Basically the forced shift to the enshittified Windows 11 in october has me eyeing the fence a lot. But all I know about Linux is 1: it’s a cantankerous beast that can smell your fear and lack of computer skills and 2: that’s apparently not true any more? Making the change has slowly become a more real possibility for me, though I’m pretty much a fairly casual PC-user, I don’t do much more than play games. So I wrote down some questions I had about Linux.

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

And also, what distro might be best for me?

  • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
    1·
    8 个月前

    Note here, a lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the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 bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let 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, 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, lxqt 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.

      • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
        0·
        8 个月前

        It runs x11, the wayland port is going insanely slow, x11 has the following problems every time:

        1. Every single app can read all of your keyboard input without asking
        2. Every single app can see what every single other app is doing without asking
        3. Apps can fullscreen themselves and go over everything else, because they can control their own window placement to any degree they want, again, without asking.
        4. HDR https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1037#note_521100 (if you need a source)
        5. mixed refresh rate and dpi display configurations.

        It may support these someday, maybe. But progress is absurdly slow. Considering cinnamon has fewer changes as a whole than just the KDE text editor alone, kde is a significantly better choice if you want a well-supported, bug-free and feature rich experience.

        • Fatur_New@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          8 个月前

          x11 has the following problems every time:

          And Wayland isn’t very well tested yet. We should only give a very well tested display server to very new users. They must not get a bad impression

          • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
            0·
            8 个月前

            That would’ve been true 5 years ago. Wayland is plenty tested these days, give me some data indicating the rate of issues is significantly higher and I’ll agree, elsewise I think the most secure well supported option is the best one. X11 is being deprecated left and right for a reason.

            gnome is wayland by default, kde is wayland by default, even XFCE is transitioning to wayland at this point… that’s just not a valid argument in the modern era.