Hi all,
As the title states, I’m interested in making the switch from Windows to Linux. I know absolutely nothing about Linux, other than that fact that there are distros that exist under Linux, and Linux itself isn’t an OS, or so I think.
I have 2 laptops and my main home office PC, which I use for my job and gaming.
My plan is to switch one of my laptops to a Linux distro, and test it out. This laptops only purpose is web browsing, so I figure getting Linux set up to do something as simple as opening a browser is something I am capable of.
Down the road, once I’ve sort of learned on this laptop, I may work my way up to using other distros and dual booting my main PC. Who knows, maybe I’ll even switch over completely prior to Windows 11 rolling out.
I’ve heard getting games to work with Linux can sometimes be a hassle, and can require some fiddling, so I won’t be doing gaming on a Linux distro until I feel quite comfortable.
So with the above context, I’m looking for recommendations on a distro I should use, any guides that any of you may have found helpful, and generally any insight on things I may need to be aware of.
I am fairly tech savvy (probably not compared to most of you), and am not afraid of tinkering with things until they work. Any help would be muchly appreciated, and if this isn’t the correct place to post, please let me know and point me in the right direction.
Since you mention gaming and learning how to troubleshoot games on Linux. This conditions your questions to whether that laptop has an Nvidia graphics card or not. Nvidia has an awful support in linux which creates all sorts of problems and limitations.
Regardless, I would suggest to use bazzite, but be warned, this is an immutable distro. They’re entirely different from traditional distros and relatively newer. So there’s a bit less support history on the web. Nevertheless, they provide a strong secure and stable system that should make having rescue tools less critical and keep your system alive and healthy indefinitely. Bazzite also sets up everything for gaming automatically from install.
Better to use something general purpose and very well supported. Linux Mint is probably a better choice right now.
Bazzite is just Kinoite with gaming things out of the box. Which in turn is just Fedora with KDE Plasma but atomic and immutable. It doesn’t get any more general purpose than that. Bazzite even preinstalls a lot of stuff that Fedora users have to add manually, like proprietary drivers. If you don’t want a gaming centric OS, then there’s also Aurora which is the workstation version. I guess my point is that, there’s not an objectively best choice in Linux. Something we often tend to forget is that personal taste also plays a role. I personally used Mint for 5 years and supported the project monetarily. But my tastes changed and I think atomic and immutable is a good path for adoption, since it all works more or less the way people have come to expect smartphones to work. But, with the power and flexibility of x86-64 computing. It perfectly fits the management model of set it up once and forget about it. Specially since OP is specifically mentioning his interest on having a system focused on security. A system that is working just works, no doubts, buts or ifs, it always works and if anything happens that make it not work anymore, you just rollback to a working state immediately without fuzz, it is a pretty neat feature.
I think “gaming centric” distros are pointless. Ah yes, please have Steam preinstalled.
Distros should instead just make sure people can install what they want and setup as they want. Stop trying to please everyone with the out of box experience.
Also I personally think immutable Linux still needs time in the oven. I consider it in early adopter status. We are still working out how to make it work. I use Silverblue but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t already have a compatible workflow. Maybe someday it will get more standardized and streamlined but right now everyone is doing there own thing and each system has its own problems.
Well, there’s much more to it than just installing steam. That’s highly dismissive of the effort it takes, including kernel level optimizations and driver space configurations required to guarantee top performance. To suggest it is pointless is insulting to a lot of people and not constructive criticism, at all.
Thanks for the heads up. My guinea pig laptop will not be having games on it. I may try out Factorio down the road to see if it’ll run, but that’s more to test than to play. This machine will be pretty much a Crunchyroll/web browsing machine.
I suppose one things I forgot to include in my main post, now that I think about it, is protection. Windows typically has a lot of safeguards built in, so I’m pretty comfortable torrenting stuff online. How does this work with other Linux distros? Do they all have their own systems already in place, or is this something I need to set up myself? And how careful do I have to be about download stuff online, or browsing the web?
First off you don’t want to be downloading things off the internet. Linux systems are build with packages so you install the packages you need. Flatpaks are also packages but they are sandboxed and often are much newer versions. You can install flatpaks as a local user or system wide.
As far a security goes, securing Linux is actually a pretty complex topic. You could start by turning on the Firewall as on Linux Mint there is even a GUI for that.
For serious security you want to setup mandatory access controls (MAC). This is a really complex topic but you might be able to use defaults. Basically what MAC does is it restricts apps to only have the access they absolutely need.
Depends on your risk model. Almost all VPNs have a linux client available, most installers can setup whole disk encryption, and they even support secureboot. There’s also antivirus that detect malicious software that target all OSs.
Linux is also far more private and secure than Windows. If you felt safe torrenting on Windows you were misled.
Just two cents on “downloading”. System setup and programs are basically all from your distro’s package manager with sometimes a couple of things from GitHub if you have particular needs.
For the rest of stuff (media / files / more) there is no windows defender and I don’t personally try to chase down antivirus. You can totally get malicious stuff out there so maybe don’t click pop ups and download everything the pirate bay has to offer, but security is more baked into the Linux permission structure and user space. Find a guide and do it “the Linux way” if you decide you need to go set up deluge or transmission with a private tracker to get some Linux ISOs for personal use.
Some people do a lot of sweating over the security of the system, but I would generally say if you need that… you’ll know it. Sure a VPN is a good idea (I don’t use one for anything), good permissions are important (I don’t play the immutable OS game), and encryption may have a place for you (or maybe not, not everyone needs a luks filesystem system encrypted at rest); but you’re making a setup that you can use / prefer to use. Make your own call, basically anything on the beaten track is safe enough and sane enough.