Thinking on switching to linux
-
The security model is also very different between Linux and Windows. Linux is just inherently more secure.
True for wayland, not true at all for x11
-
Your hatred of flatpak is probably stemming from your experience with other systems, when recommending for beginners, you must look past such biases.
That's fair.
-
AMD drivers: Native, will auto-install as the mesa library, AMD is tits in Linux, it just works.
Gmail: Thunderbird works with Gmail accounts and can sync the calendar.
iTunes: Rhythmbox has a very similar layout to iTunes and so should feel pretty familiar.
Anti-virus: Linux doesn't really need antivirus in the same way Windows does because it's more locked down and doesn't have the same vectors of attack. If someone is hacking a Linux machine, it's a corporate server, not your desktop PC.
Py-Charm: As others have noted, Python is installed natively and is usually already implemented "out of the box" on a fresh install. No need for a program to run it, Python is just... there already.
Remote Desktop: Whatever distribution you have will likely also come with a Remote Desktop client. I am unaware of whether or not they will connect natively to iOS.
Star Citizen: You should be able to add this as a non-Steam game to Steam and use Steam's Proton compatibility layer to play it. A few years ago they were literally asking for Linux players to test it with Proton and Easy Anti-Cheat.
VPN: Linux has extensive VPN support including "roll your own" through either OpenVPN or Wireguard.
Windows Games: Steam, using the Proton compatibility layer, which is essentially WINe, just made a little easier. As with Star Citizen, just add it as a non-Steam game and viola.
Windows 10: The Distribution of your Dreams is just around the corner... Mint isn't a terrible place to start.
If OP is a gamer and not too comfortable with Linux, Bazzite is a good choice of distribution.
It's a so-called "Atomic" distro. Basically what that means is that it works more like Android / iOS than Windows or a traditional Linux distribution.
The base system including drivers and key applications is built as an image by Fedora. Every 2 weeks or so, they release a new one, and Bazzite users get the new one the next time they reboot. Everything in that base image is tested to work together, so you don't get weird incompatibilities. You can still install all the other software you want, but you tend to do it using Flatpaks rather than rpms/debs. (For someone who doesn't know what that means, Bazzite is a nice OS because that's something you don't need to learn right away.)
Bazzite is meant to be something that you can install on a SteamDeck, or another handheld gaming PC, but it also works great for desktop machines. But, because it's meant for handheld machines, they've worked extra hard to sand away some of the rough edges.
If you're a more advanced user, Bazzite is still good because you can still do almost everything you'd do on a normal distribution, you're just discouraged from doing things that affect the base image because it makes updates slower and means they're not guaranteed to work. I actually really like some of the things you're encouraged to do in Atomic distros that you wouldn't do normally. For example, using distrobox as a way to install certain kinds of dev tools. I currently have one project I'm running in an Ubuntu distrobox and another I'm running in a Fedora distrobox. It keeps some of the tools isolated to the "box" where they're needed. I haven't used Fedora much lately, so it's fun to have the more familiar Ubuntu environment in one, and then the other one where I can experiment and learn.
For someone who doesn't play games, Bazzite probably isn't ideal, but I'd still recommend an Atomic build. There are downsides, but unless you're the kind of person who really likes building their own kernel and making sure it's optimal for their system, it's so nice to have a stable base image so you can focus on the other stuff.
-
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?
-
emacs
-
emacs
-
emacs
-
emacs
-
emacs
-
emacs
-
emacs
-
emacs
-
vim
-
emacs
-
emacs
-
emacs
-
emacs
-
emacs
-
emacs
-
-
So I should do this with at least ny favorite games before wiping my drive and installing a Linux distro?
Bazzite, a gaming-focused Linux distribution, is designed to work really well with Steam. One drawback is that if you have a game installed in Windows on a Windows drive, you can't use it from Linux steam. But, there is a way to have games accessible to both operating systems. I haven't done this, yet, but I'm probably going to try it this week.
It involves installing a Windows driver that supports BTRFS partitions.
Here's the video guide I found.
-
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.
Yeah, +1 for Bazzite.
It looks like it's really designed for Linux beginners. They've done a solid amount of work sanding off the rough edges.
As someone who has been using Linux for decades, I'm also impressed with it for a development system. I chose Bazzite because I wanted to be able to play games easily, but since I installed it a month or so ago, I've barely played any. I've installed a few to make sure they work, but I got interested in another project once I installed it, so for me it's been a machine used to set up and administer a Kubernetes cluster, as well as doing some Go / Javascript development.
In the early 2000s, I was one of those guys who ran Gentoo and liked building all my own software on my own machine so that it was perfectly tweaked for what I wanted to do. But, these days, I really like having an OS that's stable and gets out of my way, so I can focus on more interesting things.
