I’m just so sick of Microsoft and Google. But there’s two things holding me back:
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I wanna play Steam games on my PC
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I am just an amateur hobbyist, not a tech wizard
Is there any hope for me?
Not so much help but hope: I got rid of Windows 11 and switched fully to Linux Mint a few weeks ago. I had no idea what I was doing but I tested things on USB and also on a very old laptop I had laying around before I made it my daily driver.
I’m not particularly a tech person. I own a small creative business and have a toddler, but I figured out what I needed to quickly. I don’t game and didnt use Winsows exclusive software so have no opinions about that.
What I didn’t expect: to actually be genuinely interested in my computer again for the first time since I was a teenager (which was not recent…). I love customizing my desktop. I love discovering new open source software. I’m learning more than I expected and it’s just a totally different relationship with the tech I use every day, in a nice way. And no more BS ads / bloat when I’m just trying to exist on my computer.
this is it
you are going to be fine! linux has better compat than windows now unless you use a ton of proprietary, locked software. your average linux distro can do steam gaming pretty well, and there are distros like bazzite and garuda and popos that do some or all of the configuration for you (based on your hardware and usage).
Linux is way easier than it was even 10 years ago and many games run better on Linux than they do on Windows. There’s gaming distros but I’m not sure what the benefit is other than the built-in NVIDIA drivers. I just game on Fedora. You need to enable Proton stuff in the settings and you’re off.
Bazzite. Set it and forget it. 2mo on my new PC build, has only ever had bazzite. Runs like a dream.
- before you switch, sort out your apps. Look at what you use on windows, see if it runs on Linux. If not, find a replacement that does and test it out.
- Most Linux distros can boot into a desktop from a thumb drive. You can play and test without touching your windows installation.
- in that vein, ventoy is neat. You can make a bootable drive and drop ISOs in a folder to boot from. No messing with etcher or whatever it’s called
- desktop environment matters as much as the distro. Check out gnome, KDE, and cinnamon.
I saw some cinnamon stuff and i still dont get what that means!
Okay, so the Linux ecosystem is more modular than Windows. Windows is synonymous with its Graphical User Interface (GUI) for reasons I’ll get into later.
With Linux, there are several GUIs available to choose from. These tend to fall into two main categories: Tiling Window Managers, and Desktop Environments.
Tiling Window Managers have minimal on-screen UI elements, usually they’re meant to be used with keyboard combos with little usage of the mouse. A major feature is everything that is running is visible on the screen, when you open a new window, another window divides in half to give it room, “tiling” the screen. Some examples of TWMs include i3 and Awesome.
Desktop Environments are going to be more familiar to newcomers from Windows or MacOS. They’re made more for mouse control, several have what you would recognize as a taskbar, start menu and system tray. Windows can be stacked on top of each other like papers on a desktop, exactly like MS Windows does. Some more closely resemble MacOS though none behave exactly the same way. Some examples of DEs include Gnome, KDE, MATE, and Cinnamon.
Cinnamon is a DE made by the Linux Mint development community, and the default/flagship DE for Linux Mint. It is designed to be familiar and easy to use for Windows users. KDE’s Plasma DE is similar in many ways to Mint although it’s based on different tech; KDE is based on qt, Cinnamon is a distant fork of Gnome and based on GTK. Some are designed to be more minimal so they take up less system resources, like xfce and LXDE, others are trying mostly to resemble MacOS, like ElementaryOS’ Pantheon DE. Then there’s Gnome, which I goddamn hate.
For a beginner, the choice of DE is going to present most of the differences you’ll notice when trying out distros. It can be instructive to try, say, Kubuntu and Fedora KDE. Both ship with the KDE Plasma desktop, but the underlying OSes are different. Then try out, say, Fedora Workstation (with the Gnome desktop) and Fedora KDE. That exercise will give you a good understanding of distro vs DE.
