When Windows 10 dies, I am going to jump ship over to Linux. Which version would you recommend for someone with zero prior experience with Linux? **Edit: Linux Mint it shall be.**
Whom also likes to game every now and then ;)
Edit: Thank you all for your input and suggestions! Linux Mint shall be my next OS! Though, I think I’ll give Pop!OS a look-see as well.
Linux Mint is definitely the right choice here in my opinion. I installed it for my parent’s on their older laptop when they were having issues running windows. They were blown away by how fast it was and how they could do all of their usual tasks (i.e browsing, financing, basic games, etc.). It will be a great first experience for you!
The only thing I would maybe hesitate about with POP! OS is the big upcoming switch to the COSMIC desktop, which is is brand-new and a bit untested. But also System76 are a really solid company and seem to know what they’re doing so it’ll probably be fine.
It’s probably been said, but Ubuntu or one of its variants is really the easiest way to go. Canonical has devoted a great deal of effort to making things easy and intuitive, and a complete novice should be able to get a fully functional system set up within 15 minutes.
Its not advised to install steam os on non steamdeck devices. Pop os, nobara and Garuda I believe come configured for gaming out of the box and are pretty uptodate.
I’m already starting to migrate my small office. Two PCs done, a handful of others to go. I have probably three that I’ll run Windows 11 for software compatibility, and another three Mac’s for different software.
Who remembers “Windows 10 will be our last operating system’?” I remember. Fuck Microsoft. Fuck Macs too though.
Start looking at the desktop environments and use a virtual machine/live usb to try them out. For something similar to Windows I’d recommend KDE plasma or Cinnamon, both can be tried out using KDE Neon or Linux Mint.
I think it depends on what you are looking for. While Linux Mint is a safe option, it does have some drawbacks… well it’s more drawbacks from Ubuntu but as Linux Mint is based off of it, it’s also impacted. Primarily the fact that Ubuntu packages are terribly out of date. Thankfully mint makes adding PPA’s painless, but for apps that don’t have a PPA it’s a pain to install them from scratch like Mangohud. It’s not impossible, but there is an expect level of Linux knowledge which is required before going in.
Another option is Manjaro. You will hear the litany of endless criticism about it from the community, some of it is valid. But for the most part, while it’s not as nice as Linux Mint, I think the OS will get you to the point where you can start using your machine faster. Mostly thanks to Arch’s rolling release, as well as the AUR for filling the gap between official packages and flatpaks.
I was using Manjaro for the longest time, but switched to Mint due to a freak bootloader accident. I prefer Manjaro in terms of how well it handled Games and Windows software due to it’s association with Arch. But I like how well Mint manages my laptop’s battery and performance or lack thereof due to it’s pitiful cooler.
Keep in mind they have zero Linux experience so I doubt they’ll be needing packages that are too obscure for mint, and I wouldn’t recommend trying to run windows software in Linux to a novice.
While I agree, the issue is, that they’ll want to. Thankfully Valve is handling games well enough right now that it’s a non problem. Regardless which distro you are on.
I game, like a lot, and if windows beats me one more time i swear I’ll leave them for good. Is there a list of supported games? I just hit their site and only saw an nvidia gpx drivers too, did i simple miss the AMD stuff?
Intel and AMD drivers are part of the Linux kernel so you never need to think about drivers.
Check out https://www.protondb.com/ for something of a list of supported games, but generally most games just work (in Steam, go to Settings, Compatibility, and check the box for applying Proton on all games in library and not just the officially supported ones).
ProtonDB isn’t a complete list, but if you do struggle with getting a game to work, chances are somebody has posted a string you can paste into Steam to make the game magically work.
to add on to this, generally the only games that have issues are games with pretty serious anti cheat, and even many of those will still work. protondb will reflect this of course, but if you already know you mostly only play single player or cooperative titles, you can save a lot of time looking through your library
I appreciate what glorious eggroll does. And I’ve had no issues with the few games I’ve played on Steam.
I’ve been running Nobara for several months and it has been very stable though I find it is lacking a little polish around the edges in some areas. Kind of like how Mint was when I first started about 10y ago.
I’m trying out Fedora now for a while. On kernel 6.5. I was on 6.1 in Nobara. I have one game that’s crashing now (it wasn’t crashing in Nobara … go figure). So I may have to go back to Nobara or try to figure out what they did with Nobara vs Fedora that would help.
When Mint gets to kernel 6.x some day, I might jump back. (5.19 doesn’t support my GPU). Overall Mint became very polished. I hardly ever ran into weird issues. Although I do remember feeling Cinnamon blew up every so often.
I’d recommend Zorin. It has a UI similar to windows, easy to get into, great defaults, and being based on Ubuntu, most help on the internet will work just fine
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