Honestly I don’t mind 11. It’s miles better than 10 ever was IMO. However with that being said, Linux is better. I have to dual boot Windows 11 on my computer because unfortunately there’s no way I can use my Elgato Capture Device on a Linux machine.
I downvoted you for not minding Windows 11 🐵
I’m going to be migrating to Linux and using Mint. I’m just paranoid about doing something wrong and accidentally walking into a security vulnerability. So I want to set aside time to properly learn things and understand what I’m doing but I’m just busy AF these days…
Take it slow and do it the right way, don’t let Lemmy pressure you if you’re making slow but steady progress. It’s a learning curve for sure
I have four pieces of advice
- btrfs file system for easy backup and recovery
- Encrypt your drive
- use an ad blocker everywhere
- use virus total to scan anything you might be wary of, and if you really feel like you need an AV, they do exist for Linux.
I usually prefer Debian based systems, but when I finally ditched windows 3 weeks ago, I switched to Manjaro, and I’m loving it. You got this!
Microsoft Access and Publisher, the Adobe suite, VR. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of why I can’t completely abandon Windows, yet. I do have a handful of older PCs running Mint though, and I’ll be switching over more. But not all of them.
Ok, I really need to know what you’re using Access for in 2025
Publisher is being discontinued soon and will be removed from Microsoft 365 installs
How can I convince the GF to switch? She only plays The Sims and the occasional hentai game; her Skylake i5 and 1050ti are more than adequate for those tasks. Yet she refuses to try Linux; won’t even let me install LTSC to buy some time.
I think she just wants an excuse to buy a new laptop. She’s the kind of person who replaces her shower curtain every six months, rather than do the sane thing and simply wash it. I’ll never understand such a wasteful mentality.
Bazzite and don’t tell her it’s Linux?
There is nothing wrong if someone doesn’t want to switch to a new OS. That being said, isn’t her buying a new computer better? Old one becomes unused then.
Putting lightweight linux on an unused old computer and seeing it become better is like the standard procedure. You could even make a custom rice for her.
You know what? Just because of this I am going to proprietary BLOB even harder
*nvidia drivers in Linux: “why not both?”
My laptop is about 7 years old now, I think I will do this actually, thanks for the tip comrade
I feel like eveyone should reccomend Fedora KDE edition, its close enough to Windows for new users and modern enough to not push people away.
People have their gripes over the “big corporation” side of this but I also daily drive fedora KDE and I love it. My only complaint is 2 things.
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Wireless shuts off after long periods of sleep. Suck if I’m torrenting my Linux isos.
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Very rarely it’ll freeze up and I need to hard restart.
Both of which could be a me issue. But besides that it’s a beautiful, easily and highly customizable system. Highly reccomend as well.
I also have issue number 2 with fedora KDE (kinoite). It’s happened like 3 times in the past several months
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As a 15 years old pc user who likes to play games with a 15 years old nvidia graphics card. The only thing that’s preventing me from fully migrating to linux is the fact that nvidia doesn’t support my gpu anymore, so no proprietary driver, unless, I use a 6 years old kernel version.
The only choice I have for modren distros is the nouveau drivers, which lacks behind alot specially when it comes to gaming. I now have a dual boot setup running Popos and windows, but still I can’t be fully free from Windows, having to reboot every time I feel like playing something. I hope in the near future I get less broke to buy a new conputer or maybe the new nvk drivers will supports my gpu which is unlikely.Which graphics card?
Quadro 2000M, it’s a miracle that it support dx12 games.
That’s a workstation card, significantly higher grade than the consumer cards at the time. How did you even get your hands on it?
I have a 8570w hp elitebook laptop which i bought back in 2016 from an aftermarket sales shop, you rarely see a new laptop in stock here in Iraq and if there’s any they would be ridiculously over priced.
I’m used to saying pc as a general term, that might created som sort of confusion? Sorry if that’s the case.Ok that’s even crazier, I had no idea they made the quattro in a mobile format. Yeah the HP website calls it a ‘portable workstation’.
