Download a new OS // Download the operating system you want to install. Search for Linux distributions for beginners to get some suggestions.
I feel like it's better to actually list/suggest a few beginner distros than to tell people to look it up.
Linux Mint (XFCE desktop) is the best for beginners coming from Windows, in my opinion. Linux enthusiasts will fawn over KDE because of customization, but they ignore that the vast majority of people don't want to spend months tweaking pixels, widgets and animations, they just want to use the computer.
My point is that the site should be recommending a few newbie distros, instead of telling the newbie to search it. Specially because the choice of a distribution isn't that meaningful in the long run, but newbies struggle picking one.
That said I agree Mint would be a good choice. Not sure on Xfce; I'd probably recommend Cinnamon instead, as it looks a bit more modern (even if myself would rather use MATE or Xfce than Cinnamon).
Windows user: I'm thinking about switching to Linux, mind helping me out Linux User?
Linux user: ok, so what you want to do is just figure it out yourself.
Windows user: finds debian and fucks everything up wow Linux is terrible, I'll stick to using Windows 11.
Funny that Debian and Fedora were the only two distros that worked on my laptop. (dual GPU, others booted to black screen after install.) Debian hasn't grenaded itself yet :)
Speaking on that: a lot of people act as if promoting Linux means simply "to get others to install it". And they ignore that the newbie will need help the first days, weeks, even months. Then the newbie gets burned out and switches back to Windows.
That probably explains why some people manage to retain even tech illiterate people using Linux, while others struggle to convince even tech literate ones to switch.
I think it doesn't actually matter what distro you use.
It's like whether you're wearing red socks or blue socks. As long as you're wearing socks, so you don't get cold.
Myself mentioned a bit below that the choice of a distribution isn’t that meaningful in the long run. But I still think that some distros should be recommended - otherwise the newbie simply says "Hannah Montana Linux, Justin Bieber Linux, Ubuntu Satanic Edition... bleeergh I can't choose, I give up".
damn Ubuntu Satanic Edition sounds cool.
A shame the project was discontinued, the visuals were fucking cool. (Yup, it was a real distro.)
Been on linux for almost half a year now. Don't miss a single bit of windows, thanks to steam proton. Also thanks to microsoft for pushing me over.
Same here. I do not miss all the shit windows did. Things like:
ironically half these things are what people think is the linux ux. Seriously, windows is just terrible, clunky, buggy and full of things you need to be an advanced user to fix.
Mints file explorer when moving large files does leave some meat on the bone for me.
I'm a very recent convert. I downloaded mint a couple months ago after seeing that my entire steam library was rated as highly compatible on protondb. At first I planned to dual boot but I didn't have any reason at all to use windows and finally just took the plunge and made Mint my daily, and sole, driver
As much as people complain about electron (some valid, some not) Linux has benefited quite a bit to the cross platform availability of local applications.
Switched to Mint recently. So far it's been smoother than I expected, but still had some crazy rough patches. Luckily, helping me through this junk seems to be one of the things AI excels at. I'm set up mostly how I want to be and it's been mostly working well enough so far. Mostly.
the copilot nonsense really irked me, but it was then they had the gumption to force this absurd recall bullshit on everyone--that's when i said i'm done, no more windows, no more M$
it's obviously a "feature" they sold to senior executive board members so that middle managers could spy on their cubicle drones, but to have the gumption to try and convince the world that this was something we wanted? get fucked microsoft
It’s more than that. They want training data for their LLMs. With enough training data, they can train these models to do office knowledge work themselves, removing the need to employ cubicle drones at all.
Might want to have some people a hit more coherent on which version of Linux so they don't get frustrated. Some people are jumping to distros that I've never heard of and getting annoyed it's not windows. Like yea no kidding Justin Bieber OS isn't getting updates. And your 3k series Nvidia isn't working. Switch to Hanna Montana DE like the rest of us.
Is it necessary though? Microsoft have already been campaigning pretty hard to get people to switch to Linux. Telling people their perfectly good PCs won't work anymore because the operating system is expiring, and they can't even "upgrade" to Windows 11 is a pretty powerful message.
I feel like eveyone should reccomend Fedora KDE edition, its close enough to Windows for new users and modern enough to not push people away.
I'm going to be migrating to Linux and using Mint. I'm just paranoid about doing something wrong and accidentally walking into a security vulnerability. So I want to set aside time to properly learn things and understand what I'm doing but I'm just busy AF these days...
