lol @ all these arch/Ubuntu/mint users. been using debian for years.
😅LoL, because you feel superior?
Not very sympathetic…
I like turtles.
That is more sympathetic.
I will likely go back to mint once Windows 10 is done. 11 is pure trash.
The major hang up I have is gaming. I have an Nvidia card and it’s never behaved well with Linux. I also like GTAO but I will no longer be able to play it. Most of my other titles work fine.
I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.
i heard good things about Bazzite abd Ubuntu/Pop OS with nvidia support
I switched to Linux Mint several months ago. Thanks to Proton, All my Steam games that I bought for Windows run great. (I’m using an nVidia RTX 3060). And any older games like “Deus Ex” or “Giants: Citizen Kabuto” run under Wine, using the default settings.
pop!os reportedly packs in and handles the proprietary nvidia drivers for you, which can be a pain to handle yourself. i haven’t tried it nor do i have nvidia but i see it highly recommended a lot.
Am using Pop!_OS for video editing (DaVinci Resolve Studio) and gaming with nvidia GPU. I don’t have to think much about the operating system or GPU drivers, they work perfectly fine and get out of the way when I need to do some work.
Also have it installed on both kids’ PCs (both with nvidia GPUs) and my wife’s laptop (AMD iGPU). My son has installed a few GNOME extensions to customize; my wife and daughter have left it pretty much stock. It’s about as unobtrusive as an OS can get.
I will always have a special place in my heart for EndeavourOS, but right now, I feel like I have a more solid foundation with Pop!_OS.
have you tried Kdenlive and Olive? i heard those are very advanced and open-source. I will also switch to those from InShot
I got my start with kdenlive and still pull up some of my old project files in it, yeah. It’s really good, has a much better feature set than one would expect.
I got into the Blackmagic ecosystem with an Intensity Pro 4k capture card and was pretty happy to see that they offer native Linux support, even if it is for Rocky 8, so I snagged one of their Resolve Speed Editors, which came with a Resolve Studio license, and I’ve been using that ever since.
If your system supports windows 11 then dual boot for the games you want windows support for.
Then you have a bare metal option for those games and you can run whatever distro you want along side it.
I too am in a conundrum. I like the idea of Linux a lot, but pretty much all I use my laptop for is a) Excel and b) very rarely games, neither of which make sense to use Linux for.
I’ll build a home server at some point and I think that’ll be my start.
Have you tried Libre Office? It’s an open source Microsoft Office alternative that works pretty great. You can try it on Windows.
In my experience people who really use excel are always going to need excel.
Also in my experience excel runs great on Mac Laptops, which are so much better than any other laptop I’ve touched in the last 20 years. If you’ve tried their touchpads you’ll know what I mean. Total game changers for truly mobile computing.
In my experience people who really use excel are always going to need excel
That’s my experience too, unfortunately. LibreOffice is lagging too far behind O365 on features that you can reliably cooperate on spreadsheets across applications. Something like e.g. XLOOKUP is a fairly recent addition in Calc.
Serious question from someone who is in this situation: What the best os for someone who want to switch from window 10 to Linux because of the eol? Is it really mint ?
Such a decisive question. I wouldn’t say there’s necessarily a “best”. Mint is an EXCELLENT choice. So too would be Fedora (Fedora KDE edition I’d recommend for most) or OpenSuSe Tumbleweed.
Just pick what looks decent to you and give it a shot.
Mint is fine, Kubuntu is also great.
Kubuntu uses snaps as default and I’ve had some trouble with that. My dad is using Kubuntu and there are problems with how programs communicate. Mint is probably a better choice.
I’ll admit I’m biased because I think Cinnamon is ugly. Most people seem to like it and I get it. I just wish Mint hadn’t abandoned the KDE edition. Mint is definitely a great choice though.
Mint is the best to start tbh.
And you could stay in mint for years and barely have to use bash, and when you do there is a well stocked forum, so it is sometimes even easier than windows to troubleshoot.