I mean compared to modern cards it’s a little old but back in the day that was mainly used by data scientists and field statisticians that needed ridiculous amount of simulation math
Also, the designator ‘workstation’ back then was more than just ‘A place to work’, but a specific class of PC that was designed for high end tasks like rendering video or CAD, and they were ridiculously expensive. Fitting all that power in a laptop is really mind blowing to me
You found a treasure there
🤔
I am trying Linux but it’s not going well. I still might stick with it but it’s more because of Windows getting worse than Linux being better. Right now it’s come down to an evaluation of which things I want to not be able to do anymore because Linux doesn’t support everything I currently do or the alternative is ass or will require an inordinate amount of research to get set back up.
Using mint or ?
I’ve used both Mint and Bazzite. Bazzite I’m attempting as a daily driver now because it has all the gaming shit baked in already and I don’t know wtf I’m doing with that so it gave me a head start. However, Freecad runs like absolute dog shit on it, as well as every other system I’ve tried it on, so I need to keep windows around for Fusion360, I also can’t figure out how to program my G602 from it even though according to the docs I found Solaar supports it. I’m almost certain my headset won’t work on it. When I did my taxes it wouldn’t open PDFs from my network share because the PDF program doesn’t understand SMB. It already lost my Secure boot key once and I had to reinstall the OS to fix that even after turning Secure Boot off. I still need to figure out the best way to run VMs on it and I have numerous other peripherals that I haven’t even tried yet because it’s honestly exhausting to keep running into problems when I’m already stressed out from work and every other fucking thing going on in my life… I was able to get my media downloading stuff all running in Mint with only one issue that took me a couple hours due to gpodder not just having a fucking setting for the download directory and the documentation couldn’t just SAY how to export the path you want but over all that was pretty painless.
Ah yes I tried bazzite too and it wouldn’t even boot for me so I went mint since I had it years ago. It can be annoying if you don’t have the time or don’t enjoy troubleshooting. I’m unsure why freecad is running poor. Nvidia card?
I used to have the same issue, and booted up a Windows VM for anything I couldn’t get working on Linux, like syncing my Polar watch. Now I’m down to only using the VM when doing a firmware update of my Gardena robotic lawn mower, which is like once every second year.
Ive been seriously looking into making the switch. After some reading I decided Mint would be the easiest transition and downloaded the ISO to try it out with a USB boot. Im sure its a fluke, but since I have dual monitors the display was messed up and whenever I tried to fix it the entire GUI went away on both monitors and wouldn’t recover. I had to force power off the machine and ive been hesitant since then to make the actual switch. Id hate to brick my machine right off the bat, just trying to swap display sources.
Mint is the one everyone touts, but mint is pretty shit tbh. Check out Zorin OS. I have a funky triple display setup and it handled it like a champ. Also UX/UI on Zorin is fantastic. There is GUI for everything.
I’ve heard that happen with mint before. Try a bit more modern distro like fedora or openSUSE maybe?
I had a bit of trouble like that too… Tried Ubuntu and my 2nd display would have static bursts going through the middle horizontally. Couldn’t figure out a fix, tried out Fedora and had no problems.
Please give it another go. I think you’re right, thrt was a fluke.
Dabbled with Linux over the years but have finally made the jump to using it as my primary OS. I tried a bunch of distros and settled on the elegant simplicity of Mint. Every game has worked just… fine.
It feels genuinely refreshing to know nothing will change without my consent, I know I will not login one day to find a surprise cortana/copilot/clippy icon in the taskbar or an ad for Avowed waiting for me. I can’t believe that is even considered a ‘pro’, but here we are.
AMD or NVIDIA user?
AMD. I think if I had nvidia I might’ve gone for Pop OS, I heard that has good support for them out the box.
Good to know. I’m NVIDIA myself
I’m running pop on 3 machines. One is an old Dell core 2 duo, and I’m amazed how quick it runs and never freezes (10g ram, 120gb ssd). Only issue issue have is the pop shop freezes up sometimes, even on my higher power machine. Otherwise, solid.
Zorin OS is the distro for windows refugees. Nothing else even comes close.
Why? Never hear of it. What makes it better conpared to other popular distros? And how does it serve the need of Windoofs refugees better?
