Already did and it’s glorious! Steam works beautifully and the only final thing that I’m missing is Adobe products.
I recommend, if you want to try Linux, that you try out the ‘Debian’ distribution, and use the ‘KDE Plasma’ desktop environment. It makes for a very Windows-like experience and really assisted me with the transition between OSs.
for newcomers, maybe this is the best combo. Debian stable with KDE Plasma.
Unless you’re using NVIDIA. Didn’t work out of the box for me and required a couple hours of fiddling. Mint worked seamlessly.
PopOS (scroll down to the “Pop_OS with Nvidia” link).
It is tailored for Nvidia cards, is Debian(Ubuntu) based, & super friendly for new users.
EDIT: Here’s a link to the 24.04 release that provides only the Cosmic desktop environment (no X11, no gnome or kde). This is what I use, but it’s in alpha so user beware.
That’s weird. It worked for me just fine. I have GTX 1060 3GB.
Wrangling my Nvidia drivers into Mint also took a couple hours for me but I haven’t had problems afterward
Debian is not a good choice for beginners. It’s extremely bare bones compared to Ubuntu or Mint.
Drivers on Debian stable are also heavily outdated
Not having access to Adobe products is a feature not a bug.
maybe give debian testing a go for a little more up to date software :)
I went with Mint but I’m thinking about KDE (or maybe KDE flavored Arch? Idk I’m new) on my second computer. Pretty painless?
As long as you’re running KDE, it will feel familiar to a Windows user. I started with Kubuntu which was great until I had a system update, and it completely shat itself. Wanted to try Bazzite next, but the installer wouldn’t work properly, so I installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and I’ve seen no reason to switch since.
I completely disagree. Debian is not beginner-friendly. Go with Bazzite if your focus is gaming.
It is a gaming-focused distribution. It’s also an “atomic” distribution, which basically means it’s really hard to break it. It’s more like Android or IOS where the OS and base system are managed by someone else. They’re read-only so you can’t accidentally break them.
For example, instead of trying to manage your own video card drivers, they come packaged with the base system image, and they’re tested to make sure they work with all the other base components.
I’ve been using Linux since the 1990s, so I’ve run my share of distributions: Slackware, RedHat, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Even for someone experienced, atomic distributions are great. But, for a newcomer they’re so much better.
and the only final thing that I’m missing is Adobe products.
I miss Affinity Designer! Bought a license and I like it but no linux port 🙄
I can’t get used Inkscape, it’s so different and confusing for me
If you’re into primarily gaming, try PikaOS. It’s Debian based and uses the same tooling, but it’s on an optimized kernel. Is generally geared toward gaming.
There are other gaming specific distros of course, this is just the “Debian”-related one. I would not recommend the real debian if you’re mainly into gaming. It’ll need manual intervention and/or optimization to get games running, or at least get them running well. It’s not impossible (it even hard if you’ve got but is Linux experience), but just harder than necessary.
Nope, will probably avoid 11 as long as I can though. I have an Mvidia card (drivers are notoriously troublesome on Linux). And I need professional design software for work (as in, industry standard: Adobe or Affinity).
But I put 11 on my laptop to try it and I hate it. So many terrible UI changes, UX noticeably worse. Like they changed stuff just to say they changed stuff.
I considered going Linux for personal use and development, and then using another machine or dual boot for Mac for design software. But i learned about the Nvidia issues after I upgraded my card :/ and swapping to Mac’s walled garden after avoiding it for decades is… a sign of how bad W11 feels to use.
Made my jump to Arch (btw) a couple of years ago and haven’t really looked back. I have Win10 as a second boot option, but that’s reserved specifically for Game Pass and VR, but it’s very rare I boot it. Don’t care to upgrade even after EOL, and I’d never recommend Arch to anyone but the most comfortable with Linux, but it’s been a great option for me.
Made the upgrade last week to Linux mint and I’m loving it. Got my Arr stacks and stuff setup as dockers and it’s never worked so well. All the connection issues I’ve had on windows is now gone.
The interface is nice and not bloated. And I’m not being tracked which feels liberating.
I switched a year ago and I love it. All my old games run better on linux than windows at this point. Proton is fucking amazing.
Already upgraded to Linux Mint - https://lemmy.world/post/24365609
It’s been going great! Everything works as I expected. I now have full confidence that I will never switch back to Windows. It really does feel liberating having an OS that doesn’t track me.
Installed kubuntu on the laptop so I can get used to it. Still trying to find a AV and firewall app I like
Well my PC can’t do windows 11, and upgrading is now impossible thanks to a certain someone. So yeah…
I play only on Linux, and it works great. Come on over!
I would like to switch to Linux on my gaming machine but me and my girlfriend play Valorant together so I can’t switch just yet.
My server and laptop already run NixOS, I’m just looking forward to the day my gaming/main machine join them too
I was running mint, but had to go back to windows because of a hardware bug I’m still trying to fix where my PC will randomly not wake up from sleep and that results in corrupted drives, which windows can fix with it’s automated repair at boot, but Linux has done commands that I need to run and if I fuck it up it would fuck my computer up even more, so until I can fix the hardware bug I’m stuck on windows, but by fuck do I hate it. I prefer Linux so much more over windows, so much more convenient, efficient, personalizable and it actually works in many places where windows simply doesn’t even with a lot of fiddling around in settings and shit
I’ve been on 11 since before it was officially released. Honestly never had any issues with it, but I’m interested in hearing what sort of issues anyone else might have had? Are we talking about privacy concerns, bugs or performance issues?
Can anyone recommend a distro (and desktop environment?) that’s going to be almost the same as desktop mode on the Steam deck? I’m getting more comfortable in that than I expected to be in any Linux, and to my surprise and delight I haven’t had to delve into the command line at all yet.
Already switched the laptop over to Mint. Desktop to follow.
My system isn’t even that old (maybe 4 years) and the first few times I got that very annoying popup that I should try to upgrade it told me in vague terms that I couldn’t. So be it, everything runs fine now. I have backups of everything, so if WIn10 doesn’t continue to work as simply unsupported one day I’ll look for ways to “fix” it like someone mentioned with a 3rd party, or go to Linux and adapt to it. Anyone who has ever had a drive failure knows that the solution is to use a recovery USB which will be a portable Linux, so it will be just another version of that.