I switched from Win10 to Mint, and am quite happy. You can get a lot of stuff done through GUI, so you can put off learning how to use the terminal a little. If you are worried about using it, I can recommend using ChatGPT. Helped me troubleshoot a lot of issues and learning a few tricks.
mint is good, pop!os is also good, i use and recommend endeavouros as arch-but-easy. tbh just about any popular distro these days is prolly gonna do fine for the average user.
First step: Decide on the so-called desktop environment. A shortlist is provided below. For a new user, this should be decisive when choosing between beginner-friendly distros.
Before going over to the next (and final) step, we need to set the stage for our contenders:
- Versions of Linux Mint. Linux Mint has (rightfully so) become the face of Linux for beginners. Stand out feature would be how crazy popular it is; it’s a joy to look up your problem through a search engine and find solutions for it.
- Images of uBlue. Where Linux Mint tries to smooth the rough edges of the “traditional Linux model” as nicely as possible, uBlue’s images can be referred to as revolutionary by comparison. The model strikes some (re)semblance to what you might know from your phone or chromebook. These images aren’t even close to reaching their full potential, but have already garnered/amassed a wide audience for how they (at least attempt to) solve some of Desktop Linux’ long-standing issues. Note that finding solutions for your problems might not be as straightforward. However, documentation is decent and they’ve been very helpful on Discord.
Final step: Pick the distro corresponding to your preferred desktop environment. The list found below (ordered alphabetically) isn’t trying to be exhaustive on desktop environments.
- Cinnamon; Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. This is their flagship and probably what people mean when referring to Linux Mint.
- GNOME; Bazzite’s GNOME. If you don’t intend to game, then consider Bluefin instead.
- KDE Plasma; Bazzite’s KDE Plasma. If you don’t intend to game, then consider Aurora instead.
- MATE; Linux Mint MATE Edition.
- Xfce; Linux Mint Xfce Edition.
I wouldn’t go uBlue personally. It is very new and I don’t like the focus. Don’t go straight to immutable Linux.
Don’t go straight to immutable Linux.
My first foray into Linux was through what you’d refer to as immutable Linux; shortly after the release of Fedora Kinoite. I’m literally the embodiment of the antithesis to your statement.
It is very new
This is factually true. So I can’t simply deny that. But being more precise is helpful:
- Fedora Atomic, the family of distros that enable uBlue, has been in the works since 2014. This eventually culminated into the release of Fedora Atomic Workstation in 2018, which was the name of Fedora Silverblue before the name change.
- The first commit of uBlue as a project happened over three years ago.
- The 1.0 release of Bazzite happened over a year ago.
- By contrast, Linux Mint has been out since 2006.
and I don’t like the focus.
Could you be more elaborate 😜?
They will get a little more respect from me when they stop trying to target programmers and gamers. Because of course everyone uses Steam and VScode. It just feels very much like it is being run by young edgy programmers. It is the same group that is trying to force crappy “dark mode” everywhere.
What’s the bigger program is the lack of internet knowledge about how to fix problems. With Ubuntu and Debian there are tons of stack overflow pages on all of the various issues. Sure things have changed over time but it still the most documented distro. I can look up “how do I fix X Linux Mint” and I will get an answer. With the Bazzite immutable base almost all of the help online will be useless.
So in short I wouldn’t recommend something like Bazzite. Immutable Linux requires that you understand Linux under the hood. Also I am strongly against distros that need to market themselves as gaming.
Whatever you pick, first test it by running it from a USB drive first.
RIP your inbox lol. Like others have said though whatever you choose test it out booting off a USB first, fwiw I’d vote try FedoraKDE, but more importantly I’ll add this:
Whatever you choose it will be different and it will be an adjustment in some capacity, and that’s ok! And don’t be scared of the terminal, always keep back ups just in case but you really can’t fuck up tooooo bad unless you’re using sudo and then just be real careful. Watch a few youtube videos on something like “linux terminal basics” or “bash basics” and follow along like you’re taking a class, it’ll really help you get familiar with it. It’s a great thing to know how to use, these days if I know how to do it through the terminal I usually will instead of puttering through a gui honestly.
Microsoft added a CoPilot icon to my Windows 10 Taskbar yesterday. It looks to me like they’re not going to take “no” for an answer.
They also added a “it’s time to upgrade to Windows 11” full screen message on my login screen (with the option to decline in tiny text).
