I had no issues with Nvidia. PopOs has support for Nvidia on install....I used it and it worked

I have a GTX 1080 and I've been gaming on Linux for over a year now. No issues. Only thing that you cant do is some of the new generation window managers (wayland) but even that is working well in the nvidia drivers that arent on stable yet. In any case, the previous generations window managers work great and if wayland doesnt work properly for you, you can just as easily do without it.

Point is, its worth it to make the switch. I set my partner up with Linux Mint when their machine didnt qualify for windows updates anymore and they've had no problems, games and all. And they would never touch the command line.

Would recommend

Nvidia drivers are mostly OK now.

EndeavourOS (Arch-based) works fantastic with latest Nvidia drivers, for me

I use Garuda and NVIDIA gives me no troubles

Running EndeavourOS with Nvidia on Wayland for some months now. Prior to 555 it was a bit janky at times. Since then, and now with 560, the only issue I'm having is related to sleep/hibernation mode. Game wise everything runs fine.

If you have a new NVIDIA GPU (Turing+), you can use the new open kernel module. If you have older ones, I guess you're stuck with the proprietary or bad unofficial open source ones. The open kernel module works good and gets the job done. No need to be afraid of it. I get over 1000fps in (optimized) minecraft with shaders. I couldn't do that in windows.

I made the switch with my old 1080ti the newer GPUs work even better and mine has given me almost 0 issues with Linux mint. It’s worth the dive. Mint also “just works” so it’s super easy to get into from Windows.

It may have been the case in the past but Ive used both the GTX 680 and RTX 3060 on Fedora with no issue whatsoever. I have veen using the nvidia peoprietary drivers and they work well.

You can run Windows in virtual machine, you know.

It would be the best if you could have dedicated GPU for it, to be able to run games with nearly 100% performance.

I guess it depends on what you do, but as an awerage user - not really much to learn in terms of Linux. No special knowledge needed to use it like a normal person. I had to reformat some drives so Linux can use them and learning about Heroic games launcher, Lutris and Bottles to run non-steam games and windows software amd learn about compatibility layer built into Steam.

Otherwise it just works. Using Linux Mint. Didn't boot to Windows pretty much since I installed it - there was no need.

Try a Live USB and find out for yourself if your distro of choice plays nice with your rig. You could have your answer in an hour or so of following YouTube tutorials.

I've had no significant driver issues with Mint and a 2080, myself. I switched back in February, and most things -- games included -- just work. The few that didn't, were easy to fix with some searching on stackoverflow and reddit (about the only thing that site is good for now).

if an idiot like me can do it, so can you.

As others have already pointed out Nvidia drivers aren't that bad. The only game I've had issues with is Star Wars Outlaws, but I think that has more to do with the game itself than Nvidia drivers (It's not exactly a stable experience on Windows either).

The only big thing holding Linux gaming back is anti-cheat, but that's mostly because AAA developers don't want to allow anti-cheat on Linux. It's worth checking out if your favorite online game can be played on Linux.

Worst thing is you may have to learn downgrade commands on PopOS if a game breaks with driver updates.

I moved to Linux Mint after a brief stint with Manjaro. I don't prefer the Cinnamon interface, but gaming has been perfect. Bottles, allows me to install GOG Galaxy and the games run. I even modded Skyrim using a manual process and a ton of animation mods, that worked alright a lot of times with Vortex ( for the most part).

Linux can handle NTFS partitions, and just take a small line to fix if they are open during a crash. Flatpak software is really stable to install and keep installed.

I haven't yet had a problem with steam games.

The only problem I have is with streaming services forcing Windows usage, so I got a VPN and raised the Jolly Roger to watch streaming services.

My 3080 plays games fine, and the few times it got a little slow I rebooted and it all worked fine. Discord calls and Twitch work fine. I even take my VA Online appointments with no issues.

It's closer to going back to Windows 7 or XP, with a decent free office software.

Nvidia drivers are the reason I end up going back to windows every time. Once installed they work fine, but installation and updating were always fraught with issues, and would inevitably break and piss me off to the point I gave up and went back to windows.

Haven't tried since I got my amd card, but maybe Nvidia Linux drivers are less terrible than they had been.

Valve is holding the carrot, Microsoft the stick.

