Planning to switch to Linux for my next PC
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As for you android analogy I’m locked on iPhone since I’m not the one paying the phone bill lol
As for the rest of the stuff I feel like that’s gonna make more sense once I actually use Linux cus I see the concept of ideas here lol
Once you get into the ecosystem it probably will, yeah.
If you think of the Linux ecosystem as a whole, it's like a big salad bar. There's a bunch of stuff to choose from, several kinds of each thing. An individual distro is a salad made from that salad bar, you might have romaine lettuce, tomato slices, onion, green pepper and thousand island dressing and that's Fedora KDE, change the thousand island to ranch and that's Fedora GNOME. Switch out the romaine lettuce for spinach, switch the onion for cucumber and go with raspberry vinaigrette dressing and you've got Mint Cinnamon.
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Mint is another good one, I would probably recommend against their Debian Edition(LMDE 6) though, it sounds good but, it's their newer system so it doesn't have all the bugs ironed out yet. I struggled with LMDE when I tried it last summer, which granted a lot of time has passed, but I rarely ever have an issue with their standard Linux Mint releases.
Yeah someone mint really holds your hand, which is kinda what I’m looking for so I’ll probably just stick to something basic
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Thanks for the info good to see another point for point mint haha. But I was gonna get a prebuilt rather than build my own
But some other comments and my own y point towards getting a Pre-built with an AMD, as for the WiFi thing is there anything in specific I should be looking for while shopping
I just make sure that the word "Intel" is used somewhere in the bullet point about the Wi-Fi. If it's built into the motherboard or on a separate card.
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Once you get into the ecosystem it probably will, yeah.
If you think of the Linux ecosystem as a whole, it's like a big salad bar. There's a bunch of stuff to choose from, several kinds of each thing. An individual distro is a salad made from that salad bar, you might have romaine lettuce, tomato slices, onion, green pepper and thousand island dressing and that's Fedora KDE, change the thousand island to ranch and that's Fedora GNOME. Switch out the romaine lettuce for spinach, switch the onion for cucumber and go with raspberry vinaigrette dressing and you've got Mint Cinnamon.
Ah i like that analogy, basically a lot of interchangeability with each part so you can make your perfect system that works for you
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Yeah I think makes sense thanks!
Basically Linux mint or bazzite is the system and how it’s organized while plasma is how I’m seeing that system represented and interacting with it in other words?
Basically Linux mint or bazzite is the system and how it’s organized while plasma is how I’m seeing that system represented and interacting with it in other words?
Yup, seems like you got the gist of it!
Obviously once you start reading documents on software you’ll start to understand it all better. Suggest reading into the Docker engine for self-hosting software on your network!
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Yeah mint and bazzite are gonna be the ones I check out and I was leaning towards bazzite at first but now I just need to do a bit more research and figure out what the heck it what but at least I have a starting point now
Practice in a VM. Go from the base install to setting up all the apps to customizing the look of everything (commonly called "ricing"). That should give you a sense of what to expect.
When you think you're ready, maybe give a few Live ISO's a demo to see if there's any immediate glaring issues when it's running on bare metal. If not, then proceed to install when you've picked the one you like the most!
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I just make sure that the word "Intel" is used somewhere in the bullet point about the Wi-Fi. If it's built into the motherboard or on a separate card.
So basically look for intel when talking about WiFi
I’ll probably make a follow up post specifically for hardware once I saved up some money and decided on a distro
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Practice in a VM. Go from the base install to setting up all the apps to customizing the look of everything (commonly called "ricing"). That should give you a sense of what to expect.
When you think you're ready, maybe give a few Live ISO's a demo to see if there's any immediate glaring issues when it's running on bare metal. If not, then proceed to install when you've picked the one you like the most!
Yeah once I got a bit more research I was gonna get some vms and play around a bit but that’s a thing for future me
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Yeah mint and bazzite are gonna be the ones I check out and I was leaning towards bazzite at first but now I just need to do a bit more research and figure out what the heck it what but at least I have a starting point now
Go with Bazzite (if you end up liking it, you can install it on your steam deck, which will be the same process you use to install it in your laptop… but that's for the future.)
Mint is okay, but it's a bit behind and you have a greater chance of something going wrong than with one of the atomic distros (Bazzite). With atomic distros all the important stuff you can't really touch and the only things you can change are your personal files that are important to you but don't affect the system at all.
As long as you reboot your computer from time to time, it'll always be the latest everything. And if something goes wrong with an update, you just choose to boot into the previous version you were just using and everything is back to how it was. Non-atomics you can affect files that are important and you have to stay on top of updating.
