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.
Many people just want to USE their computer, and need simpler interfaces or they get lost. I don’t mind using dnf or even building from source, hell, I use Vim to write emails, but my ex-wife likes Gnome Software, and GUIs, and relies on me to do any tweaking. I think it’s fine for people to stick to graphic interfaces if that works for them, it’s part of the reason why GNU/Linux desktop is getting more popular with regular non-techie users, which are the vast majority of potential users.