If you’re planning to try Linux but have no experience with it, the best piece of advice I was given is this. Learn how the filesystem is structured. It will make everything else you try to do easier.
You’re also going to get a ton of conflicting advice on which distro to use. Pop OS or Mint are my suggestions. !linux_gaming@lemmy.world is a good resource to know about too
Thanks for this. I loathe the idea of being stuck on a platform that’s hard to use and swarmed by too many angry idiots who only ever say that linux is perfect and everybody who doesn’t think so is too dumb to read. Everything that makes linux approachable is a big win.
Gotta ditch Microsoft though. Ugh. Changing an OS is such a massive pain, regardless of how much of a requirement Microsoft Recall makes it.
Anyway, more stuff like this, everybody! Thank you again.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do a little of that in my younger years, but I’ve calmed down a lot. These days I generally advise caution when someone tells me they want to switch to Linux.
I personally don’t actually think any one variant of Linux is that much harder to use than Windows or Mac. I think the difficulty comes from two things:
One, I think people forget how much learning is involved in those OS’s as well. If you’ve ever tried to teach an elderly grandparent how to use “the computer” then you know first hand how much of this specialised knowledge you can take for granted. Simple things like knowing where to look to change mouse sensitivity as an example, are really challenging to any new user of any OS.
Two, there isn’t just one variant of Linux. It’s biggest strength is also it’s greatest weakness here. It’s amazing that you have so many choices for your desktop environment, but that comes with the major drawback of users needing to understand what a desktop environment is, and why Googling “how to change mouse sensitivity in Linux” is probably not going to return anything useful. You have so much choice in Linux for every little thing. Down to a level of granularity that most Windows or Mac users wouldn’t even realise they’re not getting a choice in. Alsa vs pulseaudio, xorg vs wayland, not to mention the plethora of package managers. Hell even drivers for your video card: proprietary vs open source. And yes, some of those examples boil down to the old way vs the new way, but ALL of this is added complexity, which results in a steeper learning curve for a new user.
So yeah, Linux is hard to use. The learning curve is a cliff, and anyone who thinks it’s perfect is kidding themselves! ESPECIALLY for the user who just wants to play a few games, and maybe do some browsing. We’ll never get the year of the Linux desktop with this mentality!
I do also try to warn new users about this. It is a whole new ballgame, and it will take some effort to get up to the same level of comfort you have in Windows. It really is best to not just jump in to the deep end, and fully wipe your system on day 1.
Start with a VM, then dual boot, and once you’ve stopped booting into WIndows in frustration, then you’re ready to commit.
One thing I promise though, it is 100% worth the effort
My wife is not good with computers. I moved her over to Linux with vanilla gnome. It took one 1/2 hr session and she was off and running. The next day I got a bunch of questions - another half hour. About a week later she said “this is SO much better than windows - I love it!”
Linux is easy to use. Installing and maintaining-no. But using - yes.
They don’t need to understand DEs or any of that. Press Super (“the Windows key”) and start typing “mouse”. Please teach people how to use PCs properly; this is the fastest way to access any program or setting in both Windows and popular DEs: Cinnamon, KDE, MATE… Windows will even happily send anything you type here to Bing for easy web search by default 😑
OK so I think you might be joking but in case you’re not:
“They don’t need to understand DEs” and “Please teach people.” Well which is it? is it intuitive or does it need to be taught? It can’t be both
That was just an example. Your solution doesn’t solve the problem I’m describing as a whole and I think my point still stands. Search might be common to most DEs but that doesn’t change the fact that they all work slightly differently, and if you want to know how to do something that can’t just be searched for, you need to know what DE you’re using. Which means knowing what a DE is. Not to mention, a user coming from a Mac wouldn’t think to just hit super anyway. It’s cmd + space there.
It’s not the “proper” way, it’s just “a” way. There is no “proper” way do to this kind of thing. I would even argue that it’s not even the “best” way because you’re not learning how to navigate your OS/DE if you do it that way.
This is exactly the kind of facetious bs “ugh, it’s not hard, just rtfm, noob” response the op is talking about
You can’t get stuck on Linux any more than you can get stuck on Windows. Every OS is just one short install away. And if you switch to Linux, there will come a point, like there is with everyone who tries it, when you start experimenting with different distros and downloading new ones to try every week, before you probably end up settling back on the one you started with.
