I’m a windows loser looking to make the plunge into Linux. I was thinking of switching my gaming PC to Linux in the near future. Before I make up my mind, I’ll probably try out VMs of distros.

I’ve lurked a few Linux communities here and on lemmy.ml, some I’m gonna regurgitate some things I half remember in the hope of being being corrected and starting discussion about what I should be doing.

  • Ubuntu isn’t good
  • Mint is good despite being based on Ubuntu. Made with former windows users in mind
  • Debian is good because of their packages or package manager or something. Recently sold out, but there are spinoffs that don’t use proprietary software like Duvian.
  • Fedora seemed to get some good word but I can’t remember why.
  • Arch and it’s spinoffs require a shit ton of finagling to get right but can do a lot of cool things
  • There are different desktop environments like GNOME, Cinnamon, and … others? I honestly don’t know what a desktop environment is.
  • Wine (or the fork Proton) can run windows native games on Linux
  • There are snap, flat something or other, and … other ways for installing software.

I’m sure I’m missing a lot and got some things wrong. Any help getting started is appreciated.

Edit: I ended up going with a KDE plasma spin of Fedora 36. Once I figured out how to get the nvidia drivers set up it was smooth sailing.

  • Camarada Forte
    7•2 years ago

    I don’t recommend Arch, nor Ubuntu. Ubuntu because it’s bloated, Arch because there’s a very steep learning curve from Windwos.

    Debian is a pretty good choice. It’s the quintessential GNOME Desktop distro. Extremely stable, simple and secure

    • 小莱卡
      4•2 years ago

      I’d avoid recommending Debian to new users. The non-free iso is kinda hard to find for newbies and it could be an issue especially for OP since he is a gamer.

    • Arsen6331 ☭
      4•2 years ago

      Yeah, don’t use Arch as a new user, but certainly try it out once you gain some experience and feel comfortable installing it. I was scared of it for a long time because people said it was really difficult, but once I had some command-line experience, I was able to install it with the help of the wiki, and I still use it today, 4 years later. It really is a very, very good distro as long as you know how to fix it, or how to find out how to fix it, in the (very rare) occasion that it breaks or you break it (which is much easier to do on Arch than Ubuntu).

    • krolden
      1•2 years ago

      Arch is a good place to start if you learn things well by diving in to them in the deep end. Youll learn very fast how Linux itself works just by installing and configuring it.

      Otherwise I’d recommend manjaro.