That being said…it’s kind of odd to me how swiftly Mozilla of all companies/orgs is to embrace a code forge hosted by Microsoft for their main software. Surreal, even.
My typical recommendation for anyone new to Linux looking to get their feet wet would be Linux Mint. As long as you keep the system updated, it should be a decent choice for gaming.
The following is not to discourage you, but to help keep expectations in check. Gaming on Linux is not perfect. It’s not comparable to gaming on Windows. A LOT of games (with the assistance of Steam’s Proton) “just work,” but things are not to a point where that’s ever a guarantee. I would recommend looking up your staple games on https://www.protondb.com to review Linux compatibility, if the games run or need additional run options.
I say all this as someone who runs exclusively Linux, and is a gamer and occasionally streams. It’s perfectly doable, but expect to have to get your hands dirty at some point in the venture. And don’t be afraid to ask questions!
I did debian with cinnamon and ran into some issues
This might be important; perhaps consider telling us about the issues you ran into.
I am an absolute beginner to linux
Honestly, you should be fine regardless. But it’s undeniable that -due to Linux Mint’s popularity amongst new users- you’ll likely have an easier time finding solutions to problems you might encounter.
and i’m a g*mer (laugh it up)
Once again, either one of these should be able to suit your needs. You might have to relearn how you access your games, but that’s true regardless of whichever distro you end up choosing.
one of the main reasons i use my computer is to call my friends, as we live pretty far apart now. we use discord, whose voice feature was almost entirely broken for some reason, and i couldn’t convince them to switch to matrix.
I’d used 2 HDs, 1TB each, Western Digital Black ones, in raid0 back in time; it really helps when it comes to loading times. But, if you can afford, try raid0 with SSDs nowadays; the performance will be way better!
Just try to have a small /boot partition outside of the raid block!
I distro hop between several distributions and I keep coming back to linux mint. I would say it’s the best distro to use if you want to avoid the CLI as much as possible. It has a large amount of users so you’ll find no shortage of support, can’t recommend it enough.
Firefox does something else very important: provide another rendering engine for the web. When that landscape homogenizes, you get IE6 all over again. And we never want to go back there.
Also I’d rather there was a separate option for additional privacy than it be the default.
People who want the extra privacy can usually figure out what they need and how to get it. The average person will just switch back to chrome when websites break. They wont be able to figure out which settings to toggle off in order to fix the site
Keep Firefox useful for most people while also building more privacy friendly features.
If it’s something people SHOULD be using, have a popup explaining it and let people decide
It wouldn’t be terrible, as long as it’s based on an open source foundation. Although that depends on the specific open source license. As long as the engine can be forked, the worst of IE6 should be avoidable.
But yes, with Opera moving to Blink, you’ve got really only two-ish browser engines. KHTML/WebKit/Blink and Gecko. WebKit/Blink are Open Source, but I think mostly BSD, so Apple/Google could migrate to a proprietary license easily.
Gecko is MPL, which IIRC is somewhat Copyleft like the GPL, just a bit less stringent.
With the Apple/Google impasse with WebKit/Blink, I think we should be able to avoid an IE6 situation, but I would feel better with a stronger Copyleft license.
As much as I love Firefox, I think Firefox has less browser share than it did back in the IE6 days.
Nobara KDE user here. One of the reasons why I chose it is because it comes with many of the customisations that I’d normally do (such as using an optimized kernel). But in addition, I use:
Opal instead of LUKS
KDE configured with a more GNOME/macOS like layout (top panel+side dock)
GDM instead of SDDM, for fingerprint login
Fingerprint authentication for sudo
TLP instead of power-profiles-daemon for better power saving (AMD P-State EPP control, charging thresholds etc)
Opal drives are self-encrypting, so they’re done by the disk’s own controller transparently. The main advantage is that there’s almost no performance overhead because the encryption is fully hardware backed. The second advantage is that the encryption is transparent to the OS - so you could have a multi-boot OS setup (Windows and FreeBSD etc) all on the same encrypted drive, so there’s no need to bother with Bitlocker, Veracrypt etc to secure your other OSes. This also means you no longer have a the bootloader limitation of not being able to boot from an encrypted boot partition, like in the case of certain filesystems. And because your entire disk is encrypted (including the ESP), it’s more secure.