Steam Deck is great, 10/10, would recommend, but you could also just load Linux on your old system and keep using it.

Just want to add that most games just work on Linux now. Valve has done some amazing work on this front. The Steam deck, or really any gaming PC with Steam, are perfectly good gaming boxes. Check out Proton DB if you want game-specific info.

Owned a system 76 unit years ago. Was lacking in the QC area.

Privacy, security, intellectual property

After all the fud and opposition they’ve pushed against it over the years.

what did they do?? i havent heard of this before damn

There will 100% be a policy to disable it. Microsoft may shit on their retail users, but there's no way they'd force it on their enterprise clients. It's a security and compliance nightmare and they know it.

If MS isn’t letting people uninstall it, there’s a reason for it,

🤑 and control

Recall is malware, at least according to Malwarebytes!

Malware, or “malicious software,” is an umbrella term that refers to any malicious program or code that is harmful to systems.

Windows Update is 100% malware by definition. Remember when Windows 7 had a free upgrade to Windows 10? It would force itself into the update queue with regular updates regardless of the user's permission, and even after x days after the user explicitly said they didn't want Windows 10. I worked in a computer repair shop in that time. The Windows 10 upgrade that people didn't want or agree to often failed, breaking the machine. Sometimes we could recover the installation. Sometimes the OS had to be reinstalled. It was intentionally pushing software in deceiving ways to unconsenting users that broke their machine.

As far as Linux distros are concerned, really, any distro is just a package manager with repos and a set of default utilities. Essentially, a distro is an opinion on how you should use your system, not a law. Now prepare for my ADHD-fuelled stream of consciousness (which I wrote instead of getting any work done, yay):

Stay away from Arch and Gentoo for your first distro. These are basically meme distros, especially Gentoo. They allow for a lot of flexibility and building a really minimal install, but come with install-time complexity you really don't need. Try them later on if you're interested. Stay away from nixOS for now too, although it's also awesome.

Package managers

Essentially, you have two main packaging types: RPM (used by Fedora/RedHat's dnf, previously yum and (Open)SuSE's zypper) and deb (used by apt mostly, dunno if others).

Either one is fine, but I think you'll probably find more software available as debs. But the difference barely exists and with GUI apps you can usually install a flatpak anyway (more on this later).

Deb

Everything deb/apt comes from the Debian lineage.

You have Debian, the granddaddy of stability, releases come every few years and are tested thoroughly. After package freeze, only bugfixes and security updates usually get added. Then you have Ubuntu, a fork of Debian with more frequent releases as well as Long-Term Support releases every 2 years. Ubuntu used to be the most recommended beginner distro, but it's no longer the case - not just because it has ads in it, but also because it pushes Snaps over Flatpaks AND occasionally tries to force Snaps over regular packages (again, more on this later).

Then, much like Ubuntu has forked Debian, others have forked Ubuntu. There's Linux Mint - used to have the same release cadence as Ubuntu, but now they only base their releases off Ubuntu LTS versions. Really, it's Ubuntu without all the commercial stuff Ubuntu's been pushing. And they maintain their own desktop environment(s), but you can get those elsewhere too. There's also Pop!_OS which is developed by System76, a laptop manufacturer. It used to come with its' own customizations on top of Gnome, but now they're creating their own desktop environment altogether, which is currently in Alpha 2. And then there's KDE Neon, which is also based on Ubuntu LTS, but it ships the latest version of KDE Plasma desktop environment, rather than whatever version is in the latest Ubuntu LTS.

Rpm

On the rpm side, you mostly have two families for non-enterprise users: Fedora, which has a similar release cadence to Ubuntu, but apparently keeps packages more up to date between releases and OpenSuSE, which has Leap (new versions every year, with critical bugfixes and security updates in the meantime) and Tumbleweed, which is rolling release, so you just get the latest version of every package that has been tested, rather than having to wait for a new release. Tumbleweed gets updated just about every day. There's also Slowroll, which gets big updates monthly, but can still get bugfixes between those.

Desktop Environments

For just about any distro, you can get just about any desktop environment. Ubuntu and Fedora default to Gnome. KDE Neon is pretty much just meant to be used with KDE Plasma. Pop!_OS defaults to customized Gnome unless you get the alpha version of the new COSMIC desktop. OpenSUSE defaults to KDE Plasma.