Edit to add: It’s kind of like launchers on Android. You can go in the Google Play store and install a different launcher on your phone, you can make a Samsung Galaxy look like a Google Pixel. Linux DEs work the same way, you can install KDE or Cinnamon the same way you’d install a normal app, you can have multiple and switch between them. It’s not a great idea but you can.
This post is like catnip to Lemmy users.
lol it’s been a bit overwhelming on the inbox. I expected to get told off
Can I tell you off from Arch Linux?
There are around three Linux families to choose a derivative Linux OS from,
some are more obscure ones and then some really obscure ones.
Choose one of the Linux family OSes and choose the most popular derivative of that one.
So for example Aurora is a derivative of Fedora, which is a derivative of RHEL (derivative-(in)ception).The reasons to choose derative OSes and not one of the basic main three is that:
- The Linux derative OSes have bells and whistles build on top of the parent OS. This is especially true for the extremely bare bones Arch Linux, that will throw you back into 1985.
- And this is most important… community support! You will at some point have issues and a forum where developers and experienced users can help you out are a godsend. Derivatives tend to have better community support than the bare bone ones. I’ve experienced this with the Arch Linux community. I’m not sure if Debian or RHEL communities would haved fared better, but to me this community felt like having a conversation with a real life Sheldon Cooper. I am really thankful for the excellent expert level help I did get there, but I will not go there back again. And I don’t know if I even can, because the last time I was there, I got banned for a third time.
I’ve had great experiences on the Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Manjaro communities. Other communities from less popular Linux OSes have been too small in my experience to get help on time.
For Debian, the most popular one right now is Linux Mint, a derivative of Ubuntu (derivative-(in)ception). It used to be Ubuntu, but Ubuntu tends to take big moves and risks that don’t always pay off.
Linux Mint I consider to be the safe option for beginners.
Debian is known for stability.For Redhat it’s Fedora. I haven’t used it that much.
Redhat is known for good security.For Arch it’s Endeavour OS and recently Cachy OS.
It used to be Manjaro, but they fumbled a lot on security issues.
Arch is known for having the best documentation,
and the largest amount of software available,
especially made by fellow users,
and if I may add myself, having the best package manager.I still use Manjaro myself, because I don’t feel enough need to switch to a new one,
and I like the community there.
There’s tons of youtube videos / tutorials on how to create a live usb of a distro, such as linux mint. This will allow you to boot into linux and play around without installing anything and get a feel for linux. It’s nowhere as tech wizardry as you think.
And if all your games are on steam and don’t have anti cheat things, they’ll probably just all work with proton (linux compatibility tool in steam).
These folks are all giving great advice but also let us know when you’re ready to really fuck around and have fun with your Linux superpowers 😀
You, in practically no time at all: “Nearly everything is working great! Now I want to make my desktop change it’s background to NASA’s picture of the day while also putting all my PC’s status monitors on there. Oh! And I want my PC to back itself up every hour over the network automatically with the ability to restore files I deleted last week. I’ve got KDE Connect on my phone and it’s awesome!”
Then, later: “I bought a Raspberry Pi and I want to turn it into a home theater streaming system and emulation station.”
…and later: “What docker images do you guys recommend? I want to setup some home automation. What do you guys think of Pi-hole?”
“I’ve got four Raspberry Pis doing various things in my home and I’m thinking about getting Banana Pi board to be my router. OpenWRT or full Linux on it? What do you guys think?”
…and even later: “I taught myself Python…” 🤣
“I want to copy my root, home, and boot partition contents into a bigger drive I formatted with in terminal. Let’s boot from it and see what breaks.”
spoiler
/etc/fstab partition UUIDs needed to be fixed by hand. GRUB config needed to be updated to launch straight into bash and I needed to remount the root directly as R/W because GRUB was trying to protect me from myself.
Unless the Steamdeck flew under your radar you should know that you can absolutly play games on Linux. Most of the exceptions are big online games with crazy anti-cheats (yeah in that case no luck).
