I’m just so sick of Microsoft and Google. But there’s two things holding me back:

  1. I wanna play Steam games on my PC

  2. I am just an amateur hobbyist, not a tech wizard

Is there any hope for me?

  • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
    62·
    2 hours ago

    I have 15 years of experience and do free infinite troubleshooting on matrix, feel free to add me. I recommend you go with aurora, because it is immutable, kde based, and well documented.

    immutable means the base system is read only and updates are applied ontop of it, meaning you can easily roll back an update that went bad, and the apps are separate from the core operating system and thus can never break them (unless you try really hard).

    kde is a desktop environment, it is most similar to windows and the rate of development dwarfs almost everything else, please whatever you do for your first system use kde.

    aurora is a slightly modified fedora and fedora is one of the most commonly used options, the reason not to use base fedora is that aurora includes some QoL features, for example because of issues with patents twitch doesn’t work on fedora but does on aurora.

  • ordinarylove@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    2·
    2 hours ago

    you are going to be fine! linux has better compat than windows now unless you use a ton of proprietary, locked software. your average linux distro can do steam gaming pretty well, and there are distros like bazzite and garuda and popos that do some or all of the configuration for you (based on your hardware and usage).

  • Jhex@lemmy.world
    11·
    4 hours ago

    I recommend Garuda Linux, it looks awesome and comes with everything you need pre-installed

    • JAdsel@lemmy.wtfEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      Garuda is actually my daily driver these days, and I quite enjoy it. It does mostly just work, and I also like their desktop theming. The GUI installer is great for easy hardware detection and setup. But, that’s coming from a more experienced old tinkerer who was initially looking for some lazy troubleshooting with NVIDIA graphics on a new gaming laptop, and liked the distro enough to end up switching over.

      I wouldn’t necessarily recommend any rolling release to someone completely new to Linux. The devs have done a pretty good job at making some things more user friendly, but we are talking about Arch with some extra tools bolted on. You’d better be prepared for things to break occasionally, and to need to do some tinkering around under the hood.

      On the plus side, you ARE dealing with Arch with all the info resources/user community built up around that, plus the Garuda community tends to be pretty helpful from what I’ve seen. You are going to periodically need to figure out how to fix stuff, however–and better to be aware of that going in. Some people are going to be more fine with the idea than others, but it is liable to provide a steeper learning curve for someone just getting started with Linux.

  • JustOneMoreCat@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    20·
    12 hours ago

    Not so much help but hope: I got rid of Windows 11 and switched fully to Linux Mint a few weeks ago. I had no idea what I was doing but I tested things on USB and also on a very old laptop I had laying around before I made it my daily driver.

    I’m not particularly a tech person. I own a small creative business and have a toddler, but I figured out what I needed to quickly. I don’t game and didnt use Winsows exclusive software so have no opinions about that.

    What I didn’t expect: to actually be genuinely interested in my computer again for the first time since I was a teenager (which was not recent…). I love customizing my desktop. I love discovering new open source software. I’m learning more than I expected and it’s just a totally different relationship with the tech I use every day, in a nice way. And no more BS ads / bloat when I’m just trying to exist on my computer.

  • atmorous@lemmy.world
    6·
    10 hours ago

    There is hope lots of YouTube channels, articles by bloggers such as Its Foss, and guides to Linux all over

    Especially for Linux Mint (Similar to Windows), Pop!_OS (Similar to MacOS), and Bazzite (Gaming-Productivity Distro, Similar to SteamOS)

    The latter 2 work out of the box for gaming if that’s your thing

    You got this. Learn little by little each day and engage with community as much as you can. Maybe join some Voyager for Lemmy, Bluesky, Discord, etc communities

  • Aurora Chrysalis@lemmy.mlEnglish
    121·
    13 hours ago

    A lot of people here have already given good advice. I shall add my experience, recommendation and some tips (may incidentally repeat some of them).