I’ll second PopOs, I was sick & tired of windows, I’d wanted Linux for a while and tried a few, PopOs just clicked for me and I’ve not had one problem gaming (which is what I mainly do). 20 min install time and not one problem since, which is about 14 months.
I’m currently on Pop for the last couple years and I’m really happy with it. Being stuck based on 22.04 is getting a little old, but at least it means no new big bugs (in theory).
Honestly, even if I don’t like Snaps that much, Ubuntu/Kubuntu ain’t so bad after all. I’ve been running it as a daily for months now on my Linux-only gaming PC and it’s working quite well. There’s good support for proprietary drivers and media codecs out of the box.
And personally, I’d advise on using the Kubuntu version because KDE is so much closer in terms of desktop paradigm than Gnome.
Ye, my dirty little secret is that I’m still running kubuntu on my main laptop (which I do a lot of gaming on as well fwiw.) It’s what it shipped with, and it works just fine. I can’t say I would have actively chosen it, but It’s also not bad enough to make me want to go through the hassle of installing something else
It’s like a Honda Civic. It’s just reliable and easy to maintain with good performance and some good features and some you don’t really want but are still practical. And there’s a big community giving lots of support and documentation to tweak it if you want more out of it.
Canonical (Ubuntu) bastardized their own OS. I recommend Mint Debian for noobs; Mint is what Ubuntu used to be when it was good and going Debian gets away from Canonical entirely.
Snaps, their own app-in-a-box format. Which would be fine, except they’re provided only by Ubuntu’s closed-source Snap Store, have larger size and inferior performance because dependencies are redundantly rolled into each one, and the worst part is that they started turning nearly every app in their OS into a Snap. If you sudo apt install firefox, you get a Firefox Snap instead of a native package.
Gonna repeat something I said a little while ago.
If you’re planning to try Linux but have no experience with it, the best piece of advice I was given is this. Learn how the filesystem is structured. It will make everything else you try to do easier.
You’re also going to get a ton of conflicting advice on which distro to use. Pop OS or Mint are my suggestions. !linux_gaming@lemmy.world is a good resource to know about too
Thanks for this. I loathe the idea of being stuck on a platform that’s hard to use and swarmed by too many angry idiots who only ever say that linux is perfect and everybody who doesn’t think so is too dumb to read. Everything that makes linux approachable is a big win.
Gotta ditch Microsoft though. Ugh. Changing an OS is such a massive pain, regardless of how much of a requirement Microsoft Recall makes it.
Anyway, more stuff like this, everybody! Thank you again.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do a little of that in my younger years, but I’ve calmed down a lot. These days I generally advise caution when someone tells me they want to switch to Linux.
I personally don’t actually think any one variant of Linux is that much harder to use than Windows or Mac. I think the difficulty comes from two things:
One, I think people forget how much learning is involved in those OS’s as well. If you’ve ever tried to teach an elderly grandparent how to use “the computer” then you know first hand how much of this specialised knowledge you can take for granted. Simple things like knowing where to look to change mouse sensitivity as an example, are really challenging to any new user of any OS.
Two, there isn’t just one variant of Linux. It’s biggest strength is also it’s greatest weakness here. It’s amazing that you have so many choices for your desktop environment, but that comes with the major drawback of users needing to understand what a desktop environment is, and why Googling “how to change mouse sensitivity in Linux” is probably not going to return anything useful. You have so much choice in Linux for every little thing. Down to a level of granularity that most Windows or Mac users wouldn’t even realise they’re not getting a choice in. Alsa vs pulseaudio, xorg vs wayland, not to mention the plethora of package managers. Hell even drivers for your video card: proprietary vs open source. And yes, some of those examples boil down to the old way vs the new way, but ALL of this is added complexity, which results in a steeper learning curve for a new user.
So yeah, Linux is hard to use. The learning curve is a cliff, and anyone who thinks it’s perfect is kidding themselves! ESPECIALLY for the user who just wants to play a few games, and maybe do some browsing. We’ll never get the year of the Linux desktop with this mentality!
I do also try to warn new users about this. It is a whole new ballgame, and it will take some effort to get up to the same level of comfort you have in Windows. It really is best to not just jump in to the deep end, and fully wipe your system on day 1.