As for hope : migrating to another OS (be it Linux, MacOS or whatever) can be disorienting at first, wich tend to repel some people (it’s like learning how to use a pc for the first time), that’s actually the most important thing to keep in mind for everything to go smoothly, you don’t need to be a tech wizzard, just to be patient.
As long as you don’t rush things, don’t expect everything to behave as somekind of windows clone and learn how it works a bit you should be fine.
Before you try anything I’d also suggest you check if all the software you are using are available on Linux and if not what alternative you can use : alternativeto.net can help. To check if the games you play work you can also go to protondb.com. Preparing as much as you can before install is a huge plus, and it’s really not that hard.
As an exemple I’ve helped a curious friend who wanted to try Linux, they’re the most tech illiterate person I’ve ever known…like even worse than some old people. It took them two hard month to be fully acclimated, like as fine as they were doing on windows if not better. Never even asked me for help ever since. (My eyes still bleed when I see how they’re using their pc but they clearly have no issue doing whatever they’re doing) So if they can I’m sure anyone can.
I’m not sure what you mean by flew under my radar but I don’t really even know what steamdeck is. some kind of handheld console? how’s it relevant here?
It’s because it’s quite popular so alot of people know it exists, but yes it’s a handheld console made by steam and it’s using linux, it’s basicly a Linux console.
Lots of good advice here. I’ll add a bit about dual booting.
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the problem with dual booting is when you use the same physical hard drive. Windows doesn’t play nice sometimes on the same drive. Just do yourself a favor and buy a second ssd. Then you can break linux six ways to Sunday and always have a windows backup. (And if you want to be extra safe - you can just unplug your windows drive during Linux install and you can’t f up and pick the wrong drive by accident)
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dual booting is nice just in case something doesn’t work - you can easily switch back to windows.
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dual booting sucks because there’s very few things that don’t work in Linux - it just requires a little elbow grease to figure out. But having a windows partition right there leads to many people giving up way too early with fixing their issues.
My recommendation is always to have more than one drive in your computer. It’s YOUR computer. Regardless of what you pick as your “main” OS, you always have another spot to screw around in. Distro hop, extra storage, set up a hiveos miner, whatever. Its flexibility and screwing around with other things helps you understand what’s YOUR computer vs what is Microsoft’s OS.
I say unplug the windows drive always, even if you don’t fuck up your Linux install may nuke your windows boot partition and it’s massive PITA to get it back
Same thing applies to Windows.
This is not a debate whether one is better or the other, just saying to unplug your windows drive to install Linux, no need to defend linux
I was attempting to warn them so that they unplug the Linux drive when updating windows too.
Nobody here is talking about updating windows, you should at least write the context for your previous message
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I was you 18 months ago. It’s certainly achievable, even with a crazy busy schedule. Highly recommended that you go for it.
Here are the unpopular opinions that attract downvotes:
- adopting Linux is painful. Stuff breaks. Stuff doesnt work. You will be battling uphill, but hopefully you’ll find it worthwhile in the end.
- moving to Linux permanently wouldn’t have been possible for me without AI. Now you can ask AI and it will almost always solve the problem for you. In the old days, you’d just have forum posts saying “just compile the driver and do a 10 step process with terminal that you need to figure out from the wiki…noob”. But now, these previously system breaking problems are now easily solvable without spending the whole weekend on a single issue.
- don’t let go of Windows to start with. Put Linux on a secondary machine. Do not dual boot, you will break your installation and won’t be able to troubleshoot it and will have to do a full wipe (along with the time and data loss that comes with that).
- Don’t get caught up in the distro wars. Pick Linux Mint, or a similar very beginner friendly distro. I prefer KDE desktop so I would recommend something else… But don’t go for anything with even moderate difficulty.
- Check protondB.com for the games you play. Some don’t work on Linux (e.g. Apex Legends).
There might be a reason they are unpopular.