    1. If you play some games with kernel level anti-cheat (like Rainbow Six Siege, Apex, Valorant, LoL, Fortnite, Battlefield games, Destiny 2 among others), you will have to stick to dual-boot. Check on ProtonDB for compatibility of games. I have 500+ games on Steam and pretty much everything I’ve played has worked so far.

    In terms of other software you use, make sure you have alternatives that work on Linux.

    • For Photoshop, there’s Krita/GIMP.
    • For Video editing, there’s Kdenlive, DaVinci Resolve, etc.
    • For browsing and office apps, there’s LibreWolf and LibreOffice.

    If you happen to have any software that you don’t have a good alternative or that only runs on Windows, then you’ll have to stick to dual booting.

    1. If you do end up dual booting, DO NOT use your external HDD in NTFS to run games on linux. It will work for a while, but you’ll constantly have to ‘chkdsk’ or check disk on Windows every time your HDD is found corrupted. Also, NTFS is Windows’ proprietary filesystem. So, I’ve heard that using ntfs-fix (chkdsk equivalent on linux) might cause data loss. Not sure how far it’s true, but be cautious of using that too. But otherwise, I believe that just reading files from NTFS drive usually is not a problem.
    • If you are NOT dual booting however, you won’t have to face this mess. You can backup the data on your HDD somewhere, format it in ‘ext4’ filesystem for Linux-only use (‘Exfat’ if you want to share any data with others on Windows/Mac) and restore all your files back to this HDD in ext4. Hope you have extra HDD with enough free space to move your files while you convert disks to ext4. You can also probably use cloud services for backup.
    1. I’ve used Ubuntu, Mint, Arch and Fedora.
    • Had faced a lot of issues with Ubuntu back in the day, and Snap Steam is a mess. So, avoid it.
    • Mint is easy to use, removes snap from Ubuntu and just uses apt, has a great Desktop Environment called Cinnamon, and I’d usually recommend this to someone new, but I wanted to shift from X-11 to Wayland for security reasons and HDR support among others. If Wayland worked well with Mint, I’d still be using it today, but that was the only reason I moved away from it.
    • While Arch is nice, it’s certainly not for someone new.
    • That leaves us with Fedora KDE, which would be my recommendation. It has good security features like SE-Linux out of the box. The reason I suggest KDE over Gnome is so that you might have an easier transition from Windows to Linux. Once you have a hang of this, you can later use a pen drive to load other distro with other DE like Gnome, XFCE, Cinnamon, Cosmic, etc and test them out by live booting.
    1. Speaking of pendrives, make sure to always have one with Ventoy installed and the distribution you’re using. This will be handy if you want to troubleshoot your system anytime. And I say Ventoy over others because it makes loading distro easier. You can just drag and drop the ISO files instead of having to burn with Balena Etcher or Rufus everytime.
    • Rufus is great, but if you’re moving out of Windows, you don’t need it.
    • And I have seen a lot of people have trouble with using Balena Etcher. So, avoid it.
      • Turn off Secure Boot in BIOS. (And maybe also fast boot).
    • And if your disk is on RAID instead of AHCI, you might have trouble installing. So, you might want to set your SATA configuration to AHCI mode in BIOS if you face issues.
    1. If you end up choosing Fedora, you may want to follow this.

    Fedora only comes with FOSS by default. So, you’ll have to install Nvidia driver and proprietary multimedia Codecs separately by including RPMFusion repo.

    • You can download the free and non-free repo files from the RPM-Fusion site(Graphical Setup) and install them through the Software Center. After adding the repo, you might have to enable them in the Settings of Discover Software Center. Enable all of them except those containing the words ‘testing’, ‘Test’, ‘Source’, ‘Debug’ and ‘google chrome’.

    • After that, it’s just a few lines you type in the terminal (Konsole by default) for installing driver and codecs. Make sure to update the system and restart first before doing these.

