Suggestions to switch a daily laptop to linux.
Suggestions to switch a daily laptop to linux.
I've been using this hp gaming laptop with win10 since 2 years ago with an old dumb LG screen for coding/emulate (35%) or gaming (25%) and other 40% without the 2nd screen (browsing/documents).
I've used fedora/red hat in university but it was almost 10 years ago for specific software (emu/simulators) so I'm kind of noob in general terms and I'm afraid I'll be leaving dual boot just in case.
I've read some posts before about out of the box distros (because the nvidia gtx 1650ti mainly) but I'm not sure if I should go for bazzite or cachyos or opensuse tumbleweed or a better distro that fits great in my case and about desktop, KDE (plasma) is my choice at the moment.
Thanks in advance.
Edit: I appreciate your comments and warnings (mainly about arch/gaming based distros and other tips). I didn't want controversy but I use that laptop for almost everything at home and I'm realizing that I need to invest more time both learning and extracting backups because the machine is limited and I'm willing to become a full linux user in the mid term.
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Fedora seems favourite as you've used it. There's a new version due toward the end of March so you may want to hang on, to avoid legacy stuff being upgraded. Maybe they'll remove the x11 drivers. Fedora has changed a lot but you'll want to install the other repos first thing and there's also a large move towards flatpak (which works very well).
There's also the inst.sdboot install flag to avoid the legacy grub install.
I don't find the install very easy to understand, compared to things like Debian but it's worth the fiddle.
ArchLinux is the other alternative.
I'm kind of noob in general terms and I'm afraid I'll be leaving dual boot just in case.
ArchLinux is the other alternative.
Never change internet. Never change.
OP, don't go with the hype, don't go arch Linux as your first distro, you can change to it later when you get more comfortable and feels like having a more hands on approach.
PS: I don't think that matters but just in case, I am an arch user for at least 12 years already as my only OS (except work computer) and I find it wild that so many people recommends arch Linux (or any of its derivatives) for beginners. I can only guess how many people get burnt and give up on Linux because of it.
Upvoted with caveats
I choose clean OSs with minimal additional code and settings added by distro maintainers. Fedora is fairly good. ArchLinux is excellent.
ArchLinux actually makes quite a good first distro if you're willing to learn GNU/Linux. If you grew up with the early non-NT (DOS) Windows then you're more than used to trying to squeeze the most out of Windows by learning how it works. That was a long time ago now.
I moved from Windows to Linux just after the turn of the century because Microsoft were making it more difficult to use your own OS on your own machine.
After Fedora Core 4+ I ended up using ArchLinux for the longest time. It's early adoption of systemd was a factor, as was the rolling nature.
Archlinux is good if you accept that you'll need to spend time to learn it, and that those moments might be frequent and unavoidable early on. Definitely wouldn't recommend it to somebody who needs their computer to work, since a new user with no experience might find themselves breaking their boot images and spending hours trying to figure out how to fix their computer not booting.
So yeah, I think that's an important caveat: if you don't know Linux already, and you can't afford to spend time learning and fixing your system, don't use Arch.