Take it slow and do it the right way, don't let Lemmy pressure you if you're making slow but steady progress. It's a learning curve for sure
I have four pieces of advice
I usually prefer Debian based systems, but when I finally ditched windows 3 weeks ago, I switched to Manjaro, and I'm loving it. You got this!
Basically don't run random sudo(superuser do, root access) commands you find on the internet without reading what the command does from docs or asking ai.
Leaving windows makes you more secure.
Also don't worry about turning secureboot off. It makes it a lot less annoying and gets rid of a lot of issues. Also also steam doesn't like running on linux and having it's library on windows filesystem you gotta format them both, if your games are on a separate drive.
There you go, the two hurdles i had with linux.
This weekend I want to make a point to finally begin the transition to Linux...
You will be pleasantly surprised almost daily, I hope! There will be a minor learning curve since you are used to windows philosophy and linux is different.
I want mint to be my distro.
Switched to CachyOS a couple months ago and haven't looked back. Everything works right out the box including NVIDIA cards. Recommended it to a coworker to check out and he switched from Windows a month ago.
Honestly I don't mind 11. It's miles better than 10 ever was IMO. However with that being said, Linux is better. I have to dual boot Windows 11 on my computer because unfortunately there's no way I can use my Elgato Capture Device on a Linux machine.
As a 15 years old pc user who likes to play games with a 15 years old nvidia graphics card. The only thing that's preventing me from fully migrating to linux is the fact that nvidia doesn't support my gpu anymore, so no proprietary driver, unless, I use a 6 years old kernel version.
The only choice I have for modren distros is the nouveau drivers, which lacks behind alot specially when it comes to gaming.
I now have a dual boot setup running Popos and windows, but still I can't be fully free from Windows, having to reboot every time I feel like playing something.
I hope in the near future I get less broke to buy a new computer or maybe the new nvk drivers will supports my gpu which is unlikely.
Jeez. Pathetic losers.
On Linux for 15 years never thought of going back.
And u know what? It was harder back in the days nowadays all software is in the browser anyways so what are u even missing.
I tried ubuntu 15 years ago since it was the easiest. It was hell. Now linux is a more functional OS than windows is that asks the user to do even less in order to have everything working.
Ubuntu 12.04 was nice for desktop users. It just didn't do anything good for gaming at the time.
Couldn't even get internet to work... It was nightmare even despite me having grown up with an ATI card.
Yea I tried all the DE back during intel 3rd gens. And I really tried and wanted it to work.
Ive been seriously looking into making the switch. After some reading I decided Mint would be the easiest transition and downloaded the ISO to try it out with a USB boot. Im sure its a fluke, but since I have dual monitors the display was messed up and whenever I tried to fix it the entire GUI went away on both monitors and wouldn't recover. I had to force power off the machine and ive been hesitant since then to make the actual switch. Id hate to brick my machine right off the bat, just trying to swap display sources.
Peppermint is always left out. That is the perfect on for just working, stable and easy to move to from windows. It's also lightweight and fast.
Alright, I need to move my main desktop to linux. Help me decide which distribution. Note that I already run a desktop-less server on Debian, a raspi on their flavor of deb and have a laptop I rarely use on fedora (installed it to test the waters, but Mint would probably suit its use case more).
My main desktop PC is on windows and I wanna switch but im not sure which distro to switch to. The thing needs to be gaming ready for 2024 hardware. Debian is too slow to update for such a use case, I dont jive with Ubuntu philosophy, Arch is... im just not that kind of guy... so Im leaning on Fedora but I kinda dont like that it has 100 updates every time I boot it up. Is there any in between? Stable and quick with updates, but not when updates can crash the thing?
Edit: thanks for the recommendations, I'll probably check em all out!
I have fedora. It is fast with updates and it just works. You aren't pestered constantly with popups to install the updates and then your pc will randomly force restart to do the updates, you are in control. You just get a small popup that there are updates and you can decide what to install and when.
The only Issue I have is sometimes the updates break nvidia drivers. Thankfully linux keeps spare images of the working OS ready. What it means in practise when your games run like ass. I hard reset pc using power button while its booting and select another version and use that for a few days.
EndeavourOS should be fedora without those problems and iirc the nvidia driver distribution system is in the appstore by default (saves you from running like 3 commands).
Bear in mind if you do not disable secureboot, for every big kernel expansion you descide to add, you need to manually sign keys. This involves running a console command and restarting. I just disabled secureboot.
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