    For Nvidia driver, type:

    sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia

    For optional CUDA support, type:

    sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda

    For Video acceleration support, type:

    sudo dnf install nvidia-vaapi-driver libva-utils vdpauinfo

    For Codecs, type:

    sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing

    Steam is also included in the non-free repo. You may install it by typing:

    sudo dnf install steam

    1. Other than these, most applications can now be installed directly from the store as a Flatpak. You can select them in the store between Flatpaks, Fedora managed Flatpaks and Fedora Linux app for a particular one.
    • For flatpak apps, you’ll see a tick next to the developer if they are verified. So, you can look out for that if necessary.
    • Make sure ‘Flathub’ repo is enabled in the Settings of Discover Software Center for the Flatpak apps to appear.

    NOTE: Every time the video driver updates, you will have to do a follow-on update for flatpak runtimes. You might see a bunch of ‘Application platform’ and ‘Freedesktop’ stuff which you’ll have to install. If you fail to do this, you might suddenly find flatpak applications not working properly.

    1. Troubleshooting tips:
    • If Steam doesn’t launch the first time, type:

    __GL_CONSTANT_FRAME_RATE_HINT=3 steam

    • If your system is frozen, try switching to TTY by pressing (Ctrl+Alt+F3) and going back to GUI by pressing (Ctrl+Alt+F2)*. *Could be F1 in some cases.

    • To check what errors you got during the recent boot,

    journalctl -b 0 -p err

    Apart from the driver installation and some troubleshooting, you generally won’t have to use the terminal if you’re averse to it.

    1. In terms of deGoogling, I’d recommend the following:
    • Buy a pixel and install Graphene OS.

    Switch to

    • Tuta/Proton Mail for email,

    • Proton/Tresorit Drive for storage,

    • Mullvad (or i, proton) VPN or (Rethink DNS for firewall) I am not sure if you can use both Rethink and VPN at the same time. I assume there is a way.

    • OsmAnd for maps,

    • Newpipe for youtube frontend(Grayjay on Linux),

    • Bitwarden/KeepassXC for Password management,

    • Aegis for TOTP

    • Fdroid, Accrescent, Aurora for App store.

    • Molly FOSS for Messaging.

    • whats_all_this_then@programming.dev
      3·
      7 hours ago

      This is graat info. Didn’t know about Ventoy before, it sounds really cool.

      Just wanted to add that if you’re running multiple monitors on an nvidia card, you may find that the second monitor has low fps/stutters on wayland (common on dual graphics laptops). The fix is as follows:

      Add these 3 lines to /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf:

      options nvidia-drm modeset=1
options nvidia NVreg_UsePageAttributeTable=1 NVreg_InitializeSystemMemoryAllocations=0 NVreg_EnableGpuFirmware=0

      Add this line to /etc/environment:

      KWIN_DRM_DEVICES="/dev/dri/by-path/pci-0000\:01\:00.0-card:/dev/dri/by-path/pci-0000\:00\:02.0-card"

      You may have to modify the part that says pci-xxxx\:xx\:xx.x-card with the appropriate values for your graphics card.

      Run lspci | egrep VGA to list installed PCI graphics cards and try to map the values from there

      Disclaimer: I don’t know why this works but it does and it isn’t malicious as far as I can tell. If anyone knows what exactly it’s doing, I’d like to know please.

      • Aurora Chrysalis@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        22 minutes ago

        Thanks for that info.

        I just want to add that the drm modeset is enabled by default ever since the 560 drivers. You only need to do that for the older ones, if I’m right.

        Previously, you also had to disable nouveau yourself and Nvidia driver installation used to be a headache. Things have gotten better over the ages. I’m sure this multi-monitor issue will also be fixed soon as well.

      • Aurora Chrysalis@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        43 minutes ago

        Well, it’s just 4-5 lines that you’re going to have to type and it’s just a one-time thing. Surely, it’s not that intimidating.

        Bazzite seems to be based on Fedora Kinoite, an atomic desktop. Now, I haven’t used atomic desktops. Although I wanted to, I ended up not doing that for the following reason.