That was my thoughts, too. So, now I’m running Mint on my gaming PC and the one hooked up in my living room for streaming. I tried Kubuntu, and liked it, but KDE Wayland was giving me issues. Installing a different desktop environment just introduced more problems, so I went with a different distro with the DE I wanted, which was Mint with Cinnamon. Now, life is good.
Damn. My 10 year old HP all in one is gonna be bricked? Damn shame
Download the Windows 11 ISO and tick an option to mitigate the new requirements in Rufus. That’s all you have to do. Or download the Windows 10 IoT iso from massgrave. Supported until 2030-something.
I think it needs to be retired. I strictly using it for streaming shows and it’s about a 30% chance that I have to do a hard reboot for that to work. It’s had 2 factory resets and a number of internal cleanings. It’s dying bro. It’s time to put it down
Fair enough. Tho if you do discover some functional hardware that’s unsupported by W11, know that you don’t have to turn to Linux at all.
Install Linux if you still want use your old computer
Not particularly lol. Probably gonna retire it and give it a heroes funeral for lasting as long as it did
nah, for old computers, you can’t get anything better than MenuetOS or its fork, KolibriOS. That will run on my flipflops too. recommended system requirements: Pentium MMX (this is literally from 1997), 32 mb ram (yes, you read that right), 1.4 mb (entire operating system size with preinstalled programs, yes it is something else), any vga adapter released after 1995
Fuck it man, I’ll take it, you can still spin that up with Linux and run a bunch of microservices on it. Not a great form factor for a server, but guess what, if these China tariffs take off, you’re gonna be so glad you have a 10 year old machine to have around for extra compute power, since buying new compute will be obscenely costly. (Assuming you’re in the USA of course, if you’re in Europe you’ll be fine)
I gotta figure out how to transfer my PLC software first lol
Weird to use a game that decided to drop its official Linux support for this meme
At least Sober’s working.
Lutris is a thing
They disabled the use of Proton/Wine.
I don’t think that there’s ever been an “official” client for Roblox?
Unless Linux hits 2-digit market share and iPad kids start to use Linux
Not only that but they also detect VMs so if you want to play it you have to dual boot
Official Linux support is silly honestly. It will always be janky.
Windows just works with wine and proton most of the time.
What?
By “ending official Linux support” they meant that they disabled the use of Roblox through Proton/Wine.
What flavor do you recommend?
what are the opinions on Bazzite, Garuda, Trisquel? are these ideal for those coming from windows?
the first two can be, but i don’t recommend trisquel to those coming from windows
is it hard? or why?
it’s not hard, but it only specifically consists of free software. that can be confusing and some hardware won’t work
some hardware
You mean nvidia stuff or could be others? there are open-source alternatives for everything that can be considered general use
including, but not limited to nvidia. network cards might be another issue. yes i know that there are open source alternatives and i most definitely choose foss where i can but people that just came from windows aren’t likely to care.
i saw on a hardware website that only a select few of devices run well with these distros. What about Peppermint? i heard that is relatively privacy-oriented but doesn’t extend this philosophy on drivers, and instead tries to provide a lightweight, bloat-free webapp-based system. How good is it?
peppermint is fine, you can use it
They’re certainly somewhat more exotic choices.
Bazzite is currently seeing a hype wave, because it’s strongly inspired by what the Steam Deck does. But that also means, it’s somewhat built like an OS for a console (or in fact like Android), in that it’s a transactional/atomic distribution.
This means, you can’t easily make changes to the OS itself, only to the applications you install and of course your personal files.
It certainly makes it more difficult to break, but it’s still a relatively new thing in the Linux world and particularly you might still run into some limitations when trying to use it as a full-fledged desktop (depending on what you’re looking to do with your PC).Garuda Linux is based on Arch Linux, which is what we refer to as “bleeding edge” (as opposed to “cutting edge”), because you get the newest version of all the software on your PC just a few days after it got released by the respective developers. Sometimes, those newest versions will have bugs.