Between that and being built for gamers it'll have everything already installed for you, though if something is missing, just click to install from the "app store".
When you go to bazzite.gg to download it, you answer a few questions about your hardware, and pick a desktop environment. Some others have touched on Gnome and KDE for desktop environments, the choice is yours. Do you want a desktop that looks more like windows (or desktop mode on your steamdeck) or do you want it to look more like a Mac? Windows and highly customizable is KDE, Mac and just use it as is but still able to customize through extensions, is Gnome.
Really the hardest part is going to be installing it, but it's really not too bad. There are plenty of guides, but it's use a software to get the downloaded Bazzite file onto a flash drive, boot your laptop from that flash drive, follow the prompts and wait. Don't try to dual boot (keep part for windows part for Linux). It's possible, but from how you described yourself, not worth the headache.
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Yeah once I got a bit more research I was gonna get some vms and play around a bit but that’s a thing for future me
I know people have recommended Bazzite already, and I would too, but be sure to give PikaOS a look as well.
It's a gaming distro, but it's not immutable/atomic, though it uses a similar build process. Definitely one to consider if gaming is your goal.
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Oh nice, so I just boot windows as normal then “run” the installer from a usb. As for whatever an iso image that makes no sense to me is that just the “program” that the installer is?
A lot of people have recommended bazzite so i might try that first but mint definitely sounds like a good “I have no idea what I’m doing just start working distro”
I touched on this elsewhere, but seeing your comment here… sort of.
iso image is like a .zip it's a specific type of file… one that opens into a larger image, namely your entire distro. So you could install windows with an iso file. In order to be useful though, you need to get it onto a flash drive, but not just dragging and dropping. Programs like Rufus, mentioned elsewhere, will take that iso of Bazzite and open it onto the flash drive in a way that the computer will be able to read it later and do something with it.
After you have a working flash drive, you do not boot windows like normal and run the installer from a USB. You'll have to figure out how to tell your laptop (different but similar for each brand of laptop) to boot from the USB. This usually involves having the USB in the drive, restarting your computer and hitting a specific key to tell it not to boot normally to windows, but instead boot from the flash drive.
I haven't used Windows in a while and I think there's also a way to restart windows and tell it to boot from USB as you're exiting. But that's what you'll have to figure out for your specific device. That'll be true no matter what you end up installing.
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Go with Bazzite (if you end up liking it, you can install it on your steam deck, which will be the same process you use to install it in your laptop… but that's for the future.)
Mint is okay, but it's a bit behind and you have a greater chance of something going wrong than with one of the atomic distros (Bazzite). With atomic distros all the important stuff you can't really touch and the only things you can change are your personal files that are important to you but don't affect the system at all.
As long as you reboot your computer from time to time, it'll always be the latest everything. And if something goes wrong with an update, you just choose to boot into the previous version you were just using and everything is back to how it was. Non-atomics you can affect files that are important and you have to stay on top of updating.
Between that and being built for gamers it'll have everything already installed for you, though if something is missing, just click to install from the "app store".
When you go to bazzite.gg to download it, you answer a few questions about your hardware, and pick a desktop environment. Some others have touched on Gnome and KDE for desktop environments, the choice is yours. Do you want a desktop that looks more like windows (or desktop mode on your steamdeck) or do you want it to look more like a Mac? Windows and highly customizable is KDE, Mac and just use it as is but still able to customize through extensions, is Gnome.
Really the hardest part is going to be installing it, but it's really not too bad. There are plenty of guides, but it's use a software to get the downloaded Bazzite file onto a flash drive, boot your laptop from that flash drive, follow the prompts and wait. Don't try to dual boot (keep part for windows part for Linux). It's possible, but from how you described yourself, not worth the headache.
Thanks for the write up, based on the information from all the comments and this I might go with bazzite then but I still have to do some research
I might make a follow up post eventually with a little more specifics now that I have some vague ideas
As for the survey thing is that something I do on my current windows laptop or is it during the install process?
As for constantly restarting I always press shutdown every night before I go to bed
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Sorry but what’s a flat pack? Is that like an installer?
Flatpak (flathub) is a universal app store. You can install pretty much any app from it, but you do need to be careful of what you install, as always.
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Ah i like that analogy, basically a lot of interchangeability with each part so you can make your perfect system that works for you
To further the analogy, most distros are pre-packaged salads. Somebody figured up a salad recipe they like and they put it in to go bowls. You know what's in it so you can grab it and go. Some distros like Arch hand you a empty bowl and invite you to fill it yourself, so each copy of Arch is at least somewhat unique. Gentoo expects you to slice your own veggies.
