Hello, so in the past I was considering Linux but that post was on a lemm.ee account, but I also had some other questions (and mostly forgot what was said on that thread). First off I remember a lot of recommendations for Bazzite and Mint as a good distro, however I’m against installing it myself as my dumb ass WILL find a way to mess things and end up with a several thousand dollar paper weight. There was recommendations to system76 as Linux comes preinstalled. Things i use, Steam for gaming, libre office for college work, proton drive for game and college backups, discord for ofc voice and text chat between friends
But first question: based on that is Linux even something for me? I don’t really have a problem with microsoft, mostly that Linux is new (good in that its something different but also bad that i’ll have to learn new things and potentially fix aforementioned things). But is it something that’ll be worth potential headaches as I want a system that “Just works” ™ and everythings good to go out of the box. And yes I’m aware posting in a Linux community will be biased but I’m having doubt about if it will be worth it to make the switch.
Second do things “just work” on linux, just install and go. The issue I dont want to run into is having to bug fix games or programs after a long day and wanting to unwind or an essay due where time is a factor.
I feel like i have more I just forgot :| so ill edit the post if anything comes up
Edit 1: also any hardware recommendations, I’m planning to go top of the line stuff so this PC can last me a while
My experience is that all the things software you listed works on Linux Mint. Both the operating system and the programs were easy to install. With the exception of Proton Drive. There is no Linux version afaik and the third party software I tried did not fully sync everything. I’m still looking for a solution.
I just want to quickly say: You cannot permanently brick your PC with Linux. You may break your install, but you can just reinstall. Doing actual hardware damage is near impossible.
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Possibly not. If your happy with W11, and the direction Microsoft is going, you can definitely just keep using it.
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It depends. Packages from your distro, likely will work with no issues, but there is always the possibility that something gets shipped broken (which also exists for windows). Steam games, is generally good, and getting better all the time, but there are some games that definitely won’t work out of the box (or at all). Check your games: https://www.protondb.com/
To reiterate, it is impossible to do hardware damage, so you can always return back to windows if you decide its not for you. Maybe you’ll love Linux, maybe not, but its very safe to try.
It’s mighty unlikely to brick a PC with Linux, but there has been at least this case: https://lwn.net/Articles/674940/
I’m not unhappy with microsoft, i just don’t really care, as long as all my games and programs work. As another comment said I might install linux on my current gaming laptop once I get a new desktop and see how that goes
As for the games I have a steam deck and all my games work out of the box, is that indicative of how thing would work out on linux?
Anything that works on the steam deck should also work exactly the same on your laptop, so yes, very good indication.
Installing on your old laptop is a good idea.
Thanks! I think I’ll get a windows PC then install Linux on this current laptop then use it as a test computer, unless i get some info from this thread that decisively swings my opinion one way or the other, but thanks for the info
Do that. Install Bazzite, they go out of their way to make everything just work so you don’t have to. And since you’re nervous about messing something up, Bazzite has the extra benefit of being an immutable distro, which means you can’t actually change any of the important files that keep your computer running (not easily). So you can’t mess up your OS, updates happen in the background and only apply when you restart, and rolling back to the previous update is easy should you need to.
One thing to decode though is your desktop environment of KDE or GNOME. KDE is a bit more like windows in layout, GNOME is more like a Mac layout. Purely personal preference.
Bonus, if you end up loving Bazzite, you can install it on your steamdeck, which is what I did.
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If you fear breaking something and you have some spare money, why not buy some used computer to test around? If prices are similar over where you live, an used computer, specially older ones but still from this century, shouldn’t be too expensive. And that way, you won’t lose as much if you somehow does a major mess up (which from my experience, is on itself pretty rare to happen).
I recently switched from Win11 to Debian KDE. Most things just worked. If you have no tolerance for troubleshooting and fixing occasional problems, and no real reason to switch, it makes sense for you to stay put.
If you find yourself with a cheap or spare machine doing nothing else, slap Linux on that and horse around with it to see if you want to explore running it as your daily.
I have my current gaming laptop, maybe I’ll install linux on it once I get a new PC and see how that goes
That would be the easiest path in my opinion. It’s great Linux exists and I use it extensively, but it’s still not as user friendly as Windows and Mac.
I’d also say that nowadays, Linux will work out of the box, but it’s not uncommon for some little things to not work correctly (accessories like docks, cameras, etc. may not work out of the box or at all).
Agreed. Most stuff “just works”, but if you want it to work a certain way you’ll have to do some configuring. Or if you have hardware that’s not the best supported.
Honestly, installing Linux these days is significantly easier than installing windows. For every distro I’ve tried anyway (haven’t tried any of the “hard” distros).
Something immutable like BazziteOS will make it very hard for you to break the operating system. I would recommend that one as it kinda “just works”. As others have mentioned, keep a backup in case things do fail.
That’s only really true in the sense that you will “get a bootable OS”. I had Bazzite just stop being able to update itself 3 times in a year, two times I had to entirely rebase to a newer image to get it working again, last time I just left it, pulled the drive out, and installed a different distro. I still have it, it still boots to exactly what it was before, and it still won’t update - but in an external enclosure it makes for a good “emergency” boot option (better than a live USB stick anyway).
Fascinating, what were you up to manage that? As far as I’m aware, that should basically only be possible with
rpm-ostreecommands, which are pretty strongly recommended against in the documentation, and I’ve yet to find something I really need any for.Nothing that I know of, lol. I use the laptop infrequently, usually at a DnD game every other weekend. I don’t know if that is part of the problem, like it really wants to run updates more often than once every few weeks? I would let it run updates via whatever it is that pops up in the system tray asking to run updates. Eventually, anytime it tried to update it would give me an error message, undo whatever had been done so far, and then close itself. I think they have a new software center now, Bazaar or something? This was before that was released so the problems might not repeat if I tried it again.
