If I’m not mistaken it’s not that Steam will just completely cease to function on that date, Just they won’t be fixing any bugs related to Windows7/8 from that point on.
Aha, just popping in here to suggest taking a look at PopOS!
Proton works extremely well on it, its compatible out of the box with everything Debian based (this includes Ubuntu) so it has a huge selection of free software, has great documentation for the PopOS! specific stuff and for all the debian/ubuntu stuff you can nearly always use older wikis on the internet if you run into a snag, and its got a custom DE that I personally find better than KDE and Ubuntu’s latest rendition if GNOME.
Also, while Ubuntu is going hard into Snaps, which I hate, PopOS! is going into flatpaks, which are less bad than snaps, but still stupid imo.
If you care, its fairly easy to disable and/or remove flatpaks from PopOS. It doesnt come with any preloaded afaik, so all you have to do is go into the PopShop (the app store) settings and just remove the flatpak source.
Ive run Proton on Steam via debian sources on PopOS! for years, works fine.
Oh right! I am fairly sure that PopOS! nowadays just comes by default with graphics drivers pre-installed and preset to automatically update with the rest of your software when you run sudo apt update. All you have to do is pick the Nvidia ISO if youve got Nvidia, or the standard one if youve got AMD.
I’ve been running PopOS! for years now on a HP slice with 8gb of RAM and its still flawless and feels so modern! Making the switch was definitely the best thing I ever did
The trend is that the app developers officially support and push updates for the flatpak. So you always get the latest source directly from the devs. This makes packaging organic, instead of deb/arch/rpm/etc packagers trying to catch up (those packages are often waaay out of date, even on arch occasionally)
Well if this trend becomes the norm then that is great, but in my experience the opposite is true, dependencies get updated first, then things built off of them get updated later.
False. KDE will feel much more familiar. And using a system with a modern kde version is way better than the ancient versions Ubuntu and all of its cousins use
Ubuntu is the entire reason why elderly parents have a functional PC. They didn’t need to know all of the negatives vs other distros and just needed the machine they have to work. It has been going strong for 5 years on 13 year old hardware.
I installed KDE for something more familiar and showed them where the internet, e-mail, and solitaire are. If you are the actual typical user and don’t need more, then there is no need to hate on any distro at all as long as it will boot and perform maybe 10 functions.
There’s a bit of controversy regarding Ubuntu that I don’t need to get into but Fedora and Pop!_OS are also really good for Proton support. Ubuntu will work fine but I just prefer not to use it. Maybe you could let him try out the live environment for a couple distros to see what he might like in terms of UI.
All of those are still ancient systems. Arch or opensuse tumbleweed are the only systems that are reasonable for a desktop because they’re rolling releases
Fedora is still pretty frequently and recently up to date with respect to packages and kernel, not sure you’d be losing much over arch.
But the debate to me is also not that important, I’ve been running fedora and have at some few occasions gotten some instabilities due to updates (mostly Nvidia with Wayland) so I can totally understand someone wanting stability and reliability over bleeding edge).
Someone who reviewed Nobara a while back said it best: Arch is bleeding edge while Fedora is cutting edge. Both embrace new things in the Linux world like systemd, Btrfs and PipeWire, but Fedora tries to keep things stable.
I might hop back onto it if my Arch install cakes it.
I don’t know about vanilla Arch, but on Manjaro each update breaks at least one thing. I never had issues with Mint. I wonder if I’d still get more stability from Mint if I installed Plasma on it. Anyway, I already got used to AUR and not having to deal with version upgrades. But I still wouldn’t recommend Arch-based distros when stability is needed.
But that’s not really true. You get temporary stability, and then have to do a massive update which is guaranteed to break shit. Do you have a staging server for your desktop? If not, you’re not actually getting any benefit from waiting to update.
I’d rather do some maintenance every two years than once a month. I just don’t have time or willpower to deal with it because I already have a technical job with computers at work.
Also, last time I did a full upgrade on debian it didn’t break anything. Some distros just do a much better job of testing. Rolling releases have always broken something for me after a while.
The thing that rolling release distros are good for is sanitising upstream when it comes to version compatibility. Gentoo was infamous for that, sooo many things back then were bug-compatible with each other because all other distros would lock versions down and only care about their one particular combination.
Agreed. If you’re sticking to a few games and you’re mostly a hobby gamer then yeah, but I can totally see more hardcore types, pro streamers etc looking at getting rolling release systems simply for the experience especially if they’ve got the money lying around
I second popos and mint. I love fedora but if he is a gamer you want something that will just work (navida built in or a very easy one click mechanism to get it). If he has to research PPAs and installing rpmfussion it will get all too hard very quickly. Also do some expectation setting before hand, research what games he plays work on linux, better he finds out now rather than after 2 hours of pain or getting band for “hacking” because of proton triggered an anti-cheat thing.
Edit: I run fedora on all my machines except my gaming rig which is popos. Fedora works too but popos is hassle a free experience.
Fedora more or less just works. I followed, like, 5 simple steps on the top Google result for “installing nvidia drivers fedora” and that was all it took. No further configuration or fiddling required.
I’ve done it. I agree it can be done very easily. But is relying on all new users entering the right question into google and google returning a correct answer for their distro that is not 7 years out of date the best strategy in the long run?
Any distro that does not offer a option during install or on first boot to just install this stuff with a promt is not new user friendly.
If he wants something similar to windows, get Linux mint, it’s the best parts of Debian/Ubuntu but made modern. If you can do it on Ubuntu, you can do it in mint (like online guides cuz mint is based on ubuntu if you couldn’t tell).
I started with KDE neon and loved it. For me personally, the weird partial rolling release thing was really nice. I loved seeing YT people talk about the new KDE release and all of its bells and whistles, and being able to instantly play with it on release.
I highly recommend Linux Mint (cinnamon) as an entry level Linux distro. It looks and feels similar to Windows, and it’s based on Ubuntu, so it has a lot of support and compatibility.
Really liked Mint, unfortunately the kernel was not new enough to support my 7900 XTX when I upgraded GPU so I ended up switching to Pop_OS which works fine as well.
Like others already mentioned, I would suggest Linux Mint as well. It’s better Ubuntu than Ubuntu and similarity to Windows UI would make his transition much better.
Seconded. Switched my wife to Mint two years ago, and she never cared about going back to Windows. Not that she cares about Mint, either; the point of contention was the transition, which was much smoother than she was afraid of.
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