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.

  • @electric_nan
    7•2 years ago

    Most of the arguments you’ve heard won’t have much or any relevance to you, as a new user. One of the cool things about Linux is that a lot of distros are able to run as ‘live’ systems. Meaning that you can put it on a USB drive and boot into it and try it out before you commit to installing it.

    Here’s what you do. Get a tool called ventoy, and put it on a USB drive. Then download a handful of Linux distros you want to try out. Drag and drop the ISO files onto your USB drive as per ventoy instructions. Now reboot your computer, and do whatever it takes for it to boot from USB. It varies, but might be ESC, or F2, etc. If successful, you’ll get a nice menu of all the Linux distros on the USB drive, and you can try them out one by one.