Tried using Alma on my rig at home (since I’m using it on my servers), and I’m already going to be looking for a new distro. Went back to it after a week or so not having the energy to deal with it and apps like Firefox and steam wouldn’t launch.
Need to find a decent OS to run in its place so I can stop booting to Win10
Fedora is the obvious answer for you. It’s upstream from your upstream. It has the same tooling you’re used to, but newer packages. A less obvious answer is to embrace the atomic/immutable future and look at Fedora Silverblue or the stuff that the Universal Blue community is putting out. I switched from Silverblue to Aurora-dx and I’ve been extremely happy with it.
Funny you mention that, Silver blue was the first thing I tried (because I’ve used fedora off and on for over a decade) and something about it just didn’t work for me, but I don’t remember what. Didn’t try the regular version tho.
In the end, I want something I can game on and dev with (which is the easy part, since VSCodium is multiplatform). If Steam doesn’t work, the install is getting torched (which is why Alma is getting the boot).
I’m a sys admin by trade, so the OS should require minimal troubleshooting because I’m sick of doing that by the end of the day.
Silverblue is a totally different beast than what you’re used to. The filesystem is immutable with the exception of /var and /etc. Even /home is moved into /var/home, although a bind mount exists so /home still appears to be there. You are expected to use flatpaks for applications, toolbox for rpms that don’t have a flatpak, and very last resort you can overlay an rpm on the base image. I absolutely think this is the direction linux as a whole is moving. OpenSUSE has MicroOS that does a similar thing and Leap 16 will default to being immutable. Debian has an immutable variant, and SteamOS is built on an immutable flavor of Arch. The Fedora Atomic family specifically supports bootc. You are essentially booting a container as your OS. That’s why it has so much community buy in. You could try looking at the Universal Blue images I mentioned. Bazzite is gaming focused with the option to boot straight into gaming mode, Aurora is a general workstation with KDE, and Bluefin is a general workstation based on GNOME. Each image has a DX version that includes developer tools like VScode and Virtual Machine Manager included.
I’m also a sysad by trade. A consultant for Red Hat. I personally switched to Aurora DX and the only overlayed package I have installed is
clevis-dracutso network based disk encryption with tang works. Other than that I have the built-in stuff, flatpaks (Steam is installed this way), and a couple of utilities installed with brew (btop, nvtop). I also don’t want to manage the OS. Getting the OS updates as an atomic image is very appealing. OStree also allows you to rollback if an update does fail for some reason… Doing it this way makes your OS kind of an appliance that you run applications on top of instead of alongside.Damn, that’s a hell of a high effort response, thank you for the info!
I’ll try another SilverBlue install, probably a bluefin variant you mentioned. It definitely sounds like I need to unlearn a lot of the info I’ve picked up over the years, including avoiding flat packs (or was that snap?). Not sure what toolbox is, but I expect I’ll have to look into that in due time.
The biggest downside to Flatpaks is that they’re kind of containers. That’s obviously also they’re biggest upside. But with that isolation comes some bloat compared to rpms directly installed, some don’t integrate as cleanly with the host OS, etc… The Universal Blue images ship with Flatseal and Warehouse which help manage those Flatpaks. For example, if you want to add an external library to the Steam Flatpak, you can use Flatseal to allow the Steam Flatpak to access that directory. By default Steam sandboxes itself to just its own ~/.var area.
A word on toolbox. It’s really cool and it comes with Fedora Atomic spins. However, it was forked and the fork is called distrobox and is miles better. So much better that it’s my opinion that we at Red Hat should deprecate toolbox and just embrace distrobox. What is it? It’s really just a wrapper for podman. It sets up containers to act kind of, sort of like VMs or LXC system containers, but it mounts your home directory inside the container. You can share apps between the distrobox and the host. The idea is that you can create a distrobox for whatever thing you’re doing, install all of that thing’s dependencies, and work from your home directory, but never actually touch your host installation. Kind of like a devcontainer for your system.
Snap is the one we poo poo. Canonical is always going to Canonical. Just like when they tried to make the Unity desktop (which I actually preferred) and the Mir compositor, the community had already settled on GNOME 3 and Wayland. This is sort of snap vs flatpak. Last I knew snap used a proprietary, hosted by Canonical, backend. That’s a big no from me. I’m not staunchly open source or nothing, but there is just no reason for Canonical to be making proprietary anything.
