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.

  • Johnny Mojo
    11·
    2 years ago

    My vote would be for Fedora, it’s very up to date and extremely stable, though it gets a major upgrade about every 6 months (never a problem for me), and also daily minor updates. Fedora is very beginner friendly and just works. I have had lots of stability problems with Ubuntu, and there are also privacy concerns almost continually.

    ‘Desktop’ refers to the graphic interface, think about the difference between Windows XP, Windows 10, etc- they made many refinements to the graphical interface. With GNU/Linux you get an infinite choice. XFCE and KDE seem to be pretty intuitive for Windows users, but you can always change it and try different ones without changing the OS. One of the first things you’ll notice is the crazy amount of personalization possible with any GNU/Linux desktop, it can be overwhelming.

    My recommendation is to try a few different distros and desktops in a virtual machine and find what works for you. No matter which distro you choose, the ‘normal’ software applications are fairly common for them all: word processors, spreadsheets, web browwsers, image viewers, media players, maybe the default applications are different, but you’ll find whatever you need or prefer in the package manager.