-
US has overwhelmingly all the developers of Fedora. If Fedora wins over all other linux based distros (and at this time it could be easily do in a near future), developers in other countries will move on into other projects (or move to the US). If the US, once Fedora is so clear dominant and Debian and Arch ceased to exists down the road, the US will find it compelling to close source Fedora and leave the rest of the world with a forked version but unable to develop for the time being since there is no Linux experts around left.
this isn't even possible even if fedora got 99.9999% market share, most linux distros are passion projects, even the ones that aren't don't need much funding. Debian will never go away, arch will never go away, so that simply can't happen unless they're militaristically destroyed. You say this is not far fetched, but i'm afraid I completely disagree, that doesn't even sound remotely possible. Fedora doesn't even do that much, they just package together a bunch of other things that are developed completely independently of them (they don't even make their own kernel, that's like 90% of the work!)
fedora cannot legally become closed source, most of it is GPL licensed. Lookup "copyleft", this is why android isn't already proprietary.
If Firefox closes, the dudes in librewolf will survive for a few months (I’m in Librewolf), that is it; none of them are capable of keeping developing Gecko (the engine of Firefox). Imagine that Google close sources Android, no one in the world (besides Huawei) could keep develop it competitively for at least a decade!
This isn't true, there are many open source android projects could easily keep things going. The only reason huawei does all that is because of the proprietary parts, this doesn't exist as a problem in linux, and cannot be created as one. Firefox would still be developed without mozilla, just significantly slower. Lookup phones with microg, they have no such issues keeping things going. Browsers are a special case that require a ton of resources to keep secure, OS's, not so much.
Also, google cannot legally close source android, that's the point of the GPL.
Even then what you're saying is "these aren't viable open source projects without a lot of funding" and android absolutely is, firefox MIGHT be.
Look at this… SWIFT (an interbanking payment system) , when US, in spite being European, dominates it completely, Russia and China has been for half a decade create and alternative… it is not a mayor technically difficult platform to replicate, but it is proven very hard… relying on it for decades had left every country at its merci and now that most of the world wants an alternative still could not come up with a viable alternative. Remember also when France/EU wanted to create a payment system with Iran… well, never came to fruition. Haven relying in the US for decades left Europe powerless for these innovations. The same could happen with Fedora if we start adopting it in mass.
none of these concerns resemble this situation.
I see we are not going nowhere here, but I highly appreciate your effort to make me understand your view. Russia and China, let alone Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc al want to develop an alternative from Android... how is it going? Only China is pulling it off, and after 5 years already and massive investment... just forking sure...
Just as a remark... "cannot legally become closed source". Do you really think the US is bound by any legality at this point?! And it is not just Trump... any President could scrap off any legality if it need be and lower courts could just complain all the want... Of the 100+ lawsuit cases Trump already has accumulated in 3 months you won't see much progress... and recently, even the US Supreme Court already gave Presidents "Broad Immunity for Official Acts" and "Absolute Immunity for Core Powers" so good luck for upholding GPL if an administration wants to force software out of it.
-
I see we are not going nowhere here, but I highly appreciate your effort to make me understand your view. Russia and China, let alone Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc al want to develop an alternative from Android... how is it going? Only China is pulling it off, and after 5 years already and massive investment... just forking sure...
Just as a remark... "cannot legally become closed source". Do you really think the US is bound by any legality at this point?! And it is not just Trump... any President could scrap off any legality if it need be and lower courts could just complain all the want... Of the 100+ lawsuit cases Trump already has accumulated in 3 months you won't see much progress... and recently, even the US Supreme Court already gave Presidents "Broad Immunity for Official Acts" and "Absolute Immunity for Core Powers" so good luck for upholding GPL if an administration wants to force software out of it.
I see we are not going nowhere here, but I highly appreciate your effort to make me understand your view. Russia and China, let alone Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc al want to develop an alternative from Android… how is it going? Only China is pulling it off, and after 5 years already and massive investment… just forking sure…
Like i've said repeatedly, it's the google play store, the proprietary parts they are having trouble duplicating. Even little people can make ROMS on XDA, it's not a big deal.
Just as a remark… “cannot legally become closed source”. Do you really think the US is bound by any legality at this point?! And it is not just Trump… any President could scrap off any legality if it need be and lower courts could just complain all the want… Of the 100+ lawsuit cases Trump already has accumulated in 3 months you won’t see much progress… and recently, even the US Supreme Court already gave Presidents “Broad Immunity for Official Acts” and “Absolute Immunity for Core Powers” so good luck for upholding GPL if an administration wants to force software out of it.
There's no precedent for this and it seems like baseless paranoia. Again, fedora's whole selling point is essentially the GPL, getting rid of it would make it completely worthless, none of the KDE devs would be down for this, none of the linux kernel devs would be down for this, all they'd have is DNF...
None of the value proposition of fedora is in the actual software they make, it's the distribution of that software that's valuable, they package it well, but they don't make it themselves... KDE will not go with redhat, they're separate orgs, as is linux, as is systemd, even coreutils aren't made by them.
-
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?
-
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?