Start with a VM, then dual boot, and once you’ve stopped booting into WIndows in frustration, then you’re ready to commit.
One thing I promise though, it is 100% worth the effort
My wife is not good with computers. I moved her over to Linux with vanilla gnome. It took one 1/2 hr session and she was off and running. The next day I got a bunch of questions - another half hour. About a week later she said “this is SO much better than windows - I love it!”
Linux is easy to use. Installing and maintaining-no. But using - yes.
They don’t need to understand DEs or any of that. Press Super (“the Windows key”) and start typing “mouse”. Please teach people how to use PCs properly; this is the fastest way to access any program or setting in both Windows and popular DEs: Cinnamon, KDE, MATE… Windows will even happily send anything you type here to Bing for easy web search by default 😑
OK so I think you might be joking but in case you’re not:
“They don’t need to understand DEs” and “Please teach people.” Well which is it? is it intuitive or does it need to be taught? It can’t be both
That was just an example. Your solution doesn’t solve the problem I’m describing as a whole and I think my point still stands. Search might be common to most DEs but that doesn’t change the fact that they all work slightly differently, and if you want to know how to do something that can’t just be searched for, you need to know what DE you’re using. Which means knowing what a DE is. Not to mention, a user coming from a Mac wouldn’t think to just hit super anyway. It’s cmd + space there.
It’s not the “proper” way, it’s just “a” way. There is no “proper” way do to this kind of thing. I would even argue that it’s not even the “best” way because you’re not learning how to navigate your OS/DE if you do it that way.
This is exactly the kind of facetious bs “ugh, it’s not hard, just rtfm, noob” response the op is talking about
You can’t get stuck on Linux any more than you can get stuck on Windows. Every OS is just one short install away. And if you switch to Linux, there will come a point, like there is with everyone who tries it, when you start experimenting with different distros and downloading new ones to try every week, before you probably end up settling back on the one you started with.
I’ll second PopOs, I was sick & tired of windows, I’d wanted Linux for a while and tried a few, PopOs just clicked for me and I’ve not had one problem gaming (which is what I mainly do). 20 min install time and not one problem since, which is about 14 months.
I’m currently on Pop for the last couple years and I’m really happy with it. Being stuck based on 22.04 is getting a little old, but at least it means no new big bugs (in theory).
I was stuck too and I had to reinstall everything to get the upgrade done. That’s the Linux game
Honestly, even if I don’t like Snaps that much, Ubuntu/Kubuntu ain’t so bad after all. I’ve been running it as a daily for months now on my Linux-only gaming PC and it’s working quite well. There’s good support for proprietary drivers and media codecs out of the box.
And personally, I’d advise on using the Kubuntu version because KDE is so much closer in terms of desktop paradigm than Gnome.
And Fedora ain’t bad either.
Ye, my dirty little secret is that I’m still running kubuntu on my main laptop (which I do a lot of gaming on as well fwiw.) It’s what it shipped with, and it works just fine. I can’t say I would have actively chosen it, but It’s also not bad enough to make me want to go through the hassle of installing something else
It’s like a Honda Civic. It’s just reliable and easy to maintain with good performance and some good features and some you don’t really want but are still practical. And there’s a big community giving lots of support and documentation to tweak it if you want more out of it.
Canonical (Ubuntu) bastardized their own OS. I recommend Mint Debian for noobs; Mint is what Ubuntu used to be when it was good and going Debian gets away from Canonical entirely.
Wait what did they do?
Snaps, their own app-in-a-box format. Which would be fine, except they’re provided only by Ubuntu’s closed-source Snap Store, have larger size and inferior performance because dependencies are redundantly rolled into each one, and the worst part is that they started turning nearly every app in their OS into a Snap. If you
sudo apt install firefox, you get a Firefox Snap instead of a native package.You’re clearly wrong. The answer is Arch
OK, but seriously. There are two main general use families:
Debian based and redhat based
Pick something that has a DE out of the box. Use it. The big ones used to be GNOME and KDE. I dont know which one is more recommended now.
Find equivalent programs (ie. Notepad -> gedit, adobe pdf reader -> evince).
Figure out the windows start menu equivalent: how do I access my programs?
Maybe six months to a year later, learn how to use a terminal emulator.
Maybe a year later, switch to arch and find out why it’s superior
Been using Bazzite. Super simple install, been working really well.