If you can’t tell, I’m stoked about the immutable future of Linux.
I’ve layered zsh, zsh-autosuggestions, zsh-syntax-highlighting and syncthing. The first three because the version from homebrew behaved weird, syncthing because I’ve got two users on this computer and
systemctl enable syncthing@useris easier than dealing with podman containers right now.
It’s a different family then what you have been playing with, but if you want “just works and not fancy” - Debian.
It won’t have the latest and greatest software (security patches sure but nothing else). You trade that for stability.
Any reason to go vanilla Debian and not a Debian based system like Ubuntu? I’m not looking to do much advanced on my desktop other than maybe some docker/bash/Powershell development, gaming, and basic browsing.
I definitely am attracted to ‘it just works’, but I also want to make sure I’m not handcuffing myself with an os that makes it hard to play with it as well. I know those are at two ends of a spectrum, but worst case I have plenty of VMs to use to play if necessary.
“It just works” is why Linus Torvalds uses Fedora and not Debian. Just saying… Debian does a lot of weird hand holding and many packages come with pre-configured pieces rather than what the developer pushed. They’re usually sensible, but if you don’t know it’s doing that it can be strange. For example, fail2ban on Debian will come with an SSH jail pre-configured. That is what most people use it for, but IMO it’s kind of weird that someone made that decision for you on an app that isn’t pre-installed.
In the defense of Debian vs Ubuntu, Debian won’t force snaps on you.
And to be clear. I’m not going to say Debian is not without it’s flaws. It is the system you choose if all you care about is stability. Case in point, I work with Linux day in and day out for my job, the absolute last thing I want to do is tinker with my laptop when I’m not at work - so I picked Debian. For me, the absolute stability is the most important thing - for others the fact that software can come preconfigured or is just old will be deal breakers.
As for Ubuntu vs Debian - ultimately they are similar. However Ubuntu has made some (IMO) choices I dislike (eg snaps).
If all you care about is stability, check my other comments about the Fedora Atomic family. Hard to be more stable than immutable with built-in rollback capabilities. That’s why I currently run Aurora DX.
That might be a good selling point of Debian, if you never try anything advanced with it. I wanted to get GPU passthrough working on Debian with qemu, and it was such a pain trying to get the packages that Debian didn’t come with. Had to add new apt repositories, started messing up the boot cycle, and I eventually just gave up.
With no Adobe CC on Linux, I’m stuck on W10 for the foreseeable future. Otherwise I’d have already switched.
With no Adobe CC on Linux
How’s this?
Nice, that’s big. Thanks for the link.
It has been my pleasure! Hope it’ll work out for ya!
As you can’t ditch it for alternatives, I suggest:
- KVM, kernel-based VM for better performance. See this vid about setting it up: https://youtu.be/BgZHbCDFODk Licenses (and cr=cks) should work, judging by the Adobe forums, but you’d have an overhead with Windows running, so you’d greatly win by stripping everything off from it, up to disabling system services or even their Explorer DE (like some gamers did with Win Aero in W7 times, killing it while the game was running).
- Wine (Proton) directly or via Bottles\Lutris\Steam increased it’s emulation capabilities and performance in the previous years. It works for highly demanding games, talks OK with my various discrete v-cards, skips the Win10 overhead, shows CC apps not unlike other programs, but it can cause random bugs, apps not communicating right to each other, and activating it may be not as straightforward. Before starting to rely on that, it’s better to test your exact worklfow, tools you use, etc.
You’d be probably drown in a question of what Linux distro to choose, considering there’s stuff like AV Linux or Pop_OS being recomended for media design. But you’d easily hop from one to another as you go, so it’s better to install something as simple as Mint first, and try Adobe workarounds there before moving next.