For Ubuntu you get variants like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc, for whatever desktop you want, or you can switch alter (apt install kubuntu-desktop for an example). For Fedora, you can get a Fedora Spin, like Fedora KDE Spin for an example. Or you can similarly switch: dnf install @kde-desktop-environment. Same goes for all of them, really.

Desktop environments: The two big ones are KDE Plasma (close to Windows in default appearance, but a lot more customizable, and more functional straight out of the box) and Gnome, which as of Gnome 3 is just... unique, I guess. It's different. Then on the "Help I'm running this on a computer from 2004" side you have things like XFCE and LXQT. (Xubuntu, Lubuntu get their names from these). Those work just fine too, just a bit less eye candy. There are a lot more of less mainstream ones like Budgie or Enlightenment, but you can worry about those later.

Sandboxed applications - Flatpak, Snap

Now, why did I mention Flatpaks and Snaps earlier? Those are sandboxed package managers. A package comes with a sandbox of its' own, and Flatpak or Snap keeps a copy of all the libraries it depends on, instead of using system libraries. This means that 1) There's never a version conflict between what's installed on your system and what the application uses and 2) You have multiple copies of some libraries (Flatpak and Snap both I think do try to deduplicate though so if two applications use the same version of a dependency, it keeps one copy stored). 3) You can install applications your distro doesn't even have a package for.

Both also keep system resources out of reach of the applications, so they're more secure to some degree if you don't trust an application. This comes with limitations, too - sometimes you NEED your application to have access to something that's limited in Flatpak or Snap. You can sorta fix this with flatseal for Flatpak, but it's not perfect.

The real problem with Snap, besides having a proprietary backend vs Flatpak where you can use either Flathub or another application store with it, is that Ubuntu is starting to force it upon you - including for applications you may not want to run in a sandbox at all. You'll run apt install firefox and it'll play a trick on you and install the Snap instead of the deb. You lose some control over your system and how you use it. You can override this, but it's possibly more work than you'd want to take on as a brand new Linux user.

At the end of the day, I recommend using either OpenSuSE Tumbleweed (if you want latest and greatest always), Fedora, Linux Mint, or Pop!_OS. If you really want the latest and greatest KDE Plasma and don't want Tumbleweed, then KDE Neon might make sense for you.

I'm in the exact same boat as you.

After ten hours of research you will have learned that Linux Mint with Cinnamon is the one you're looking for, for an intro. Widely used, familiar, stable.

Feel free to read a bunch to confirm.

Linux Mint seems to be one of the most recommended for newcomers.

"Burn" the ISO on an USB drive, boot live from it and give it a try.

There's plenty to read up on but I think starting with any is a good place. You'll find stuff you dislike. I'd recommend setting up ventoy on a USB (it will let you have several linux images on one thumb drive) and testing out most importantly the desktop environment (DE).

Main ones being KDE, GNOME, and cinnamon that comes with Mint (which is a great first distro to test).

If you end up having questions feel free to DM me

The transition is really not difficult. A distribution like Xubuntu (XFCE+Ubuntu) is very easy. Everything should work out of the box.

Check out Aeon and Fedora Silverblue. I'm installing Aeon on Desktops and MicroOS on Servers. My computer needs to be a reliable tool. Immutable distros make it exactly that.

The last thing I want to do in my free time or during my work day is be forced to fiddle with some poorly documented and/or implemented idiocy on my personal computer because I forgot to cast the correct incantation prior to updating something. I'm not a masochist.

EDIT To the hesitant but hopeful Windows+Nvidia user: give Fedora Kinoite a try. Check my reply to @[email protected] below for details.

Try Debian

Things seem to have improved in the last 5 years, so maybe give it another shot. I'm on Fedora 40 with gnome and lots of extensions, and I'm constantly tinkering with it to make it look just right (for fun, not that I feel like I have to). Nothing catastrophic has happened yet!🤞

I spent much of yesterday getting Debian to work on my old MacBook.

In theory it's relatively straightforward, but there are so many little niggles and roadblocks that it really sours the experience.