If you have nothing to lose, ie. if you don't play anything with anticheat or you don't use any productivity software with crazy DRM platform-locking you into Windows, do it, switch over.
The bulk of all games will run in Proton or even vanilla WINE now and the minority that's platform-locked into Windows is anything that uses kernel-level anticheat, if you only play single-player games, those will broadly work fine in WINE/Proton, and as for productivity software, there's plenty of alternatives to things like Maya, Photoshop, Lightroom, or Premiere/AfterEffects to choose from that isn't platform-locked anywhere, eg. Blender as a Maya alternative, Krita or GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, RawTherapee or Darktable as a Lightroom alternative, and KdenLive or Davinci Resolve as a Premiere/AfterEffects alternative.
-
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?
What do you use iTunes for? That stood out to me.
Also Chrome works fine on Linux, though Firefox is a better browser even on Windows.
-
What do you use iTunes for? That stood out to me.
Also Chrome works fine on Linux, though Firefox is a better browser even on Windows.
Fooyin's a really good alternative and if you can flash Rockbox onto an older iPod that supports that firmware, then it'll just function as a normal external drive.
-
Software Linux support AMD driver 
open-source drivers for CPU and GPU are included in the Linux Kernel and work very well. If you have bleeding edge news hardware, check online in which Kernel version they are supposed and choose Linux distro accordinglyWeb Browser Chrome/chromium, Firefox. All are commonly available in your distro software repository by default, or otherwise with FlatpakWeb-based email not dependent on OS. Local Email client software are available, one exemple is Thunderbird.Office suite LibreOffice, or anything web-based such as Google Docs will work independently of the OSItunes Many music players/library managers are available on Linux, I don't have any specific recommendations here, I am self-hosting Jellyfin for my music needs JBL not sure what you mean here ? Your headset/speakers ? Don't see why it wouldn't work Music score reader/editor MuseScore, I also use Guitar Pro (7, 
inside Bottle (wine) and it works with some tweaks needed for fixing font bugAntivirus ClamAV, arguable if you need an antivirus at allPython many IDEs are available, a scary amount of Linux distribution rely on Python under the hood 
@op, they may suggest you to change your kernel version to support newer hardware, don't do this unless you know what you are doing and can undo it from cli. its usually fine but can cause weirdness. its better to choose another distro if yours don't support something very new you need.
-
Star Citizen works great on linux with Lutris.
https://lutris.net/games/star-citizen/As good as it runs on Windows, anyway... It is still Star Citizen
(No shade, really promising and most of it is pretty slick and impressive when it's working and I hope they get it stable sometime soon-ish)
-
On windows you install things from random websites as the primary method of installing stuff, this means anything can install anything and has installers that can install bonus stuff. This is why windows has so much malware.
On linux, imagine your distro is an app store, ubuntu is an app store, mint is an app store, fedora is an app store. The apps themselves can't manage installation so they can't bundle nonsense with them. you just click install and you get only the thing you wanted and nothing else.
Since your distro curates all the software, as long as you trust your distro, you'll know there's no malware on your computer, because you get all your software from the distro (or flathub but same idea).
You can install things from random websites for Linux too, though.
-
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?
Star Citizen runs just fine under linux.
https://github.com/starcitizen-lug/lug-helper
I would recommend using Wine directly over using Lutris right now, but that's an option you can pick in this script. Join the discord if you have trouble, people are friendly there if you're polite.
-
You can install things from random websites for Linux too, though.
You can, but on windows it's the standard way to do things, on linux it's almost never done.
-
For an average user i would recommend Firefox
For someone tech-savy and privacy focused - LibreWolf
Why? Some websites will not work properly on LibreWolf because of how hardened it is (not extremely, but just enough to break some things on websites). I don't mean it's bad, it's just not for everyone atm since many people want things to just work
If you want more customizability, then Floorp's also a great option .
-
@op, they may suggest you to change your kernel version to support newer hardware, don't do this unless you know what you are doing and can undo it from cli. its usually fine but can cause weirdness. its better to choose another distro if yours don't support something very new you need.
This isn't exactly what I recommend. Only in the case the hardware is bleeding edge, as in, it was released less than 6 month ago, then check in which Kernel version it starts to be supported, as well as check the Kernel version shipping with the distribution you are interested in installing. Distro Kernel version >= Kernel version where the driver starts to be included, no problems. Otherwise, check a distro that has more frequent upgrades.
Things to check: GPU, CPU, WiFi chip, Ethernet chip. In windows you can find the information in the device manager. On Linux (e.g: test with a live USB) the command
lspciwith display the information.A common case would be: I am interested in Debian because I heard it's the most stable, will my AMD 5070XT work with that ? Probably not very well, better Check Ubuntu non-LTS or Fedora.
I am not recommending op to modify the Kernel from the Linux distro, just consider this point in choosing the distro.
-
What do you use iTunes for? That stood out to me.
Also Chrome works fine on Linux, though Firefox is a better browser even on Windows.