Stuff breaks? What breaks? I don’t have stuff that breaks. Windows has been far more breaky to me over the last decade than Linux has ever been. What have you been doing? This may have been true 20 years ago, but not today.
AI? Look, I helped a friend fix a new install. It wasn’t Linux fault, it was a setting in the bios that needed to be changed. But the AI had them trying all sorts of things that were unrelated, and was never going to help. Use with a grain of salt. You shouldn’t really need to do much if you can get through the install anyways.
I am really curious what “system breaking problems” you have? My latest laptop over the last 2+ years has been so uneventful and boring. Never used a command line on it, but don’t forget when you see people share command line fixes, it is because it is the easiest way to directly share information. Not the only way to do something. My desktop has had a few hiccups over the last 5, but that is what I get for running Arch on it.
I’m glad it worked smoothly for you and it sometimes is a smooth effortless experience for some people; but if you want to “convert” people then you’ve got to be honest about the fact that people commonly face difficulties. I’ve commented about my Linux issues before and I can paste the comment again here to give an example:
One of the first issues I had problems with was figuring out what was wrong with Street Fighter 6 giving ultra low frame rates in multiplayer, but working fine in single player. It needed disabling of split lock protections in the CPU.
A recent update in OpenSUSE made the computer fail to boot half the time and made the image on the right half of the screen garbled. I rolled back to before the update and am using it without updating for a few weeks to see if the GPU driver problem gets ironed out (AMD GPU).
I installed VMware Horizon for my job’s remote work login and it fucked up my Steam big picture mode and controller detection. I didn’t bother trying to figure that out and just uninstalled VMware remote desktop.
I managed to install my printer driver, but manually finding the correct RPM file to install would not be tolerable for normies. Update: I’m using CachyOS now and the Brother website says Arch plainly isn’t supported. When I install the driver from AUR that’s specific to my printer, then it doesnt print and just spews out endless blank pages.
I still can’t get my Dualshock 3 controller to pair via Bluetooth despite instructions on the OpenSUSE wiki. I’ve stopped trying to troubleshoot that and use my 8BitDo controller instead.
I still can’t find a horizontal page scrolling PDF app.
Figuring out how to edit fstab to automount my secondary drives is not a process normies would be able to execute. I still can’t figure out how to use this to auto-mount my Synology NAS.
Plasma added monitor brightness controls to software and these seem to have disappeared for me now, and I can’t figure out why. It reappears intermittently, but then disappears when it feels like.
My KDE Plasma task bar widgets for monitoring CPU/GPU temp worked till I reinstalled OpenSUSE, and I can’t figure out why they’ve decided to not work on this fresh install. System monitor can see the temperature sensors just fine still. Update: this seems to have fixed itself (maybe through am update?).
Flatpak Steam app wouldn’t pick up controllers for some reason. Minor issue, but unnecessary jankiness.
My laptop fingerprint reader plainly isn’t supported.
Trying to set up dual boot kept destroying (I.e. making unbeatable) either the Linux install or the Windows install. I have up eventually as I couldn’t figure out how to fix GRUB from the command line.
I’ve been trying to find a solution for keeping a downloaded synchronised copy of my online storage (Mailbox.org). Can’t figure out rsync. I get an error with Celeste and it doesn’t sync after the initial file install. Having a 2 way sync for online storage could be considered a pretty basic requirement these days and something Mailbox can easily suggest an app for in Windows.
People do not tolerate this amount of jankiness. And this doesn’t include the discomfort with relearning minor design differences between OS’s when switching. Linux is a bit of a battle with relearning and troubleshooting things that would never be problematic on Windows. I know we all love Linux, but allow people to be honest rather than being dismissive. I had over 2 decades of experience with Windows and it had its quirks and problems, but my preexisting familiarity with it made it much easier to use and troubleshoot.
Sure I know I’m a noob and not doing this right. But that’s the point…can someone with limited knowleddge still work this OS?
