After contemplating for 3-4 years about switching my main rig to Linux, I did it on Friday just gone.
Note for the below, I have a full AMD system.
I went with Garuda Dragonized distro as it is gaming focused and has all the game related stuff included.
took me less than 30mins going from gaming on Win11 to Linux, but I did the research before.
there are a few tweaks if you use Steam but you have Lutris to help you.
of the 35 ish games installed, all of them work without issues, but they need updating once you enable compatibility to Proton.
the default theme is too flashy but you can select to bring it down a few notches
Technical
if you have secondary SSD or HDD, dedicated to games or files like I did, it is advisable to have them backed up to an external drive as you will need to re-partition them from NTFS to use them properly in Linux
with Garuda Dragonized Gaming, all drivers are installed but follow the Wizard at the beginning and check all that apply to you. It will save you time.
Good luck and looking forward to having you on Linux!
Mint on my desktop, decided to try out Tumbleweed on a cheap laptop. KDE wasn’t for me / wasn’t reliable enough, but I’m happy with Gnome. I haven’t needed to use Flatpacks though.
Might try MicroOS on the servers, I like the idea of an immutable distro so less can go wrong during updates, and I run all services as containers anyway.
I use Linux MX on my gaming desktop and LMDE on my laptop. I also have an encrypted LMDE VM that I use for some working stuff, since I have to use Windows on my company PC (but we’re allowed to have Virtualbox on it).
The desktop is pretty new, I built it a month ago after almost 10 years, it’s i9 and rtx 4070. The laptop is several years old (HP spectre), but since the previous one gave me so many headaches with nvidia optimus, I decided to go full Intel, I’m happy I did because I had no problems with it whatsoever, Intel only on laptops for me going on.
Focus learning on how to install Arch Linux and use it without breaking. This not just gives you a rock-stable distro, but also the required knowledge on to maintain Linux OS.
Or go with “Ubuntu” level of easiness. You choose. :)
I first tried KDE Plasma 5 but tbh I thought it was just a worse experience than Win7, it was really close but all the tiny little annoyances got in the way and it felt like I couldn’t do everything I needed through GUI so I still had to use terminal but it was awkward having to switch between using the keyboard and mouse and I would navigate through the GUI to get to directories then open terminal…
After a month or two of that I finally tried a tiling WM (i3wm) and it’s just a way way better user experience than any DE.
I will note though that I’m using Fish for my interactive shell and seeing anything in the tiny dmenu was just way too hard until I used Rofi for drun.
Without Fish and Rofi I might’ve tried more DEs or even gone back to Win7.
I recently used Linux Mint with Cinnamon on a relative’s PC and using Bash and the apt package manager sucks so bad. I even prefer Arch KDE, although I think Nemo is a bit better than Dolphin.
Anyway it’s been about 2 years of daily driving Arch with i3wm for me and I haven’t really gone out of my way to learn things but you naturally pick stuff up along the way just by using it.
Just make sure you’ve got another device with an internet connection in case something happens. I basically haven’t had any issues after I got better but I made a lot of user errors at the start. Nothing that can’t be fixed but finding out how to do the fixing without internet is a million times harder.
The hardest part is when you need to use tools from windows, or to develop a program for that system. Also, many things require good amount of configuration, and with that, expertise at what you doing. I’m currently struggling with solving bug as to why VSCodium will not debug in external terminal.
If I understand correctly, the filesystem driver is contained within the kernel for all linux-native filesystems (Ext4, XFS, BtrFS, F2FS, etc.), just as drivers for computer components and devices are. But drivers to access NTFS (Windows) and HFS+ (Mac OS) drives are programs in userspace
Tldr and tealdeer in the arch repo are both helpful, but Ill do you one better since someone already beat me to it. I found fish shell’s tab completion with either tool to be immensely helpful if you’re not trying to stay stock standard. But if you’re working on a lot of remote machines you don’t own stick with bash/zsh.
There’s some easy to find fuzzy search and linting for for history plugins that mean if you found it once you can do it again in whichever shell.
Its mostly familiarity, but i don’t think I could function without fzf.
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