        From what I understand, you can’t easily alter the base image of the system and everything else is a flatpak. This seems fine, but if you end up having to install an application for which there is no Flatpak, how would a non-tech savvy user do that? Still have to use the terminal at that point, I’d bet.

        Case in point, even the other day, I came across this application called ‘syncplay’ for which there’s no flatpak alternative and thankfully, Fedora repo had it.

        I also hear that if you end up installing apps this way(Layering as it’s called?), the update times become slower. You may shed some light on this.

        Also, while it may not be as good as a snapshot system of the atomic desktops, the regular Fedora nonetheless shows the last two kernel installations on every boot so you could revert back to one if an update goes wrong.

        I also have to mention that I always have my important files backed up on HDD or cloud that in the worst case scenario of losing my files on any update, (which hasn’t happened so far btw), I can always restore them. In case of Steam games, it shouldn’t be a problem if you have a fast internet connection. You should download them back in no-time. That is another reason I can still live without having to use a stable atomic desktop.

    • atmorous@lemmy.world
      1·
      10 hours ago

      Can’t forget Zen Browser for best productivity browser. Also Ungoogled Chromium, and Brave (Especially Brave Leo functionality)

      OP if you want to use AI locally but privately then use Ollama with Open Web UI

      Also HuggingChat is an AI Chatbot that can do all kinds of stuff with the 1-tap community extensions, models, and assistants avilable. Website is free with an account. Use as a web app for it to be even better experience

      When you are more advanced learn distrobox to add apps only available on other distros natively to your laptop

      If you have any questions feel free to ask me whenever

      • Aurora Chrysalis@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        32 minutes ago

        While Zen and ungoogled chromium are fine, I’d suggest to stay away from Brave for any serious purposes 'cause you never know what shady things they might be doing. Case in point, they had previously been changing regular URLs to include affiliate links on their own. They also have that crypto bloat.

  • daggermoon@lemmy.world
    52·
    10 hours ago

    I’d say try Kubuntu. It’s like Ubuntu but with KDE (Windows-like user interface) instead of GNOME (shitty Mac clone turned tablet like interface). It’s well-supported and is easy to use. Also supports new technologies like HDR which Mint is lacking. Though you can install KDE on pretty much any distro (Mint included) but it’s a good starting place.

    Note to fellow Linux veterans: Yes, I know snaps suck but it is not something new users need concearn themselves with. Kubuntu is a great distro except for snaps which aren’t going to affect OP’s use-case (or most use-cases. Also sorry for shitting on GNOME so much. If you like it that’s cool, I just don’t think we should be recomending it to people coming from Windows.

      • folaht@lemmy.ml
        1·
        54 seconds ago

        Can I tell you off from Arch Linux?

        There are around three Linux families to choose a derivative Linux OS from,
        some are more obscure ones and then some really obscure ones.
        Choose one of the Linux family OSes and choose the most popular derivative of that one.
        So for example Aurora is a derivative

        The reasons to choose derative OSes and not one of the basic main three is that:

        1. The Linux derative OSes have bells and whistles build on top of the parent OS (company). This is especially true for the extremely bare bones Arch Linux, that will throw you back into 1985.
        2. And this is most important… community support! You will at some point have issues and a forum where developers and experienced users can help you out are a godsend. Derivatives tend to have better community support than the bare bone ones. I’ve experienced this with the Arch Linux community. I’m not sure if Debian or RHEL communities would haved fared better, but to me this community felt like having a conversation with a real life Sheldon Cooper. I am really thankful for the excellent expert level help I did get there, but I will not go there back again. And I don’t know if I even can, because the last time I was there, I got banned for a third time.
          I’ve had great experiences on the Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Manjaro communities. Other communities from less popular Linux OSes have been too small in my experience to get help on time.

        For Debian, the most popular one right now is Linux Mint, a derivative of Ubuntu (derivat-inception). It used to be Ubuntu, but Ubuntu tends to take big moves and risks that don’t always pay off.
        Linux Mint I consider to be the safe option for beginners.
        Debian is known for stability.