If you have specific hardware, I’d say that Wacom-like graphic tablets work like they should (tried several pieces, adapted some touchscreen devices, nearly out-of-the-box on modern Linux), but for something else, like controllers that need to talk to your programms in some special way, you’d better google their compatibility or try it yourself. Making a passthru of inputs to VM or taking it’s inputs by Wine wouldn’t usually be a problem, problems start when this piece needs a specific Win\Mac-only driver, and they can, especially if they are old, have a temper of a feral ghoul. I know that there are a lot of linuxoids creating in different kinds of media, so I’m pretty sure there are some answers on the web, at least for the same manufacturer, series or kind of hardware.
Are you able to run windows in a VM for your software?
Download a new OS // Download the operating system you want to install. Search for Linux distributions for beginners to get some suggestions.
I feel like it’s better to actually list/suggest a few beginner distros than to tell people to look it up.
Zorin OS is going to be the best for windows refugees. It is so far ahead in this area that it isn’t even remotely close.
I don’t know why people keep trotting out mint. Mint has far too many issues to be a serious suggestion.
Mint has a common issue of destroying itself on updates. It happened again to a coworker of mine a week ago when he decided to give nix a go (we are both systems engineers/network engineers).
That and mint’s GUI elements are a thin veneer. There is still a lot of legacy garbage. It isn’t made with the premise of “this GUI needs to be rock solid”. It seems to be built upon the old tired bullshit that nix users always trot out e.g. “most users only log into x y z site and make a document once in a while” or some shit. It simply isn’t true.
Most users do a variety of things. Some may be complicated, some may not be. The reason I tell people that Zorin is the distro of choice for refugees is that Zorin understood the assignment (although there are some very specific areas where it offers too much choice to the user, but those are exceedingly minor) and realized that the GUI and UX centered around that GUI is everything. Especially when you are trying to court windows users.
It should be noted that I am quite familiar with *nix, and he is to some degree familiar with it. Another guy we work with switched to popos on a whim a little over a week ago. He said he’s really enjoying it.
Yes please. Unless you want chat gpt recommendations to new users. I know I can’t run windows much longer on my platform but I don’t know which nix will get get my work done. With the least effort.
Linux Mint (XFCE desktop) is the best for beginners coming from Windows, in my opinion. Linux enthusiasts will fawn over KDE because of customization, but they ignore that the vast majority of people don’t want to spend months tweaking pixels, widgets and animations, they just want to use the computer.
As a newer Linux user I think the priority in communication should be use Mint and then have some general information about how Linux isn’t Windows, with some key differences and how to do things. I know that’s more complicated than just saying it, but a “simple” get started guide would ease transition a lot.
My point is that the site should be recommending a few newbie distros, instead of telling the newbie to search it. Specially because the choice of a distribution isn’t that meaningful in the long run, but newbies struggle picking one.
That said I agree Mint would be a good choice. Not sure on Xfce; I’d probably recommend Cinnamon instead, as it looks a bit more modern (even if myself would rather use MATE or Xfce than Cinnamon).
Windows user: I’m thinking about switching to Linux, mind helping me out Linux User?
Linux user: ok, so what you want to do is just figure it out yourself.
Windows user: finds debian and fucks everything up wow Linux is terrible, I’ll stick to using Windows 11.
Speaking on that: a lot of people act as if promoting Linux means simply “to get others to install it”. And they ignore that the newbie will need help the first days, weeks, even months. Then the newbie gets burned out and switches back to Windows.
That probably explains why some people manage to retain even tech illiterate people using Linux, while others struggle to convince even tech literate ones to switch.
Why do you suggest Mint over Ubuntu?
Ubuntu is developed and controlled by a corporation (canonical) and they have some non ideal practices (like pushing snaps heavily instead of the more open flatpaks or native apps). Mint takes what’s good in Ubuntu and cleans it up a lot.
Because fuck snaps
Mint in any of its default offerings feels significantly more familiar to a Windows environment than default Ubuntu, Lubuntu (LXDE desktop) or Xubuntu (XFCE desktop), making the migration “less painful”;
The ISO image is ~1GB smaller \Snaps probably 😆
Yeah, I agree. Especially since there’s SO much information out there that’ll come up if they try to search, and lots of it isn’t good, and tons of it is conflicting with each other. It’s best to make it as easy and simple as possible. Like just suggest Mint or something.