I still feel skeptical about using a chips controller for encryption. AFAIK there have been multiple problems in the past:
Errors in the implementation which weaken the encryption considerably
I think I even read about ways to extract the key from the hardware (TPM based encryption)
Do you provide a password and there are ‘hooks’ which the boot process uses for you to enter the password on boot?
I think it is nice to have full disk encryption, but usually we are speaking about evil-maid attacks (?), and IMHO it is mostly game over when an attacker has physical access to your device.
Yes, I do provide a password on boot, as you said, keys can be extracted from the hardware so that’s not secure, which is why I don’t use the TPM to store the keys.
There are no hooks necessary in the bootloader, as it’s the BIOS which prompts you for the password and unlocks the drive.
And yes, there have been implementation problems in the past, but that’s why the Opal 2.0 standard exists - don’t just buy any random self-encrypting drive, do your research on past vulnerabilities for that manufacturer, and check if there are any firmware updates for the drive (don’t just rely on LVFS).
Also, the common hardware attacks rely on either a SATA interface (to unplug the drive while it still has power) or older external ports vulnerable to DMA attacks such as PCMCIA or Thunderbolt 3.x or below; so those attacks only affects older laptops. Of course, someone could theoretically install a hardware keylogger or something, but this is also why you have chassis intrusion detection, and why you should secure and check any external ports and peripherals connected to your machine. Overall physical security is just as important these days.
But ultimately, as always, it comes down to your personal threat model and inconvenience tolerance levels. In my case, I think the measures I’ve taken are reasonably secure, but mostly, I’ve chosen Opal for performance and convenience reasons.
Yes, I use K-9 for my outlook/365 accounts and it works fine. I also have my NAVER account there but I can’t send emails because I’ve been too lazy to configure the SMTP settings properly.
Sure. I didn’t want to originally as I hate being that guy when someone asks “x or y” shouting “try z!”, lol.
If you are primarily planning to game on the computer, I’d recommend popOS to new to Linux users. System76 has some good tweaks for gaming performance behind the scenes and excellent driver support all out of the box. You can get all of these benefits on other distributions, but it’s work to get them that I wouldn’t recommend to someone not yet pretty comfortable in Linux.
Beyond that, there are 2 others I’d recommend to keep an eye on, maybe not jumping in as your first foray into Linux, but are really good once you have some confidence built up. Those are Bazzite (an immutable fedora off shoot built around gaming, even as a steam deck replacement os but the desktop version is also pretty great as far as my experiences) and Garuda (rolling release arch derivative also geared toward gamers, is usually pretty impressive in benchmarks compared to other distro out of the box). Bazzite has a lot of those same popOS tweaks out of the box, and primarily uses flatpak for stuff you install, so you don’t need to update your entire system just to keep discord happy. Garuda does a good job holding your hand compared to vanilla arch and has a lot of handy stuff setup and installed out of the box, but it is a rolling release so expect to run updates often (for this reason I’m not a fan of using it on an only occasionally used system). Bazzite does recommend against dual booting in the traditional sense using grub, they recommend removing other drive with an os during install and then using bios to choose what to boot, and that’s the biggest reason I’d recommend being more comfortable before trying it. You know your comfort and skill level better than anyone else here.
All that said, I’m not discounting Linux mint - it’s a great os choice for all around use, especially coming from windows. But it may require more tweaking and fiddling to get the best gaming performance out of compared to something built around gaming. Ultimately, same thoughts about fedora - it’s a great all around os, but if your primary concern is gaming it might take more work to get the best experience possible. Not to say your experience will be bad without all that effort either, it’s all to be taken with a grain of salt.
Give nobara a try. It’s fedora with focus on gaming. Mint is always a good option. Personally I use endeavour os, pretty straight forward to install but maybe a bit too barebones if you don’t know what you need yet.
Mint is always my recommendation for a Linux beginner. It’s the most “it just works” distro I’ve ever messed with, and has plenty of documentation for anything you’d need.
As for advice: I know you want to avoid the CLI, but try to poke around in there and learn it some. Once you get used to it, you can accomplish a lot of things even faster than through GUI applications.
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