I’m a windows loser looking to make the plunge into Linux. I was thinking of switching my gaming PC to Linux in the near future. Before I make up my mind, I’ll probably try out VMs of distros.

I’ve lurked a few Linux communities here and on lemmy.ml, some I’m gonna regurgitate some things I half remember in the hope of being being corrected and starting discussion about what I should be doing.

  • Ubuntu isn’t good
  • Mint is good despite being based on Ubuntu. Made with former windows users in mind
  • Debian is good because of their packages or package manager or something. Recently sold out, but there are spinoffs that don’t use proprietary software like Duvian.
  • Fedora seemed to get some good word but I can’t remember why.
  • Arch and it’s spinoffs require a shit ton of finagling to get right but can do a lot of cool things
  • There are different desktop environments like GNOME, Cinnamon, and … others? I honestly don’t know what a desktop environment is.
  • Wine (or the fork Proton) can run windows native games on Linux
  • There are snap, flat something or other, and … other ways for installing software.

I’m sure I’m missing a lot and got some things wrong. Any help getting started is appreciated.

Edit: I ended up going with a KDE plasma spin of Fedora 36. Once I figured out how to get the nvidia drivers set up it was smooth sailing.

  • @holdengreen
    2•2 years ago

    I would start with Linux Mint Cinnamon edition and also would have two partitions. One for the home directory, where all your files will be placed and another for the operating system (root etc) eg Mint.

    why would you do that?

    • @triplenadir
      2•2 years ago

      it can make it a little easier to install a different distribution later, or reinstall if something gets messed up. but it’s not as good as having backups, and it can be hard to guess in advance how much space to allocate to each partition. I’m 50:50 on whether it’s a good idea

      • @holdengreen
        1•2 years ago

        you’d just need to rsync to another drive. much better than realizing you’re out of space in one or the other

    • Oros
      1•2 years ago

      In case you want to distro hop for any reason, all you have to do is install the new operating system to the one directory and set as home the second parttiion thus keeping all your files intact.