        For Redhat it’s Fedora. I haven’t used it that much. Redhat is known for good security.

        For Arch it’s Endeavour OS and recently Cachy OS.
        It used to be Manjaro, but they fumbled a lot on security issues.
        Arch is known for having the best documentation,
        and the largest amount of software available,
        especially made by fellow users,
        and if I may add myself, having the best package manager.

        I still use Manjaro myself, because I don’t feel enough need to switch to a new one,
        and I like the community there.

      • buttnugget@lemmy.world
        3·
        10 hours ago

        Linux folks used to be much worse about gatekeeping, but even 20+ years ago when I was first starting out, there were always decent folks among the techie dumbfucks.

  • XXIC3CXSTL3Z@lemmy.ml
    41·
    12 hours ago

    If you want real gaming performance then arch all the way with archinstall. Trust, it’s insanely good and you can get double of what you get on windows in terms of performance. Boot times are also insane. I have used so many distros and I can tell you that arch is king for performance.

      • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
        4·
        6 hours ago

        I agree. Arch has been my current favorite distribution for several years now, but it’s almost impossible to maintain without having to drop into the shell occasionally. I have EndeavourOS installed on my wife’s laptop and she’s been happily using it for nearly a year; bauh helps with software installs, but I still generally drop into a shell for the full -Syu upgrades, and you have to use the shell at least once just to install bauh as it’s not a core package.

        You might be able to avoid the shell to use bauh if you use the AppImage; I haven’t tried that. bauh can apparently do system upgrades, but I haven’t tried that yet and I need to see how it handles news; Arch is fairly cavalier about pushing out breaking changes that require extra user steps which need to be discovered by reading the news posts.

        I agree that Arch isn’t the best “first linux” distribution.

    • XXIC3CXSTL3Z@lemmy.ml
      1·
      12 hours ago

      If you really wanna learn how to tinker and become tech savvy you can always try manually installing arch or get an easier distro and learn from there.

  • ter_maxima@jlai.lu
    31·
    22 hours ago

    Check your games on ProtonDB

    The only games in my library that don’t work are entirely the publisher’s fault for blacklisting Linux in their anticheat, and it’s very few games even then.

  • traches@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    60·
    1 day ago
    • before you switch, sort out your apps. Look at what you use on windows, see if it runs on Linux. If not, find a replacement that does and test it out.
    • Most Linux distros can boot into a desktop from a thumb drive. You can play and test without touching your windows installation.
    • in that vein, ventoy is neat. You can make a bootable drive and drop ISOs in a folder to boot from. No messing with etcher or whatever it’s called
    • desktop environment matters as much as the distro. Check out gnome, KDE, and cinnamon.
      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        12 hours ago

        Okay, so the Linux ecosystem is more modular than Windows. Windows is synonymous with its Graphical User Interface (GUI) for reasons I’ll get into later.

        With Linux, there are several GUIs available to choose from. These tend to fall into two main categories: Tiling Window Managers, and Desktop Environments.

        Tiling Window Managers have minimal on-screen UI elements, usually they’re meant to be used with keyboard combos with little usage of the mouse. A major feature is everything that is running is visible on the screen, when you open a new window, another window divides in half to give it room, “tiling” the screen. Some examples of TWMs include i3 and Awesome.

        Desktop Environments are going to be more familiar to newcomers from Windows or MacOS. They’re made more for mouse control, several have what you would recognize as a taskbar, start menu and system tray. Windows can be stacked on top of each other like papers on a desktop, exactly like MS Windows does. Some more closely resemble MacOS though none behave exactly the same way. Some examples of DEs include Gnome, KDE, MATE, and Cinnamon.

        Cinnamon is a DE made by the Linux Mint development community, and the default/flagship DE for Linux Mint. It is designed to be familiar and easy to use for Windows users. KDE’s Plasma DE is similar in many ways to Mint although it’s based on different tech; KDE is based on qt, Cinnamon is a distant fork of Gnome and based on GTK. Some are designed to be more minimal so they take up less system resources, like xfce and LXDE, others are trying mostly to resemble MacOS, like ElementaryOS’ Pantheon DE. Then there’s Gnome, which I goddamn hate.