And honestly, rebasing to a new image was incredibly easy to do, it just takes a bit of time, but I didn’t like randomly “having to” do it.
Interesting stuff. Yeah, can confirm I’ve not had any experiences like that in my 6-ish months with it, despite screwing around with nearly everything under the sun: emulators, modding games, hosting services, third party launchers, etc, but I guess it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that it hasn’t always been that rock solid.
My only real issue so far has been that Steam isn’t quite wayland-ready, and I’m insistent on tinkering with HDR gaming and therefore run into issues with Steam Input or Steam Overlay.
I did jump in when Bazzite first began to gain traction early on, so I feel like it’s reasonable to expect some kinks to work out. And like I mentioned, it is very difficult to completely brick a Bazzite install as you can always boot into the last working configuration.
Interesting, what are you using now?
I was already running Garuda on my desktop for about a year prior to the Bazzite problems on my laptop, so I just switched the laptop to Garuda as well.
@Crozekiel I like Garuda been using it for awhile.
I love it. It’s been my only OS on my desktop almost 3 years now (and now my laptop for almost 1 year). I know a lot of people get turned off by the appearance, but it is a truly great distro imo… I don’t love the theme either, but I also don’t love default KDE theme, so a fresh install is going to always be a few minutes of tweaking the ui anyway so where it starts doesn’t bother me at all.
I’ll try this out. Thanks guys
So, first of all, as others said, bricking is a non-issue, cellphones are stupid, PCs are not, it’s virtually impossible to damage your hardware without going out of your way to do esoteric stuff.
Second, neither Windows nor Linux “Just Work”, there’s a million factors that may cause issues, it’s just that you’re more used to Windows’ issues.
If gaming is a priority to you, Bazzite has been quite plug and play for me, and the packages you listed can easily be installed as flatpaks. Of course games run through a compatibility layer, and something may not work. Nowadays the most tweaking people do is install multiple versions of proton and set a game to use one or another. If that doesn’t work, things get more complex, but as an inexperienced user, your best bet would be to play a different game.
Is this a laptop or desktop? With desktops my suggestion is always to buy a new drive, disconnect the old one and install Linux on the new one. This way you don’t risk nuking your data, and you can later connect both and use your UEFI as a bootloader to choose which OS to boot.
Everyone else has pretty good information. To answer the edit, the only Linux specific piece of hardware you’d want is an AMD gpu. To be clear, Nvidia isn’t bad and would work just fine if you want one, but it’s drivers can potentially be annoying to install and get running (I’ve heard it’s better nowadays, but I don’t have one so idk), whereas AMD drivers are part of the kernel (i.e. you don’t have to do anything, they’re just there, and will work)
We use Nvidia at work, and I have one at home. For the most part, it does just work.
If you do want to install Linux, #1 thing you must do is BACKUP YOUR DATA. On the cloud, in a USB drive, an external SSD, etc. backup your data!
Linux will definitely be a breath of fresh air. I recently switched and I enjoy not being begged to use a Microsoft account, Office, Bing, CoPilot, and especially OneDrive. Linux is also super customisable, you can easily get icon packs and themes without faffing about with sketchy programs. Also, depending on the hardware, you might also get some performance improvements.
99% of things, for me, work on Linux. If your games run with the Steam Deck they should run fine with most distributions. The 1% of the time when something does not work includes OBS being stuttery due to driver issues (I had to go hunting for that, but it works fine now), but other than that Linux has been pretty smooth sailing.
The best way to find out what works for you is to dual boot. That way you can either use WIndows for things that won’t work or are trouble to fix, but you can start getting used to Linux. Plus you can try out different flavors and see what feels like you. You don’t have to decide to go Linux and throw out what you know. Ideally you can do one drive for Windows, one for Linux, but you can also share the single drive with two partitions as long as there is space.
In theory, that is true, dual boot is good for trying stuff out. In practice, for a beginner who doesnt want to tinker, setting up dual boot is a nightmare.
I’ve dual booted since fedora 4, and it hasnt gotten any easier to get it setup. The best system for beginners was ubuntus weird “install as an app, then boot into it” thing, but that no longer exists.
Wubi was awesome!
Anyway, what’s hard about seeing up dual booting? Doesn’t the installer simply do it for you?
I think it depends on how your Windows setup sees it. I’ve never had a huge issue in the various Linux versions over the years, but I have had to tweak things now and then, especially after a Windows update which gets really upset at not being the only OS. My Windows/Ubuntu now works fine, was simple to install (it’s on a separate drive which helps), and the Windows issues are minor things I don’t worry about because if I use it now it’s only briefly and I’m back to Linux. Still don’t know enough to convert Windows to a VM, and I’m not sure that would be better than just keeping it this way.
Simply download the official Windows ISO, open VirtualBox, mount the ISO, install Windows inside VM.
If you have a product key, put it there, otherwise simply run it unlicensed.
Afterwards install the VirtualBox host additions inside the VM.
Note that VirtualBox isn’t open source, so if that’s a concern for you, you’d need to use a different software. IIRC virt-manager is kinda easy to use, though not as user friendly as VirtualBox.
Thanks. I’ve browsed the instructions on how people typically do it, but I was hoping that there might be a way to basically transfer the WIndows copy and all its stuff into a virtual version. That seems to be not that simple. Perhaps the procedure is to establish a new WIndows in VM and then move/install what you have on the old. Which is why I’ve avoided it, that’s a lot of work.
