Thinking on switching to linux
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Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.
I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?
Antivirus is completely unnecessary and terrible on windows and linux... and on linux it's uniquely useless. Everything is installed from a centralized repo, antiviruses won't be of any help at all. antiviruses came about because windows let executables just be run easily and simply and used them as the default way of installing software, this was beyond idiotic and the reason that OS became infested with malware. Linux never made that mistake from the start, and so antivirus is unnecessary.
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Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.
I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, color management, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
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I don't play VRChat myself, but I have to disagree. I'm in several Linux VR groups, and the general sentiment is that it's not as easy to set up, but works well for the more popular games, including VRChat. This is similar to my experience. There's good resources (like LVRA) to help people set things up, or when they're running into issues. I'm also not saying VR on Linux is flawless, far from it, but to describe it as just "scuffed" without context doesn't explain the whole state of it.
Dang. I tried for a bit to get it working, but I couldn't get it over 20 fps
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nearly, it's too bad they're hung up on wine 8 default. have to manually switch to proton since 8-26 is too old
Using either ProtonUp-qt or ProtonPlus you can install newer/alternative Proton versions, including one optimized for Star Citizen
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Using either ProtonUp-qt or ProtonPlus you can install newer/alternative Proton versions, including one optimized for Star Citizen
but alas that isn't automatic. if things don't work out of the box it's a point against Linux every time
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AMD Drivers: if your GPU is new enough (which it probably is since you're playing Star citizen) it should be just magic here since they come together with the kernel.
Chrome: it's available for Linux, no need to switch. Although Firefox is very nice too.
Gmail: not sure what you mean, Gmail is a website, those are available on any platform. If you meant a desktop email client (which honestly I have never in my life used) there's Thunderbird.
Office 360: Are you talking about Microsoft 365? Is that not a website too? In any case Libre office is a nice alternative to the classical Office desktop app too in case you want that.
I-Tunes: A quick search online reveals people use wine to run the Windows version of iTunes, although I would probably consider migrating. Spotify has a native client and there are some places where you can buy music and have it locally for playback.
JBL: not sure what this is other than a brand for speakers.
Anti-virus: You almost assuredly don't need an anti-virus on Linux, as long as you install software through the proper channels (i.e. using the package manager) chances of virus are so small it's not something to worry about. Most Linux anti-virus serve to check windows binaries in the system to avoid someone using the Linux machine to send virus to Windows users.
PyCharm: it's available for Linux
Remote desktop to iOS: Not sure this is possible even on Windows, I use remmina for remote desktop, it supports several ways of connecting to the other device so maybe see if it works for you.
Star citizen: Never played it but it seems to be playable with Wine.
Steam: While steam is available not all games are compatible, check out https://www.protondb.com/ to see the status of any specific Steam game.
VPN: should be native on Linux, there's a protocol caller OpenVPN which most VPN providers will give you a Config file for that you can use directly on the network applet on Linux.
PS: Next time share the list in text, it makes it easier to reply
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Remote desktop to iOS: Not sure this is possible even on Windows, I use remmina for remote desktop, it supports several ways of connecting to the other device so maybe see if it works for you.
What? This is absolutely possible, and it seems like OP is already doing so from Windows. Remmina is also, as far as I'm aware, a client app, not a server. I would personally recommend Sunshine, with Moonlight as the iOS client, but that's more geared towards gaming. xrdp would be my recommendation if OP is using the built in Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol currently, as that will continue to work with whichever iOS client they are already using. Otherwise, if they're using VNC currently, I would go with TightVNC as there are dozens, if not more, iOS clients.
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- AMD Drivers: Good news! They work even better on Linux. Bad news, you're probably referring to the AMD "control panel" type application instead of the drivers themselves, which doesn't have a direct equivalent. The drivers should come pre-installed, though depening on distro you may need to select/install "radv" or "vulkan-radeon" manually. Most of the control panel functionality can be found in other applications, like OBS for recording or CoreCtrl for clock speeds.
- Chrome: Although Firefox is pre-installed in most cases, you have full freedom of choice here. Most people find that Firefox works basically the same after using it for a bit, but if it doesn't fit you, there's other options. Google Chrome is most likely available in your distros app store, but there's also less "spying" options like ungoogled-chromium.
- Gmail: You can access this on the website, or through a mail client like thunderbird. You can switch if you want to, you're not limited by any means here.
- Office 360: Though LibreOffice is a great alternative, some find themselves forced to use MS office for compatibility reasons. This is still possible, buy only in a webbrowser.
- ITunes: This is a hard one to find alternatives for, depending on what you use it for. For managing iPhones from a PC, you essentially need Windows or macOS. For playing music, there's plenty of options.
- JBL: I'm unsure as I don't use any of their products, but assuming you mean audio related "control panels", there's many options available. Though they may need a bit of tweaking and searching around to get things to sound the way you want.