        For a beginner, the choice of DE is going to present most of the differences you’ll notice when trying out distros. It can be instructive to try, say, Kubuntu and Fedora KDE. Both ship with the KDE Plasma desktop, but the underlying OSes are different. Then try out, say, Fedora Workstation (with the Gnome desktop) and Fedora KDE. That exercise will give you a good understanding of distro vs DE.

        Edit to add: It’s kind of like launchers on Android. You can go in the Google Play store and install a different launcher on your phone, you can make a Samsung Galaxy look like a Google Pixel. Linux DEs work the same way, you can install KDE or Cinnamon the same way you’d install a normal app, you can have multiple and switch between them. It’s not a great idea but you can.

      • Coco@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        15·
        17 hours ago

        If a computer is a car, then Linux(the Kernal) is the chassis. Mint (the distro) is the motor, and Cinnamon (the desktop environment) is the fancy interior.

        KDE plasma is a fancy interior that works with tons of different motors.

        Cinnamon is designed for mint and works best with it.

        DISCLAIMER: All of this is analogy and isn’t technically correct in a pedantic sense, but it works well enough for me. I’m sorry if my analogy isn’t exactly accurate.

        • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
          51·
          13 hours ago

          I’d say Linux (the kernel) is the motor/engine and Mint (the distro) is the chassis. The chassis defines the shape of the vehicle and its size class, for instance.

      • traches@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        12 hours ago

        The desktop environment is all the stuff like the taskbar, the settings menus, the application launcher, the login screen, that kind of thing. It’s the system level user interface.

        You choose which one by which distro you download. Linux mint uses cinnamon, Ubuntu and fedora use gnome. There are “flavors” of Ubuntu and fedora that use KDE. That’s why I suggested ventoy: you can download a few different ones and boot into them without making a new thumb drive.

        If you don’t feel like bothering with any of that, just use Linux mint. It’s good.

  • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
    14·
    21 hours ago

    I take it you’ve never even tried Linux before. Both of those things are not things that will hold you back. My mom uses Linux, and she barely knows what “right click” means.

    With regard to your Steam games, as long as you don’t play games that use restrictive anticheat, you’ll be fine.

  • dingus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    332·
    1 day ago

    If your library is on steam, then there’s nothing to worry about! Works natively on Linux. If your library is on other platforms, I’d honestly think twice about switching full time. Dual booting might be a better option. My library is split amongst multiple platforms and I decided that it wasn’t working well enough for me. Steam games will work great though!

    Many distros are easy enough to install and navigate as a newbie. My go to for years now has been Linux Mint! It’s based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian.

    • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
      26·
      1 day ago

      If your library is on other platform like gog, epic, amazon or off platform .exe you can use heroic launcher and for most stuff it works just as well.

      For some games there is a little more learning curve because you have to translate custom steam configurations found on protondb to do the same thing in heroic but overall you actually have way more control then steam.

      The only reason “id think twice” is if you play lots of games with anticheat which does not work on every distro (like arch btw).

    • TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      41·
      1 day ago

      oh that’s cool. nope, whole library is on windows on one PC right now.

      I was thinking about trying out dual booting to get a feel for it. my understanding was that many programs wont work with linux or require complicated fixes to get them running. so id hate to be left downstream without a paddle, so to speak

      • INeedMana@lemmy.world
        13·
        1 day ago

        Depends which programs. Also, it’s very possible that there are open source alternatives

        But if you are dead set on using exactly the same program, https://appdb.winehq.org/ is a database of if and how to make them run on Linux. Wine’s core focus is games, but many programs are covered there too

      • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
        10·
        1 day ago

        They mean other platforms like GOG or Epic, not stuff like consoles.