You’ll find folks who’ll tell you they’ve been running Arch since they were two years old and never had a problem, but ultimately, why risk it?And yeah, Trisquel is also getting basically a hard no from me. It’s a distribution for purists. For people who want nothing to do with the corporate world, who’d rather not be able to do something than rely on proprietary software.
If you’re coming from Windows, the chances of you even really knowing what that means are basically non-existent, so I doubt it’s what you want…on desktop, i’m coming with windows, but i do have good relations with the linux kernel, as i am an android custom rom user for 2 years now, i’ve been on PerryRice kernel, now on Helios. And there are 114 user apps on my phone, and 32 are closed source, so that means 72% of my android is open-source. And my phone is also rooted and has a custom recovery installed. I use my phone for everything, Windows only for gaming and homework. I already daily-driven Tumbleweed in Virtualbox for a little bit more than one week and it was pretty good, i could handle it mostly, despite many people saying it is hard to use for a beginner. But i’m still very new to linux and if something seriously breaks, i doubt i could fix it by myself, so it would be good if the desktop enviroment didn’t delete itself, the boot won’t corrupt, and no update would brick my system (ik how to solve bricking on android, but desktop is an another story). So out of Bazzite and Garuda, which is more suitable for me?
Oof, so I came to Linux also with a history of Android Custom ROMs. And well, I had quite a bit of frustration, because my phone was so much more capable and customizable than my (Windows) desktop.
In that regard, Linux has been an absolute fucking delight. And it kind of took Android’s place, in that I now prefer tinkering with my desktop and am frustrated with how incapable Android is.If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, I have one recommendation to make:
You want something with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment. It’s extremely customizable, extremely feature-rich. Other desktops, as well as more minimal GUIs (“window managers”), can be fun, too, but for starting out, I would recommend KDE.If your Tumbleweed looked like this, that was KDE:
Well, kind of the default for both Bazzite and Garuda is KDE, so this doesn’t tell you terribly much. 😅
But I’m coming at it in this roundabout way to tell you that I’m on Tumbleweed and well, therefore I’m probably biased, but I don’t really see why you’re looking for something else, if you liked Tumbleweed.openSUSE has the best implementation of KDE (by some fine details, but still). It’s got a really nice snapshotting system (btrfs for the filesystem + Snapper).
Garuda seems to have adopted that from openSUSE, although I don’t know, if it’s quite as fully integrated in Garuda.Those snapshots will save you, if your system should ever break.
Basically, if your filesystem and bootloader are still intact, there’s a pretty easy way to rollback: https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book-reference/cha-snapper.html#sec-snapper-snapshot-boot (should work the same on Garuda)But yeah, I would kind of recommend against Bazzite due to it being a relatively new concept (with the caveat that I haven’t dabbled around with it yet; I simply wouldn’t know, if it’s actually already very mature).
I should also say that I actually lied, I’m not on Tumbleweed, but rather Slowroll, which is a semi-official flavor of openSUSE. It’s essentially Tumbleweed, but you get one big upgrade once per month and only security updates in between. While the snapshots can easily rollback the breakages, eventually I got mildly annoyed at having to do so once or twice per year on Tumbleweed, when a bad update made it through, so I’m trying out Slowroll. Might be an option for you, too.
And finally, if you feel like I’m coddling you a lot less in this comment than in the last: Yep.
Since you’re dicking around with Android Custom ROMs, you’ll be fine, no matter what you choose. I mean, Linux will still be a humbling experience, because it has no qualms showing you how much you don’t yet know about computers, but it also loves to teach you. The most important ‘skill’ is having fun when tinkering with technology, which you’ve got.A lot of the newbie recommendations, and that people tell you Tumbleweed is hard to use, are like that, because we just don’t know who’s asking these questions. Some people want to get away from Windows, but have no interest in learning. And then, yeah, I’ll also sometimes recommend Linux Mint, because its keyboard shortcuts are exactly like Windows, even though it actively got in the way of my desire to tinker, when I initially switched to it…
yes, i had the same desktop, just different stock background. My only problem with kde is that even at 1920x1080 buttons are irrealistically small. And i plan to use a linux distro on 2k display, maybe even 4k. Propably there is a way to make them bigger but idk. And i’m considering Garuda, or maybe Bazzite as a secondary option, because these are preconfigured for gaming out of the box and i really don’t know what to tweak on a vanilla distro to make it game-ready. And Garuda is also very loud about their btrfs implementation with zstd backups (ik a lot about compression algorythms, can even use some of them on paper to manually compress data like a lunatic, and zstd is a very decent algorythm, especially if we measure compression/time ratio). Slowroll actually sounds good because my custom rom is set to major releases every second week (maintainer is Tejas Singh, you propably heard about him, he is a prominent figure in the custom rom genre). And on linux, i should be able to edit custom shortcuts, macros and stuff, right? Also, i tried Tumbleweed in vm for a week and it had a little learning curve but i took it very well, only had one issue when i couldn’t install anything because the same package conflicted with an another from a different repo and stuff, but a simple reboot solved it.