- Musescore: I also don't use this, but it's available on Flathub, meaning you can (and probably should) use your distros "App Store" to install this.
- Norton AV: Not many AVs targeting Linux exist, and they're not the greatest quality. Though it's doable to go without one, as long as you don't download and run random files off the internet. Stick to the app store, and you should be totally fine.
- PyCharm: This is available on Linux, also in the "app store". There's other IDEs available too, like vscode.
- Remote Desktop to iOS: I haven't owned an iOS device since 2019, so I don't know which protocol they use. It's possible this isn't supported at all.
- Star Citizen: It looks like this is playable through Proton. You can use Steam (add non-steam game), Lutris, or Bottles to launch non-steam Windows apps/games.
- Steam: Works great
- VPN: As you didn't put a previous VPN provider here, I'm not able to tell you if it works on Linux. Personally I have a hard time recommending any VPN service, but Mullvad stands out as being the least untrustworthy. Almost all others like Nord, Express, etc. share some common traits that make them very untrustworthy to me.
- Windows Games: This is a bit more complicated. Games from the Microsoft Store are very unlikely to run, and require messing about to even try in the first place. Other games made for Windows likely work (even outside Steam), using management tools like Lutris or Bottles is often easier than manually using Wine.
If a tool (or distro) works well for you, it's a good option. Everyone has different opinions on the "best" distro, but since it's very subjective, there is no single "best" distro. There's only 2 distros I recommend against, that's Ubuntu (and close spin-offs) and Manjaro, because they have major objective downsides compared to equivalents like Mint or Endeavour. The distros I generally recommend to new users are Mint and Fedora, but feel free to look around, you're not forced to pick a specific one.
You noted you were likely going to choose Linux Mint, great! It's a "stable" distro, as in, it doesn't change much with small updates. Instead, new release versions (23, 24, 25, etc) come with new changes. Linux Mint comes with an App Store that can install from Flathub, which should be the first place to check for installing new applications.
As for VR, it depends heavily on which exact headset you have, and is not always a great experience on Linux right now (speaking from experience with an Index). The LVRA wiki is a great starting place: https://lvra.gitlab.io/. If you're on a Quest, WiVRN and ALVR exist, though they both have their own downsides. If you're on a PCVR headset from Oculus, your options are more limited. You might also want to consider a different distro, as VR development is moving very fast. Many VR users choose to go with a "harder" rolling release distribution, like EndeavourOS, to receive feature updates quicker.
Also of note, if you have the storage space, you can choose to "dual boot" (even with just one drive). This will give you a menu to choose between Windows and Linux when starting your computer, and will give you time to move stuff over. I generally recommend this, as it provides an option to immediately do a task you know how to do on Windows, when it's absolutely required to do the task asap.
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This is exactly way proprietary stuff sucks !
Indeed. I hate it. But gotta keep it around until the device is dead.
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Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.
I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?
Add Steam to "Windows gaming for Linux." Every game I bought on Windows runs great in Linux Mint. Steam has a native Linux client and ot uses a Wine layer called Proton that has all the settings for each game.
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Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.
I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?
Recommend you Linux mint.
But preferably use LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) instead of Mint based on Ubuntu
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Recommend you Linux mint.
But preferably use LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) instead of Mint based on Ubuntu
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Antivirus is completely unnecessary and terrible on windows and linux... and on linux it's uniquely useless. Everything is installed from a centralized repo, antiviruses won't be of any help at all. antiviruses came about because windows let executables just be run easily and simply and used them as the default way of installing software, this was beyond idiotic and the reason that OS became infested with malware. Linux never made that mistake from the start, and so antivirus is unnecessary.
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Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.
I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?
Remote desktop you can use rustdesk
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One is based on Ubuntu, the other on Debian.
I wouldn't recommended and don't like Ubuntu myself cause of their decisions in the FOSS world -
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, color management, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Absolutely aggree about KDE, I helped a bunch of people switch to Linux, and for experienced users, KDE was the key. Not only it works better, but it also follows the logic people are used to, but with more freedom.
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gmail -> proton or tuta if you don't care about IMAP, or any other decent email provider (I use disroot, I set my brother up with mailfence, they both seem quite good. I use them with thunderbird)
pycharm -> not an IDE, but I like VSCodium (vscode without MS)Proton owner came out as big creep, so don't really recommend.
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iTunes: Quod Libet.
+1 for Quod Libet
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Proton owner came out as big creep, so don't really recommend.
I saw it as pandering to trump, so his administration doesn't make proton illegal in USA
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Just how will you manage to open gmail on linux?
People have been trying for decades, there is just no way
I haven't checked lately but on GNOME you add Google account to your Online accounts and gmail is automatically added to your email client (Evolution in some diatros).