I set up a user account upon install, as it asked me to, but when I tried to do something with sudo it just kept telling me that I wasn't in the Sudoers group. Mine is the only account on the machine, why isn't that set up by default? So I searched for a solution, which appears to have a bunch of different ways to do it, but none of them quite worked, or worked first time. The first few solutions involved using the terminal, but in the end it was easier to open the document in the file manager and edit it as a root user. Linux users are hard for using a terminal when they could just open a document in a text editor.

In the end I got everything set up how I wanted, but it probably shouldn't have taken a whole day of irritation.

No, we don't. When people use words you don't understand to ask and answer their own questions, the solution is simple - say that you are a newbie and ask your question in your words. Just ask additional questions when you don't understand something. Politely, and not like "you nerds, nothing works, help me asap".

EDIT: Who downvoted this? People really expect others to specifically limit their speech to what a random lurker can understand? And think that using words they don't understand for interactions not involving them makes a community toxic?

Dear Troll, if that were the case askubuntu wouldn't be a thing.

Have you tried Linux Mint Cinnamon? It's about as beginner-friendly as it gets, has help forums, a dedicated chat built-in for getting help, a welcome screen that walks you through how to do updates/backups/firewall/etc, and works out of the box. I'm an ex-Windows user and I've been using Mint for almost a year now with practically no issue.

I cannot imagine a less welcoming and beginner friendly community

You have very little imagination, then.

That's a horribly wrong idea of us that everyone seems to have.

Internet explorer did similar things, try to remove it and the OS would just crash.

Edit: just remembered it also had direct memory access to make it faster (well, less slow) which was so insanely unsecure on so many levels.

"Do I look like I know what a Wayland is?"

Had me in the first half, not gonna lie.. "Windows is very simple and lightweight" 😂

And as if it's entirely reasonable for the maker of your OS to intentionally work against your ability to control your own hardware and what runs on it.

Happy Debian daily driver here. I would never ever recommend raw Debian to a garden variety would-be Linux convert.

If you think something like Debian is something a Linux illiterate can just pick up and start using proficiently, you're severely out of touch with how most computer users actually think about their machines. If you even so much as know the name of your file explorer program, you're in a completely different league.

Debian prides itself on being a lean, no bloat, and stable environment made only of truly free software (with the ability to opt-in to nonfree software). To people like us, that's a clean, blank canvas on a rock-solid, reliable foundation that won't enshittify. But to most people, it's an austere, outdated, and unfashionable wasteland full of flaky, ugly tooling.

Debian can be polished to any standard one likes, but you're expected to do it yourself. Most people just aren't in the game to play it like that. Debian saddles questions of choice almost no one is asking, or frankly, even knew was a question that was ask*-able*. Mandatory customizeability is a flaw, not a feature.

I am absolutely team "just steer them to Mint". All the goodness of Debian snuck into their OS like medicine in a kid's dessert, wrapped up in something they might actually find palatable. Debian itself can be saved for when, or shall I say if, the user eventually goes poking under the hood to discover how the machine actually ticks.

Debian is probably one of the worst choices for someone looking to try Linux, especially for gaming.

Nothing better than setting everything up only to find you can't install some new thing because your xyz is too old

Also I would recommend looking into Debian, the software may be a tad bit old but its the most stable distribution

I daily drive Mint, which is in the Debian family. Highly recommend it as it is geared for a 'works out of the box' experience for people. And the default UI (Cinnamon) is very familiar to Windows users. Complete with a task bar, tray, and searchable start menu.

Pure Debian is more of a server OS, and not something one should recommend as a daily driver. It's not deficient in that, but it takes a fair bit of work to get it up and running for daily use.

Same. First distro that was actually painless 10 years ago, and I haven't looked back.

I've been very impressed by the out-of-the-box experience with Pop!_OS. My Steam games work, and I have Elder Scrolls Online running through Lutris.

So far, everything just works.

Maybe Cinnamon mate!

Mate you think BSD is better than Linux for ease-of-configuration -- in what fucking universe?!

Warhammer was close, but the grim dark was way off

For Photoshop alternatives, I'd start with GIMP for photo editing

I have always felt that GIMP was the ultimate software Camel. As in, designed by a committee to include everything and the kitchen sink without any coherent UI/UX.

It’s the software industry’s 1965 Lada masquerading as a 2024 model.

