Alright you nerds, I made the jump to Linux.

One of us! One of us!

NOOOOOs very darth vader-y

And I would have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for your meddling logic.

The nerd team!

"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"

Happy to post this! I wish you good luck with your switch!

My approach was of course to backup all my personal files to a large backup drive. I exported as many as configurations for my programs as I could - like for Handbrake and FreeTube as an example. I backed up those configs so that on my Linux OS I could just import them and have all my programs configured the way I wanted. Before I pulled the plug on my windows, I also wrote down every program I used and saved it into a simple list, so that I can hunt for alternatives.

That approach I think was great for me since I spent a lot of time planning and carefully backing everything up.

It’s been very smooth for me with minor hiccups when I first cutover to Linux Mint, but I’m damn happy with how well things have gone.

Take your time to methodically prepare and I’m sure you’ll do well when you’re ready to commit.

You have the option of trying without installing. Lots of Linux distros can run straight from DVD or USB without having to be installed. This way you can rest assure that it will either work for you once installed or you can just eject the media without altering or touching anything on your drive.

Oh that’s so awesome, I had no idea about this! I jotted this down and will definitely try it out tomorrow. Things I take for granted and know so well in Photoshop, I can’t even figure out for the life of me how to do in GIMP. It’s practice what I need, and this package sounds great to help me ease into it again. Thank you!

Rip it's not in the aur

Sounds amazing. Using GIMP sounded like the worst part of this whole endeavor.

Can verify that photogimp is brilliant. As well as the interface it also creates photoshop like keyboard shortcuts too. There are one or two things not quite right but on the whole its a life saver.

This sounds awesome! Thank you for commenting about it

Just installed this and tried it out. THANK YOU. It immediately cured most of the things that drive me nuts about GIMP!

You may be my savior because I plan on playing some comp this weekend and don't want crashes.

Do you just set the game compatibility to force Steam compatibility and then Proton Experimental? Did you get rid of any of the launch options that I saw all over the Steam forums and Proton DB (e.g., steamdeck=1 ) ?

This hit me in the gender

I must have missed that promotion, any chance I could order some?

Another nail in the Windows coffin.

Another lost potential customer for Linux hostile gaming publishers.

Thank you! Now I'm ready to kill the Batman and torrent more Linux ISOs. It will make a fine piece to my collection

A direct hop is usually not the best way to move into the Linux world. The best way I've heard (and wished I did myself) is slowly start migrating to programs that will be available and you'll be using, while still on Windows. Get used to how new things work and if an emergency comes up, you can fall back to your tried and true tools. Then, just keep migrating apps until most of what you use is open source stuff, or stuff widely available. (Spotify, Discord, Zoom, etc.) Once you have your workflow worked out, you've found substitutes for things you can't get on Linux, then is a good time to take the plunge.

Going cold turkey is going to be really rough. I had Fedora on a side piece laptop for years before my first try on my workstation and it was a disaster. Less than a week later I had to go back to Windows. But, now I'm familiar with the tools I use and I've been a full convert for a few months now and it's been great.

You can do it! Just...take it slow.

It depends on what kind of software you usually use. You should look up the programs you use regularly/can't live without to see if they have Linux versions or if they have decent replacements. If everything there checks out, find an LTS distro. Debian/Ubuntu and derivatives (PopOS or Mint) or fedora and derivatives (I don't know any fedora derivatives) would be good.

I started using PopOS last year for a gaming machine and all the tinkering I did, I did because I'm a nerd and I wanted to. If I wanted an easy experience without even looking at a command line I think I could've.

One more thing. Most (maybe all?) Linux distros can be booted and viewed in a live environment from a USB without having to erase your whole drive (just make sure you don't go through the setup and actually erase your drive (unless you want to))

I mean, it's not like I haven't spent hours debugging windows. Why is the sound crackling? WHY?

Never solved it and Linux just worked

Linux Mint has been set and go for me personally. You will thank us later.

I’m sure others have mentioned this and you know it by now. But just in case, it is possible to run a complete Linux desktop from DVD or USB without installing. It is a good check to make sure your hardware is compatible and everything works for you.