        Steam games mostly work, with some exceptions. You can check out ProtonDB to see more precisely what games work, which ones straight up don’t, and which ones need a fix. ProtonDB will usually also tell you what that fix is, which is handy.

        But most of the time, you can just hit play and not worry about it.

        A note on dualbooting. Linux uses different filesystems from windows. It can access windows NTFS partitions, but it’s not a smooth experience.

        A common pitfall is trying use your game library while it is still on a windows filesystem, from linux. Since you can see the folders, and even add them in steam, it’ll seem like it should work. But you’ll run into issues actually running the games. It’s technically possible, but not worth the hassle.

        Generally you really want to either format your storage and redownload your games, or if you have the space, copy them over to a fully supported file system.

        • TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
          3·
          17 hours ago

          thank you for that tip. I currently run all my games and docs from external HDs. (my pc itself only has a small amount of SSD storage used only for booting etc, and i dont know how to install a new hard drive yet…) I would have definitely tried to just plug in my HD and tried to run it through steam lol

      • SomeLemmyUser@discuss.tchncs.de
        4·
        1 day ago

        For testing try the live USB sticks Just flash them to an empty stick with programs like etcher, then power dowb and select the stick in your bios (usually reachable by hammering f1, f2 or Del while starting

        (Remember that performance will be much better when installing it for real compared tusing running it from a stick though)

        Dual boot will work and is not that hard to setup, but you should back up all your data before trying it.

        Also when dual booting to avoid duplicates etc I have all my documents and stuff on a USB stick, so I don’t have a version in my win and a version iny linux. Cloud works as well

      • evilcultist@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        One thing to keep in mind is that dual booting can work to highlight what you’re missing because generally all of the games that run on Linux will run on Windows, but the reverse is not true. It becomes easy to just default to windows so you don’t have to reboot to play something that doesn’t work in Linux and that can undermine the attempt to switch the OS.

  • Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    20·
    1 day ago

    Lots of good advice here. I’ll add a bit about dual booting.

    1. the problem with dual booting is when you use the same physical hard drive. Windows doesn’t play nice sometimes on the same drive. Just do yourself a favor and buy a second ssd. Then you can break linux six ways to Sunday and always have a windows backup. (And if you want to be extra safe - you can just unplug your windows drive during Linux install and you can’t f up and pick the wrong drive by accident)

    2. dual booting is nice just in case something doesn’t work - you can easily switch back to windows.

    3. dual booting sucks because there’s very few things that don’t work in Linux - it just requires a little elbow grease to figure out. But having a windows partition right there leads to many people giving up way too early with fixing their issues.

    My recommendation is always to have more than one drive in your computer. It’s YOUR computer. Regardless of what you pick as your “main” OS, you always have another spot to screw around in. Distro hop, extra storage, set up a hiveos miner, whatever. Its flexibility and screwing around with other things helps you understand what’s YOUR computer vs what is Microsoft’s OS.

    • JayGray91🐉🍕@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      8 hours ago

      Hey, I’m glad that my Obviously Sprcial Idea of getting another ssd just for linux have legs. I decided this is my plan going forward to learn Linux as daily driver and gaming.

      Now there’s only the first step that I have to make.

    • TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      2·
      17 hours ago

      I’m gonna have to figure out how to install another SSD I guess… hope my motherboard is compatible with whatever is on the Market. I bought it all in asia and apparently the motherboard is an issue

    • Dagnet@lemmy.world
      6·
      1 day ago

      I say unplug the windows drive always, even if you don’t fuck up your Linux install may nuke your windows boot partition and it’s massive PITA to get it back

      • Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        18 hours ago

        Has that ever happened across drives? Without user error?

        Every Linux distro I’ve ever used has been pretty damn specific about where it installs boot, and respectful of all other drives and boot loaders.

        I’ll concede defeat, but I find your claim hard to believe.

        • Dagnet@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          17 hours ago

          Yes, first time when I installed Nobara, then second time when I installed Fedora. Both times windows was in another drive, both times I picked the right drive. I asked around and people recommend unplugging your windows drive, I agree.