I’ve been almost-ready to ditch Windows for years. Now’s the time.
My new neighbor is an old-school nerd. He hosts install parties at our local leftist third space.
He’s going to help me switch to… not sure yet. Probably Mint. I can’t wait. It feels as good as never giving a cent to Amazon, Uber, and streaming services.
Yay.
i quite like the out-of-the-box experience of debian13 running gnome, but i had to do quite a bit of tinkering to get my nvidia card running. it is running now, and i basically feel like i have a brand new computer.
That’s great to hear! Welcome, and have frustrating fun!
If you don’t mind me asking; in your context, what does “leftist” mean? When I hear the term, it’s usually meant as a pejorative for some nebulous group the utterer doesn’t like.
Thanks !
Not a native speaker, so don’t put too much faith in my answer, but: for me, it means actual left, faaaar left, not the milquetoast leftf-wing parties that sometimes win elections in Western Europe.
There’s a good measure of gift economy, for example. We share many resources, grow food for each other (I do squash, a neighbor does leek, and so on–but we don’t trade, we just take what we need.) When we need musclepower we just pass the word around and strangers or friends come build a wall / clean out an old barn / stack firewood. There’s a buy-nothing warehouse were we drop everything from clothes to building materials, toys, kitchenware, and art supplies.
I volunteer to manage a pay-what-you-want hostel for hikers. There’s a lot of grassroot community politics / activism. It’s nice.
Never go to a second location, let a third.
You in trouble.
Oh yeah baby
The only thing stopping a mass exodus is that there is no single version of Linux that is just dominating. I know that defeats the purpose of Linux, but that is what the dumb masses (such as myself) want. We want easy, and we don’t want to be special. If I have a problem I want a thousand others with the same problem, not my own little unique problem that I have to take hours away from my day to fix.
The fediverse has the same issue
Then Linux Mint is what you’re looking for.
I’d say the stopping thing is a few multiplayer PvP games with anticheat, also some software that won’t work in Wine (adobe products, corel products, microsoft products).
Yes, I know alternatives exist (Krita, Inkscape, LibreOffice). No, they are not 100% drop-in replacements. I for myself love working in LibreOffice Writer, but when you work in a place where everyone except you uses MS Word and expects DOCX files, you can’t “just” switch to linux without issue.
2 years ago when I started my switch I tried ~10 distros and then did a prolonged test of about 2 months for each of the 2 distros that were the closest to being perfect out of the box and settled on Bazzite.
I wish you a happy journey and if you don’t like one flavor don’t ditch Pizza, there are many more flavors to try and one of them surely will become your favorite.
Mint is a good choice. It just works.
Haha! No it doesn’t.
Finally moved my gaming machine over while upgrading storage the other day. Pretty much seamless.
Good luck!
Oh so now I’m committed I need luck all of a sudden?
"It feels as good as never giving a cent to Amazon, Uber, and streaming services.
Yay. " Yay indeed. Just started my Cinnamon journey. Old Win7 laptop - never going back, to Apple either.
Apple, with their M silicon, has been tempting recently, but I really can’t bring myself to pull the trigger when I could have a top of the line Framework for the same price as a middle range MacBook pro. Sure, the MacBook is probably more powerful, but the framework would actually be mine.
That said, in the current ram/ssd economies I’m not buying a laptop at all if I can help it. Unfortunately, I want one so I can edit on the go, and uploading TBs of video footage to my home PC and then editing remotely isn’t going to work, so I’ll probably have to cough up some dough eventually.
Yo, so first of all, congrats on being able to ditch Windows! Second of all, I got hype-convinced to make the switch a few days ago and I have LOVED it. Moving from Windows to Mint (at least so far) was a breeze. There’s a tiny bit more thought overhead that goes into fixing things sometimes, but if I’m really honest about that, I had a lot of that with Windows, too, I just have decades of fixing Windows experience.
Mint is a good choice for your first linux.
