So ive use windows pretty much for everything and ive kinda had a enough of windows. i was thinking of trying linux on an old laptop that i just upgraded to 8gb of ram and im not sure wha tos to put on it. i was thinking something lightweight maybe ubuntu mate? i need somethign like windows that will allow me to game and do other things liek gaming maybe even streaming or reading? idk. also what are some neede dsoftware, browser so rthigs needed for linux. i com efrom a family who has never trie dlinux and hates it because its “the smar advanced coders os” somethign liek that.
anyways im a noob so go easy on me please als i may have ben linux distro hopping but i still feel lost.
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So, how deep does the “similar to Windows” needs to go? Are you thinking in terms of ease of use, things that works out of the box, something that looks similar to Windows?
In terms of look and feel, I’d recommend something based on KDE. KDE out of the box looks a lot like Windows (in fact, Windows 11 has some stuff that looks like it’s been ripped off KDE) Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Manjaro and Mint all have KDE versions you can install. I think Cinnamon also looks a fair bit like Windows. Although I wouldn’t exactly rule out other desktops just yet - maybe you’ll quickly realize hey, that other desktop I tried does look and function pretty neatly for my needs and you won’t feel like you need something that looks like Windows.
In terms of tutorials and being able to look things up online, Ubuntu and Manjaro tends to be the two most popular and therefore most documented. pop_OS! is also fairly popular and they do a good job at making Linux accessible for newcomers, but it’s based on Gnome so the experience will be different.
My personal advice is get VirtualBox, pick a few distros and try them out. You won’t exactly be able to game on them, or if you do, you’ll probably be limited to more lightweight games. But that should be plenty enough to install Discord, OBS, Steam and give a few distros a try. You can expect real world performance to mostly feel more responsive than Windows, and for games you can expect similar or maybe 5-10% lower performance in most cases. So don’t look too much at how fast it runs in a VM - VMs are fantastic piece of technology (and I actually game in one with a VFIO setup, but don’t bother just yet it’s a whole rabbithole), but especially under VirtualBox or VMware you’re not going to get the full performance.
Try a bunch of distros, try a few of the main Desktop Environments (DEs), see what you like, see what you dislike. Gnome on Ubuntu will be very different than Gnome on Fedora. Don’t rule out a distro because the DE, and don’t rule out a DE because of a distro. You can install as many as you want in VirtualBox, so take your time to get a feel of what you like and dislike and go from there. Once you’ve made your choice, you can partition your disk and keep Windows around if you want to have that safety net. Sometimes there’s that one game that just won’t work in Linux, and you can reboot to Windows to play it. I started this way, and found myself rebooting to Windows less and less until I reached a point where I was actively avoiding it and willing to make sacrifices just to avoid it because Linux had become my primary OS. If you have 2-3 distros you want to try, nothing stops you from installing all of them on hardware as well, they’ll happily cohabitate for the most part. Spend a day in Ubuntu, spend another day in Manjaro. Get a feel of which one has less friction for you.
In the end, Linux is Linux. Some distros ships everything you need for gaming out of the box and are easier to set up, but ultimately, Linux is Linux, you can (with some effort) get anything that runs on one distro on another distro. Heck, on ArchLinux land, we have a whole bunch of Ubuntu-patched packages in the AUR to bring in some of Ubuntu’s modifications in.
Speaking of ArchLinux. It’s a pretty good distro, it’s also become a bit of a meme distro. Don’t feel like you have to jump in all the way and get into ArchLinux, Gentoo, VoidLinux, Alpine, etc. You can if you want - honestly, if you really want to dive in deep and learn Linux from the ground up they will get you there, but beware that the learning curve on that will be steep. Those distros are aimed at more advanced users that want to control every aspect of their system in great detail. There’s no shame using a normie distro like Ubuntu or Fedora. Those are made to just kinda work and be reliable, whereas the ArchLinux installer is basically “here’s a command line, install what you want, good luck have fun”.
You don’t have to “commit” to a distro. For some it becomes a bit of a religion, but it’s perfectly normal to hop around distros a bit before you find the one that clicks with you. That’s why there’s so many of them: different goals for different people and different minds. I started with Ubuntu in 2007, ran to Debian around 2010 when they introduced Unity and I didn’t like it, wasn’t a fan of Debian either, ended up breaking it with Debian Sid, went to Fedora for a bit, and back to Ubuntu with a different DE before I felt like I had enough and wanted something I had more control over, and that’s when I switched to Arch and stayed on Arch to this day. Meanwhile my fiancée put Arch on her laptop but increasingly feels like it’s too much maintenance for her and wants a laptop that just kinda works to run Chromium and VSCode. So she might end up just switching to Ubuntu. That’s perfectly fine! The computer should work for you, you shouldn’t work for the computer.
If you end up not liking Linux, that’s fine too! Most of us here swear by it, but maybe Windows just happens to be the best operating system for you, just like for some people that’s macOS.
With that, good luck, hope you enjoy your Linux experience and ask questions. Lemmy is a great place to ask for help, there’s also lots of still very active IRC channels on libera.chat, and there’s some Discord servers too if that’s your thing.