A lot of the choices basically don't matter to you at this point; like the process manager. There are people who are irritated with Systemd, the de facto standard one, and prefer some other. They'll all work fine for desktop use, you'll probably never notice let alone form an opinion. The main things you will experience as meaningful differences between distros are the Desktop Environments and Package Managers. The GUI and the app store.
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Thanks for the write up, based on the information from all the comments and this I might go with bazzite then but I still have to do some research
I might make a follow up post eventually with a little more specifics now that I have some vague ideas
As for the survey thing is that something I do on my current windows laptop or is it during the install process?
As for constantly restarting I always press shutdown every night before I go to bed
You can do it right now and see what happens. Go to Bazzite.gg and go to the download section. It just wants to know where you're installing it so it knows what version to give you to download. Installing to a laptop will be a different file than installing to your steamdeck.
And since you shut down nightly you'd always have the most current version when you boot up the next day. But that only applies to atomic (formerly called immutable) distros like Bazzite. If you go Mint, which isn't atomic/immutable, that won't be the case and you'll have to stay on top of updating.
It's early still, so you have plenty of time to do some research and when you're ready ask the questions you still don't understand and generally we're pretty helpful around here.
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So I think another comment talked about this but I’m having a brain fart so mint or bazzite (the distro) is like the os but how does plasma the desktop environment fit in?
the simplest way to think about is the distro is your app store
what versions of apps available and how many as well as when they're updated are determined by distro
the desktop environment is the thing you interact with aside from the installation of software, the entire gui
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You can do it right now and see what happens. Go to Bazzite.gg and go to the download section. It just wants to know where you're installing it so it knows what version to give you to download. Installing to a laptop will be a different file than installing to your steamdeck.
And since you shut down nightly you'd always have the most current version when you boot up the next day. But that only applies to atomic (formerly called immutable) distros like Bazzite. If you go Mint, which isn't atomic/immutable, that won't be the case and you'll have to stay on top of updating.
It's early still, so you have plenty of time to do some research and when you're ready ask the questions you still don't understand and generally we're pretty helpful around here.
Yeah I definitely have a lot of info here, feeling a little overwhelmed but I just need time to sift through the nitty gritty and digest this
But I’m super early in the process haven’t even thought about what hardware I’m gonna get get (at least from this post I know need something AMD probably so that’s a start lol)
Also if I swap out to bazzite on my steam deck will I have to reinstall stuff like emudeck (only thing I’ve installed in desktop mode)
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To further the analogy, most distros are pre-packaged salads. Somebody figured up a salad recipe they like and they put it in to go bowls. You know what's in it so you can grab it and go. Some distros like Arch hand you a empty bowl and invite you to fill it yourself, so each copy of Arch is at least somewhat unique. Gentoo expects you to slice your own veggies.
A lot of the choices basically don't matter to you at this point; like the process manager. There are people who are irritated with Systemd, the de facto standard one, and prefer some other. They'll all work fine for desktop use, you'll probably never notice let alone form an opinion. The main things you will experience as meaningful differences between distros are the Desktop Environments and Package Managers. The GUI and the app store.
Thanks for the explanation
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I touched on this elsewhere, but seeing your comment here… sort of.
iso image is like a .zip it's a specific type of file… one that opens into a larger image, namely your entire distro. So you could install windows with an iso file. In order to be useful though, you need to get it onto a flash drive, but not just dragging and dropping. Programs like Rufus, mentioned elsewhere, will take that iso of Bazzite and open it onto the flash drive in a way that the computer will be able to read it later and do something with it.
After you have a working flash drive, you do not boot windows like normal and run the installer from a USB. You'll have to figure out how to tell your laptop (different but similar for each brand of laptop) to boot from the USB. This usually involves having the USB in the drive, restarting your computer and hitting a specific key to tell it not to boot normally to windows, but instead boot from the flash drive.
I haven't used Windows in a while and I think there's also a way to restart windows and tell it to boot from USB as you're exiting. But that's what you'll have to figure out for your specific device. That'll be true no matter what you end up installing.
Thanks for the info, I’ll probably get more information when I’ve actually chosen hardware and do some big brain research of my own
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Flatpak (flathub) is a universal app store. You can install pretty much any app from it, but you do need to be careful of what you install, as always.
Oh that’s much simpler than I was expecting lol