I agree that computers can have issues. But none of these are linux only. Windows does all this stupid shit too. My printer wont work with windows, only linux (how the hell this can be true is beyond me). Bluetooth drops in windows, works fine in linux. The latest nvidia update on windows broke all games making it black screen until I used some regedit fixes. A windows update broke my firmware on a video card for a while, almost got RMA’d. I could go on, talk about Jankiness. I don’t use windows as my main computer due to it being so all over the place. I say this as a MSDN dev and windows server and azure dev and support person. I remote entirely from Linux, I need to have an OS that works.
My point is windows does this shit too.
But: That is your issues are a long list that seems to have a repeating theme: OpenSuse.
You don’t need to edit FSTAB to add a drive, there is a gui for that, for whatever that’s worth.
I have not had any of these issues on the 5 or so linux computers I use daily. I have had a few upgrades in Arch cause me to update grub or roll back, but that is about it.
Over the last two years I have found Fedora KDE has been amazingly easy to use and update.
I still can’t find a horizontal page scrolling PDF app.
That one has me curious: what is that? (I mean by definition - scroll - that can’t be a thing, lol) But I am sure it is, got examples?
I’m glad it works well for you.
OpenSUSE is what helped me get past even more basic problems with getting my PC up and running, that’s why I stuck with it because I couldn’t even get this far on other distros. I’m on CachyOS now and can manage better now that I’ve learnt to troubleshoot some of the main issues.
Horizontal page scrolling. I want to be able to read massive documents by scrolling through side-by-side pages rather than scrolling up/down.
Okular can be set to do that, but it doesnt have a scroll bar, which you might not like. Firefox can do that as well, but I concede that browser PDF viewers are not ideal.
If your library is on steam, then there’s nothing to worry about! Works natively on Linux. If your library is on other platforms, I’d honestly think twice about switching full time. Dual booting might be a better option. My library is split amongst multiple platforms and I decided that it wasn’t working well enough for me. Steam games will work great though!
Many distros are easy enough to install and navigate as a newbie. My go to for years now has been Linux Mint! It’s based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian.
oh that’s cool. nope, whole library is on windows on one PC right now.
I was thinking about trying out dual booting to get a feel for it. my understanding was that many programs wont work with linux or require complicated fixes to get them running. so id hate to be left downstream without a paddle, so to speak
Depends which programs. Also, it’s very possible that there are open source alternatives
But if you are dead set on using exactly the same program, https://appdb.winehq.org/ is a database of if and how to make them run on Linux. Wine’s core focus is games, but many programs are covered there too
They mean other platforms like GOG or Epic, not stuff like consoles.
Steam games mostly work, with some exceptions. You can check out ProtonDB to see more precisely what games work, which ones straight up don’t, and which ones need a fix. ProtonDB will usually also tell you what that fix is, which is handy.
But most of the time, you can just hit play and not worry about it.
A note on dualbooting. Linux uses different filesystems from windows. It can access windows NTFS partitions, but it’s not a smooth experience.
A common pitfall is trying use your game library while it is still on a windows filesystem, from linux. Since you can see the folders, and even add them in steam, it’ll seem like it should work. But you’ll run into issues actually running the games. It’s technically possible, but not worth the hassle.
Generally you really want to either format your storage and redownload your games, or if you have the space, copy them over to a fully supported file system.
thank you for that tip. I currently run all my games and docs from external HDs. (my pc itself only has a small amount of SSD storage used only for booting etc, and i dont know how to install a new hard drive yet…) I would have definitely tried to just plug in my HD and tried to run it through steam lol
If you want real gaming performance then arch all the way with archinstall. Trust, it’s insanely good and you can get double of what you get on windows in terms of performance. Boot times are also insane. I have used so many distros and I can tell you that arch is king for performance.
He said he’s not a tech wizard. Arch, even with archinstall, asks you to be at least an apprentice tech wizard.
