Thinking about making the switch and need some advice.
Thinking about making the switch and need some advice.
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.
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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.
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.