Second this! Been using it for years. Not a single problem. It just works
Plus it’s built on Debian right? So if you ever want to bring things even lower-level you’re positioned well to learn more in preparation.
The “main” version is built on Ubuntu. There is a Debian based version (LMDE), but the Ubuntu based one is the “recommended” one.
Ubuntu is Debian based, so it stays true
I know you’re getting a million suggestions and to be clear- nothing is wrong with Mint, but I recommend Fedora Kinoite as a first distro if you’re coming from Windows. KDE is going to be more familiar and the way the backend is designed makes it basically impossible to meaningfully break.
Bazzite or Zorin too
Definitely Bazzite, I also love Zorin but IMO that’s more an “Install on your dad’s laptop” OS than something for someone who knows how to install an OS.
I’m about there as well. I’m worried tho, cause I do some Sim Racing and some games don’t support Linux, and I’m worried the equipment won’t work. I know dual boot is always an option, but at a certain point, I fear I’ll just default to Windows because it’s what I know.
Just got into sim racing as a longtime Linux user. iRacing doesn’t work because they’re lazy about enabling anticheat, but ac, beamng, and others work great. What hardware do you have in your rig? FFB “just worked” with my pxn vd6, and I had to write up some udev rules to get my simsonn load cell pedals running, but it’s been smooth so far. There is a matrix chat you can join from simracingonlinux dot com that has excellent information and folks to help.
Yeah iRacing was my worry. I haven’t played it at all yet cause it’s just so much to get started, but that’s a goal, so it’s kinda at the forefront of my thoughts. I have a Moza R5 with just the stock pedals, but I have been eyeing some Simsonn pedals something fierce. How do you like them?
And awesome, I’ll look into that! I’m sure I’m gonna have questions, but from what I’ve seen, the Moza stuff is pretty plug and play. I have a bunch of random peripherals I need to look into tho
I really like the simsonn plus x pedals I picked up. The brake pedal has way better feel and modulation, and they’re adjustable about a billion ways to Sunday. I haven’t adjusted anything yet because I’m working on a frame to invert them out of 2020 extrusion.
The r5 should work perfectly out of the box, and install boxflat to do any tweaking you may need. Hopefully you take the plunge and things work well for you.
Mint is very comfortable for a windows user! If you’re on even slightly older hardware I really doubt you’ll find Windows more comfortable.
It’s all fairly new; within the last year. 9800x3d, 9070xt, and then the peripherals are all I’d say also new. So that also plays a part. I’m sure I will be fine, it’s just the unknown of it all, and Linux has a (imo deserved) stigma in its online support. I think the big worry is I feel like I have to learn it all, then change, instead of learning as I go. Just a lot at once, but I think it’s about time to learn.
Yeah getting hardware to work may require a bit of fiddling. There are some stellar resources, and some extremely helpful people. Most stuff really does “just work” but when it doesn’t you don’t have to learn everything, just how to fix that issue!
I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how painless it is. Obviously if you havae special hardware it may be hard to find drivers or whatever…hell if I know! but I had similar apprehension to you and it’s been a breeze!
Someone else responded that does some sim racing. It has limits, but it seems it’s game specific and largely by dev choice. More confidence than I expected, but I have liked at literally nothing for the process yet. Free weekend though, so hopefully 48 hours is enough lol
Having never even looked at Linux before I had it up and running on my old MacBook in less than an hour! Maybe another two of playing with settings (mostly for fun), and now it’s just my computer! I’m sure it’ll take extra time to get the things you want to work to go if they’re unusual, or maybe as you point out you may need to keep a windows partition for that.
Sounds like you’re in good hands. Enjoy the ride, plenty to learn and to feel good about understanding :)
Have fun! Whatever you do, if you run into an issue you can’t solve, stick with it. You’ll learn and become better over time.
I’ve been gaming on Linux for about 3 years now and it’s been great. Had some hiccups here and there but they were solved with some searching.