I agree. Arch has been my current favorite distribution for several years now, but it’s almost impossible to maintain without having to drop into the shell occasionally. I have EndeavourOS installed on my wife’s laptop and she’s been happily using it for nearly a year; bauh helps with software installs, but I still generally drop into a shell for the full
-Syuupgrades, and you have to use the shell at least once just to install bauh as it’s not a core package.You might be able to avoid the shell to use bauh if you use the AppImage; I haven’t tried that. bauh can apparently do system upgrades, but I haven’t tried that yet and I need to see how it handles news; Arch is fairly cavalier about pushing out breaking changes that require extra user steps which need to be discovered by reading the news posts.
I agree that Arch isn’t the best “first linux” distribution.
One thing I’ll say is that for a lot of distros these days you shouldn’t really need to use the terminal much if ever. That being said don’t be scared of the terminal. It’s just another way to tell the computer what to do. It takes some learning but if you want to learn things with the terminal you might eventually find it easier/faster than using the mouse for some things. Go through some tutorials and you’ll probably find out that the terminal is not that actually all that scary.
Most distros allow you to try them out before you install them. You can run them from a USB stick to let you try a few out before you settle on one. You won’t be able to install any programs this way but you’ll at least be able to get an idea of the interface and see if there are any you like more than others. Even still you can dual boot your PC with Windows + Linux and switch back and forth whenever you need. It’s not an all or nothing ordeal. I still have windows 10 on my machine but I rarely use it now.
Gaming on Linux is better than it’s ever been thanks to Steam coming with proton out of the box. protondb.com is your friend for figuring out what games you can run. That being said there are occasionally some rough edges that I have run into personally. I can run most games I want just fine but occasionally I have some issues. I’m just telling you this so you know it’s not like a flawless experience. Then again I’ve also spent plenty of time trying to get games running on my windows PC in the past too so…
My recommendation for a first Linux OS is Ubuntu because in general it’s the most popular and has the most support.
Best of luck!
Adding on to this.
If you don’t know what a command does you can read the manual running the “man” command. Run “man” followed by the command you want to read about. It also works for some system files too!
Also if you fix something like a driver issue for a game that took a lot of research. WRITE IT DOWN. It WILL come in handy in the future.
I have 15 years of experience and do free infinite troubleshooting on matrix, feel free to add me. I recommend you go with aurora, because it is immutable, kde based, and well documented.
immutable means the base system is read only and updates are applied ontop of it, meaning you can easily roll back an update that went bad, and the apps are separate from the core operating system and thus can never break them (unless you try really hard).
kde is a desktop environment, it is most similar to windows and the rate of development dwarfs almost everything else, please whatever you do for your first system use kde.
aurora is a slightly modified fedora and fedora is one of the most commonly used options, the reason not to use base fedora is that aurora includes some QoL features, for example because of issues with patents twitch doesn’t work on fedora but does on aurora.
I’m started on Mint and like it so much I never distro-hopped. Every not and then I think about trying an immutable. But then I remember how much learning I had switching from Windows to Mint and I get scared of losing so much time to learn about Aurora. What would your say to me?
Not who you asked, jumping in until they reply: Windows and most GNU/Linux distros are much further apart than most GNU/Linux distros are to each other. Unless you’re doing a lot of manual meddling or using hacky tools, the biggest change between Mint (Ubuntu/Debian-based) and a Fedora-based distro, in my experience, was that
aptis replaced bydnf, so if you install apps from the command line instead of a prettier software manager (I did lots of programming so this was normal for me) then the names of programs and libraries were a bit different. I’d also make a list of things you’ve installed (VPN software, chat apps, etc.) and look them up in the Fedora packages site or their own website and make sure they’re all available. I would assume they would be, Fedora is popular enough.The desktop environment (Cinnamon vs. KDE) will be an initial change, but they’re both familiar enough with a program menu, task bar, like how Mint lets you carry over some of that same basic surface-level intuition that Windows taught.
