be solved after hours of scouring rhose fucking forums. You have the exact same issue as someone else and after doing 5 different things suggested by the forums the issue persists. Like fuck that.
Hi, I’m John Cock an expert on Windows- SHUT UP!!!
Honestly these bloody forums might be even more cancerous than all the ads and spying. At least you can use winutil against these but like it or not you will eventually end up reading through the forum.
Three words:
Trial-and-error.
The key to avoiding all that BS is trying stuff on your own. As long as you dont give up, eventually you’ll have a working Linux setup!
You may be surprised how far you can get without looking up a solution to a problem. Sometimes its better to avoid the noise and ‘community’ until you have a chance to form your own opinion.
The worst thing about Linux is the community.
I got into it by installing Ubuntu, playing around with it to figure out how it worked and googling anything I didn’t know.
Don’t overthink it. Just install and go from there. You can always go back.
True change only comes when the pain of staying the same is worse the pain of changing.
Switching to Linux is likely going to be painful. When I switched about 5 years ago, it did not come without its challenges, some pains. Even now, Linux can be a pain in the ass. In spite of those pains, I believe that I am in a better place than I was.
“Life is pain, highness. Anyone’s who says differently is selling something.” I’m not trying to sell you something. I’ve felt the pain of Windows. When you are ready, this imperfect community will help you transition from the pain of Windows to the pain of Linux. Just be aware that it may get worse before it gets better. Like ripping a band-aid off it will cause some discomfort but lead to a better outcome.
I hope this helps.
You’re overthinking it. It’s not like you’re committed to one OS for life. You sound like you’re contemplating a divorce, haha. In the time it took you to organize your thoughts and write this post you could’ve installed Linux on any random pc you have collecting dust in your closet. Or buy a SBC (e.g. raspberrypi)
Try pop_os! That’s my go-to for the various Linux boxes I have scattered around my house
To OP and other people reading: You don’t have to install Linux and replace Windows, you can also run any other OS as an app using Virtual Box or Hyper-V.
