Hi there!

Seeing the enshittification of Windows unfold, I’m curious about trying out Linux.

I don’t want to move over my main machine just yet, but I’ve got a 9 yo HP Pavilion 15-e001ed spare laptop I want to experiment with. Eventually I want a gaming laptop that can run steam games.

When I googled I found a plethora of pieces of advice, but seeing the proselytizing for Linux here, maybe I could get a bit more personal advice as a potential conscript.

So what advice would you give me to start my journey into Linux?

UPDATE: Ok my cherry is popped, writing this from a fresh Mint install. It’s suprisingly smooth sailing. Only thing is somehow software gets installed on my root partition instead of the home partition I made because people told me so.

But overall not nearly as dounting as I thought it would be. Thanks for the help everybody!

  • isgleasEnglish
    3·
    4 days ago

    You can try your luck and see if you can find hardware similar to yours already probed, that may help you decide.

    • Akasazh@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      Thanks. Cant find the specific model in there, just the generic Pavilion 15.

      There seems to be support for the AMD A6-5350M graphics card that’s in there…

      • owenfromcanada@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        AMD is very well supported in Linux, especially on older hardware. If you use something beginner-friendly like Mint, you shouldn’t have to do anything special to get it working well.

        • Ketata Mohamed@mastodon.tn
          1·
          4 days ago

          @owenfromcanada @Akasazh I just want to mention that old amd GPUs require a proprietary driver, from my humble logic, that requires tinkering, like for Nvidia cards that do require proprietary drivers, but even Nvidia embraced Open-Source so there’s nvidia-open now, in short, now, there’s 0 reason to use proprietary trash, except on special circumstances

          • owenfromcanada@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            4 days ago

            Good to know! I haven’t had any AMD GPUs, but it was my understanding they’ve been well supported for a while.

            Unfortunately, the open source Nvidia driver isn’t suitable for gaming yet. But some distros (Mint at least) provide an easy GUI to switch to proprietary drivers. Very easy tinkering, as these things go.

            • Ketata Mohamed@mastodon.tn
              1·
              4 days ago

              @owenfromcanada do you happen to know the name of such tool? I know Garuda, Ubuntu & many distros have them, but since my priority was stability even on stress conditions, my daily driver is Endeavour OS, but it lacks that feature, it has everything otherwise

              • owenfromcanada@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                3 days ago

                It’s just called “Driver Manager” in Mint, I’m guessing it’s specific to the distro. I’ve tried a few different ones, and it’s by far the easiest to switch compared to any other. I think it can theoretically be installed on any Ubuntu-based distro, but I don’t know of anything for EndeavorOS.

                • Ketata Mohamed@mastodon.tn
                  1·
                  3 days ago

                  @owenfromcanada I know how easy, user and beginner-friendly it is, since 2008 I had my fair share of distro-hopping among debian & RHEL families, but they all broke when I installed them on my Nvidia-powered Laptops, 3 years ago I had enough so I began my tour with the Arch family, manjaro was an unpleasant host, even though is for gamers & very user-friendly but super unstable &, ahem, governed by clowns, I tried Garuda but it’s gaming focused, I need an all-purpose distro, so EOS was my go-to