This comment makes me excited to meet more people in the fediverse… So much about what you said makes me happy to read!
Someone’s gotta step in and contribute quality content for this to takeoff! 🚀
I have to give you an upvote for writing this novel. Nice!
wow! thank you for all this info it really help.
Linux mint is amazing for you, I personally would say its better than zorin
I would recommend that you check out Linux Mint. It is based on Ubuntu, but is in my experience easier to use out of the box.
They have a MATE version on their website.
Zorin is designed to be a Windows replacement, but my personal recommendation is LinuxMint. Sure it’s not trying to be a carbon copy of Windows, but it’s designed to be easy to learn, stable, functional, and support pretty much everything from the get go (just not bleeding edge), with a readily available store that lets you download everything you need (that isn’t already included in the install).
Linux Mint Cinnamon is a good choice. Even as a sysadmin and DevOps engineer I use it on my workstation because it Just Works. It has good window management, settings management, file management and just stays out of the way. Flatpak is well integrated for things you may need that aren’t natively packaged, like discord.
I’ve heard good things about PopOs too but haven’t tried it.
A lot can boot from a usb stick and you can look at them. Linux Mint should look very familiar to a Windows user. Their main edition is Cinnamon, however they have an Xfce version that is lightweight. Xubuntu is another option that is also using Xfce. Ubuntu Mate is an option but it will be less familiar out of the box and with more of a learning curve.
Most distributions will support your use case, but how old the laptop is might influence how well they run. That said, even full GNOME can often run perfectly fine on older systems, and there is no downside to trying a bunch of things.
If you want to live boot, I would suggest installing Ventoy on a flash drive. It lets you drag and drop multiple image files on the drive and pick what one you want from the boot menu.
Made me remember this classic post!
This reads line the “Am I out of touch” image macro. “No, it is the new users who are wrong !”
Have you considered steamOS? It runs a fair number of games and the Linux kernel.
I think it still isn’t officially out yet. At least the new version and I wouldn’t recommend the old one.
On integrated graphics (which I assume op has) gaming should work generally the same across ditros. I use mint personally and that’s a great way to start off. Simple, similar layout to windows, and I have run into any issues with games.
Valve wants to release SteamOS outside of the SteamDeck? Do you have a source? I want to read about that.
Have any experience with it ? I considered it but some comments seem to indicate it’s still really rough to be used as a computer OS
ive thougth about it but i though it was only for games, and i need to do more than game you know?
SteamOS 3 still isn’t widely available AFAICT, and the older versions are well and truly out of date. And HoloOS isn’t quite reliable enough to recommend in my opinion.
I wouldn’t recommend it as a general purpose OS at this point either, but it may be a good option down the line.
SteamOS isn’t available for the public?
Bad idea for general purpose system. Most of what SteamOS does on its own right now is Steam Deck integration. You can run all the games on any other Linux system with graphics drivers and Steam. It’s not hard to get going
SteamOS isn’t available for general computers and is not good with nvidia
Linux mint is fairly good in this case
You can’t officially run steamOS on hardware other than the steamdeck (yet), but you can use holoiso.
The similarity is really only superficial. You would have to learn about the OS one way or the other, even if some distro has Interfaces similar to Windows. You might need to find software alternatives for example, or be comfortable with package manager.
For gaming, you want to checkout Steam w/ Proton and Heroic Game Launcher
As others have said, Linux Mint (Cinnamon) is an obvious choice.
Alternatively, I recommend Tuxedo OS. It’s a KDE based distro developed by a German company that makes various computers which run Linux out of the box. You get the developer support of a company that ships machines with the distro (like System 76’s Pop!_OS) and a more Windows like experience than Pop!_OS’ gnome desktop environment.
Mint (cinnamon) is really nice, has a Windows like look and feel. Stable and friendly 👍
If you want a familiar Windows-like experience, the general consensus is that Mint and Zorin are the best for helping people transitioning. Lightweight-wise, Mint MATE, Xubuntu, or Lubuntu would work. Could install MATE, LXDE, or XFCE on Arch, too. Might be a Fedora spin, too, for some or all of those.
If you want super lightweight, Void is awesome to play with, but you have to get it going yourself somewhat like old-school Arch. It’s definitely more advanced, but worth doing for the learning.
Don’t recommend Arch or void to newbies lol, switching to Mint or Fedora will be difficult enough.
I think that linux mint will be perfect for you!
Linux mint is a pretty university praised easy to use distro.
I second this, but for Linux Mint Debian Edition. Same as regular Mint but decoupled from Ubuntu.
ubuntu mate is a good choice for a beginner, but if your computer is old enough, the system may slow down. This is due to the fact that snap images are slowly decompressed on older processors. You can try Linux Mint too.
About the software. The main thing is to accept the fact that not all Windows applications have analogues on Linux. some people actually make such a mistake. no need to try to install wine and migrate literally every exe file. Look at the software specifically for linux.
The default browser is firefox. But you can install chrome or chromium without any problems. There is OBS studio for linux for streaming. For games, you can put lutris. There is also an official steam client. if the game has an anti-cheat and this anti-cheat is not optimized for linux, you will not be able to play it.