Bazzite is probably fine
Reminder for Windows 10 users who can’t upgrade to Windows 11
/s/can’t/won’t
¿Por Qué No Los Dos?
God I hope there will be a good enough solution for professional audio stuff when Win 10 is done. This and when will the new proper CAD software.
It sucks ass, but I don’t see how one will be able to change to Linux in those spaces on a professional level. All my private stuff is on Linux systems, though.
Try downloading and installing Tiny11.
This sounds good, thank you for the hint. Does this also prevent all ai bullshit and recall and stuff?
Yes and yes. It also bypasses the windows login.
If you have the budget Siemens NX CAD CAM FEA runs on Linux (Redhat and SUSE, also works on OpenSUSE). However the GUI version is NX 12 or prior releases, newer versions are headless…maybe that will change with Linux Desktop gaining percentage steadily
Whatever version of Windows that allows group policy changes will let you turn off all the annoying stuff, that’d probably be your best bet for now.
I’m currently using Ardour on Arch with some packages from the pro-audio group, but I wouldn’t exactly call my setup “professional”
Weird everyone suggests Mint, when it’s way less user friendly then KDE Fedora. I mean, I guess on old hardware Mint is good, but anything newer (like the last 4-5 years) Fedora is pretty much set and forget.
Same with gaming, Bazzite is a WHOLE lot better than Mint.
I’m on Mint 22 with current laptop hardware (Intel/Nvidia) and it’s been completely plug and play, even for gaming.
I absolutely love Mint.
Desktop has both Mint and Bazzite. I use both daily.
Mint can’t natively control my display or sound, and it has had issues with internet and the Nvidia graphics card before.
Bazzite can natively control display and sound, and I haven’t had to use the CLI even once.
New Lenovo Laptop I tried both too. The mousepad and fn shortcuts for brightness and sound didn’t work on Mint. Fedora mousepad works perfectly and fn shortcuts work
Old 8 year HP 4gb ddr4 laptop neither worked well, so went with a lightweight distro that was debian based.
Old 12 year HP 16gb ddr3 laptop; mint gave internet LAN issues and DVD drive issues, keyboard shortcut for brightness issues. Fedora XFCE no issues.
Friend’s 4 year old Asus laptop; Mint gave issues with WiFi, Nvidia graphics card, and controlling screen brightness. Fedora no issues.
Another friend had similar issues with their laptop on Mint but said no issues on Zorin btw, and Zorin also worked better on their mom’s old desktop. Both are debian based interestingly enough, but Zorin is sort of paid so makes some sense I guess?..
This is all anecdotal of course, but at least based on what I’ve seen, Mint has never been as beginner friendly as it seems compared to Fedora in that it usually requires more tinkering. You even see that here with the pro mint comments suggesting some use of a CLI.
Mint is on kernel 6.8 what are you talking about(Alteast mainline Mint not LMDE)
People will keep using Windows 10 even if Microsoft will not fix any vulnerability
Using roblox to talk about linux
It once played perfectly fine under WINE, then Roblox explicitly blocked it for no good reason.
Distro-hopped a lot till I landed on Manjaro with XFCE desktop environment. Been daily driving it for about a month now without any complaints. There is an option to install with NVIDIA drivers as well.
I put Mint on a PC for my dad because it’s first thing easy for him to use and second a 32-bit machine and Mint the best choice I found that runs on that.