If it wasn’t for Paint.NET still missing vectorized/sprite-based text (it instantly rasterizes text the moment focus leaves it), I don’t think I could ever use GIMP.

I've been a LONG time user of Adobe, grew up with PhotoDeluxe and pre-suite Photoshop and used every version of Cretive Suite since my parents ran a graphic design business. I made all my high school essays in InDesign CS4. Suffice to say, growing bitter over proprietary software in the last few years has been painful but I'm doing my best to move to only FOSS.

There was a point in time I tried replacing Premiere with DaVinci Resolve, but I quickly noticed it was oriented for color correction, and some of its features for composition were locked behind Fusion. These days, if you can believe it, I do all my video editing in Blender. It's still got a long way to go, but since v4 the VSE has gotten really good. I'd like to try kdenlive when I finish migrating to Linux, but on Windows it basically doesn't support GPU encoding which is a dealbreaker for me.

Adobe Fresco is replaced quite well by Krita. It has a learning curve but is far more powerful as a result. I'm still learning but I'm impressed.

I don't really like Scribus, but I don't really have a need for software like InDesign, so I haven't had to worry about it.

I've used Inkscape way back just because it was portable when Illustrator wasn't. It was pretty minimal back then but I can see it's grown greatly in depth. The workflow is enough to be disruptive, but not too badly to work through I think.

And finally the titan, Photoshop. It's such a massive and ubiquitous software that it simply cannot be replaced by any single program. At least since I moved to drawing in Fresco I don't use PS for that, but again Krita is a fine replacement. Pixel art in PS is very normal too, but that's replaced quite nicely by Aseprite, it's more capable in that space and still quite easy to use if you don't know its features. It's the photo editing and general purpose image editing that's the real challenge. I keep hoping that version 3 of GIMP will magically fix its problems, but in the meantime it's frustratingly clear that it's built by software engineers, not artists, but it's often made out that it's everybody else's burden to forget everything they know and start from scratch to learn its special workflow. There's an interesting patch someone made called PhotoGIMP that's supposed to improve that, but I haven't spent enough time with it to really say. Currently my only alternative is Photopea. It works great right now, but I don't like that it's a web app and not FOSS. I really hope I can eventually find an alternative that I can finally be comfortable with.

I love Krita!! I put my specialty software into a virtual machine, aka the shame box. You can disable networking for it. 😈

For me I would start with affinity while not in linux but it's OK on wine can be a bit buggy tho but you need to compile a custom version of wine and no hardware acceleration support and it's possible they are gonna release a linux build as well.

I wanted to but a NAS system anyways to do house backups and stuff.

And this system is RAIDed so getting everything on to the NAS will be easiest and start the process of setting up backups for the home.

It still can’t.. Hidden somewhere deep in windows, there is still a IE, believe me.

Depends on the headset, they don't all work on Linux unfortunately.

It was mostly working 2 years ago when I tried it last. I just had some weird frame dropping issues at the time that I can only imagine were fixed by now. This post is making me want to try VR again on my linux install

Yes, I even play VR Windows games on Linux., the latest one released just weeks ago being Subside.

I'm using a Valve Index but with ALVR even standalone HMDs, e.g. (sadly from Meta) the cheap Quests line. You can find a lot more details on https://lvra.gitlab.io

BricsCAD has a native Linux client

Put it in a shame box (VM). This is how I run my specialty software.

I havent found anything I can't do with freecad and blender.

vMs work well too though.

Indeed but I very rarely, if ever need it except for some games. Usually there are FLOSS equivalent of most software. They are sometimes worst but often just as good and, obviously, they can be modified. So Wine and Proton are amazing but hopefully needed less and less.

Yes. It is (or at least it was, don't know about Windows 11) in the Folder Settings.

But but muh Linux is better.

Though to be fair, Linux has had some great developments!

I will be SO glad when my Windows 10 stops getting forced updates.

That said, it's getting so much better every year. It's already ahead of Windows in user-friendlyness IMO, but every year I'm amazed by how much cooler it gets.

The only thing I can say is that on Linux, you get excited by the thought of updating your system. It's like a Christmas feeling instead of a Monday one.

Agree. And as someone who planted that tree 25 years ago, the shade sure is nice year after year.