For news, discussions and memes!
This community follows the Lemmy.zip Instance rules, with the inclusion of the following rule:
You can see Lemmy.zip's rules by going to our Code of Conduct.
What to Expect in Our Code of Conduct:
If you enjoy reading legal stuff, you can check it all out at legal.lemmy.zip.
Switched to Mint recently. So far it's been smoother than I expected, but still had some crazy rough patches. Luckily, helping me through this junk seems to be one of the things AI excels at. I'm set up mostly how I want to be and it's been mostly working well enough so far. Mostly.
Mint's popularity is unfortunate because it (the last time I checked) defaults to X11, which gives you a desktop built on technology from 1984.
Might want to have some people a hit more coherent on which version of Linux so they don't get frustrated. Some people are jumping to distros that I've never heard of and getting annoyed it's not windows. Like yea no kidding Justin Bieber OS isn't getting updates. And your 3k series Nvidia isn't working. Switch to Hanna Montana DE like the rest of us.
Switched to CachyOS a couple months ago and haven't looked back. Everything works right out the box including NVIDIA cards. Recommended it to a coworker to check out and he switched from Windows a month ago.
Been on linux for almost half a year now. Don't miss a single bit of windows, thanks to steam proton. Also thanks to microsoft for pushing me over.
Same here. I do not miss all the shit windows did. Things like:
ironically half these things are what people think is the linux ux. Seriously, windows is just terrible, clunky, buggy and full of things you need to be an advanced user to fix.
Mints file explorer when moving large files does leave some meat on the bone for me.
what distro do you use? im looking into moving from windows, but currently use apple devices to sync my music to my phone so im on hold for now
Been on CachyOS for a couple months now. If you want to go Arch, I highly recommend it. No issues with NVIDIA drivers or any of my other hardware. The only thing I need Windows for anymore is Solidworks.
I'm a very recent convert. I downloaded mint a couple months ago after seeing that my entire steam library was rated as highly compatible on protondb. At first I planned to dual boot but I didn't have any reason at all to use windows and finally just took the plunge and made Mint my daily, and sole, driver
I also went cold turkey to fedora and once I solved my two main problems: disabling secureboot and formatting my steam library to be a linux filesystem, I have a better ux overall. Now I'm looking to move to endeavourOS since fedora is too fast with its updates which breaks nvidia drivers sometimes. (Which just means I restart while the pc is booting and select an earlier version of the OS)
As much as people complain about electron (some valid, some not) Linux has benefited quite a bit to the cross platform availability of local applications.
This weekend I want to make a point to finally begin the transition to Linux...
You will be pleasantly surprised almost daily, I hope! There will be a minor learning curve since you are used to windows philosophy and linux is different.
Is it necessary though? Microsoft have already been campaigning pretty hard to get people to switch to Linux. Telling people their perfectly good PCs won't work anymore because the operating system is expiring, and they can't even "upgrade" to Windows 11 is a pretty powerful message.
Jeez. Pathetic losers.
On Linux for 15 years never thought of going back.
And u know what? It was harder back in the days nowadays all software is in the browser anyways so what are u even missing.
I tried ubuntu 15 years ago since it was the easiest. It was hell. Now linux is a more functional OS than windows is that asks the user to do even less in order to have everything working.
Ubuntu 12.04 was nice for desktop users. It just didn't do anything good for gaming at the time.
Couldn't even get internet to work... It was nightmare even despite me having grown up with an ATI card.
Alright, I need to move my main desktop to linux. Help me decide which distribution. Note that I already run a desktop-less server on Debian, a raspi on their flavor of deb and have a laptop I rarely use on fedora (installed it to test the waters, but Mint would probably suit its use case more).
My main desktop PC is on windows and I wanna switch but im not sure which distro to switch to. The thing needs to be gaming ready for 2024 hardware. Debian is too slow to update for such a use case, I dont jive with Ubuntu philosophy, Arch is... im just not that kind of guy... so Im leaning on Fedora but I kinda dont like that it has 100 updates every time I boot it up. Is there any in between? Stable and quick with updates, but not when updates can crash the thing?
Edit: thanks for the recommendations, I'll probably check em all out!
I have fedora. It is fast with updates and it just works. You aren't pestered constantly with popups to install the updates and then your pc will randomly force restart to do the updates, you are in control. You just get a small popup that there are updates and you can decide what to install and when.
The only Issue I have is sometimes the updates break nvidia drivers. Thankfully linux keeps spare images of the working OS ready. What it means in practise when your games run like ass. I hard reset pc using power button while its booting and select another version and use that for a few days.
EndeavourOS should be fedora without those problems and iirc the nvidia driver distribution system is in the appstore by default (saves you from running like 3 commands).
Bear in mind if you do not disable secureboot, for every big kernel expansion you descide to add, you need to manually sign keys. This involves running a console command and restarting. I just disabled secureboot.
I know you said you're not an Arch kinda guy....but I highly recommend Garuda.
Takes away most of the rough parts of running Arch, and comes in more flavours than you can shake a stick at. The forums are highly active, and Devs/admins/mods are very quick to respond to question/issue posts.
Edit: I've only had one single update related fuckery in the 3ish years I've been running it, and it was through personal error.
Peppermint is worth checking out. I don't game but Debian and some extra on top. Lightweight
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...
This is a very valid and smart concern to have. But the scary commands all start with "sudo", which gives everything you type in root access. Other than that linux is very secure and idiot proof as long as you read what the commands do. For software linux is way more secure as gone will be the days of rummaging through dodgy sites for installers. Instead you just open up software center and find the app you want and it will be installed straight from the official upload. The repos software centers have are customizable so you can add and remove them. Instead of checking if the installer is secure, you check if the repo is secure on the rare case you add a new repo.
I mean a popular app distribution is flatpack that ships apps like steam and blender and whatever in a sandbox with access only to resources they absolutely need access too. To the point where you need to allow the apps to get access to another drive even. Just to make sure nobody will inject ransomware through the blender default cube I guess.
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
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.
I went fedora which is not a beginner system and even fedora is easier than windows.
Common suggestions are: mint, pop os, endeavourOS. But it doesn't matter, they are all functional OS that let you do everything.
I think it doesn't actually matter what distro you use.
It's like whether you're wearing red socks or blue socks. As long as you're wearing socks, so you don't get cold.
Myself mentioned a bit below that the choice of a distribution isn’t that meaningful in the long run. But I still think that some distros should be recommended - otherwise the newbie simply says "Hannah Montana Linux, Justin Bieber Linux, Ubuntu Satanic Edition... bleeergh I can't choose, I give up".
damn Ubuntu Satanic Edition sounds cool.
A shame the project was discontinued, the visuals were fucking cool. (Yup, it was a real distro.)