I think one failure of the Linux community is not communicating that this feature has been around for two decades now.

Agree with both commenters.

Make a live USB, see if you like it, and then install Linux alongside Windows in a dual-boot configuration. Note that it is recommended to use two different physical drives for the respective operating systems, but one will do as well.

Then do everything in Linux while feeling safe that there is still Windows to fall back to.

ONE OF US!

Seriously glad to hear that. It just sounded like the best way to go into this. It was very scary at first because I encountered a few hiccups that I had to do a lot of research to figure it out, but so far I've been great.

Same, did a rebuild of my PC when I cannibalized my old one into a media server (really only kept the drives, so not really more like just built a new one...), bought two nvme drives for it with the intent to put Linux on the first and Windows on the second, but held off on putting Windows onto it to force myself to stick with it until I got a real sense for what I'd need it for...

A couple months later I decided I'd just use that second drive for more storage. Hasn't run Windows once in over ten months of use and I've yet to miss it.

Only took me sixteen or eighteen years of saying I'm going to switch to actually do it...

Ooh that sounds cool! I'll check that out!

What file explorer does Mint use by default? Pretty sure Dolphin has this option built-in...

Thank you! I only wish I discovered all this back when I was a teenager and had much more free time! I could have been a wizard like all these other nerds posting here!

Ah well, I'm never late or early, as I understand the lore. Picard or Dumbledore said that, it's true.

Also important to know is, us that Mint is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian. The majority of Stuff that works on Linux Mint should work the sane way on Debian and Ubuntu(except UI solutions OFC). So if you're stuck try exchanging "how to do XYZ in Linux Mint" to "how to do XYZ in Ubuntu/Debian"

I'm working on learning all the terminology, which I'll figure out over time as I immerse myself.

Things that catch my attention are distro hopping. As a hopefully former Windows user, the idea of being able to switch your OS to another distro just baffles me. Without having any understanding of this, I would imagine it's possible switching from a Debian to a different Debian distro. But if I switched from an entirely new "framework" (no idea what to call original Linux distros), such as Fedora to Debian or something, that baffles me. I don't expect to distro hop but who knows!

And then I learned you can switch things out like KDE, Gnome, and even learned that Gnome is not pronounced like the traditional word, but like "Guh-Nome" as a play on the acronym "GNU". LOL

I'm very much a novice with this system. In the past I tried to roll Pop_OS! and also Ubuntu, but they were so glitchy and didn't work great for me. After having my Steam Deck and seeing just how stable Linux is, I felt much more confident going all in on Linux Mint (appreciating Steam Deck is Arch).

Anyway, the point of my rambling is unknown. If you made it this far, I'm proud of you.

Even though I was aware of it, this was one of my challenges. I was using Bazzite, which is obviously so niche that few tutorials would be specific. So, I tried to understand which distro was the base layer for it, and based my searches around that. Even then, a lot of things felt inapplicable, or needed to go through its containerized compatibility structure.

Don't make me blush bro

Thank you for this! I jotted down your launch options along with what some of the other persons here were posting. Hoping of course NetEase can get this addressed in a coming update so we don't have to use this workaround.

Congrats on the cutover! I don't play Fortnite any more but my spouse wants to give it a go some time. If I play with them, I may have to install a Windows drive as a secondary device after all. Totally forgot about this game because I don't think I currently play any games that can't work on Linux.

This also skips the launcher, which is nice

It's the one I recommend, but honestly have never actually used. I've gotten a few people to successfully switch with it and got a few others away from Ubuntu (my first distro), hence why I keep recommending it.

That's how they getcha. First you install Linux because it looked fun, then you buy a small NAS to protect your most important data, next thing you know you have a server rack in your basement and a half petabyte of storage. Don't listen to him, OP! This is the path to many financial woes. Run while you still can!

Appreciate the advice. I'll be looking into something like that for sure to have some kind of on-prem storage solution. NAS might be the best way to go so I'll be looking into that this year as I get more comfortable.

Edit: I realise I said USB drive in my post lol. I meant I'm using a large external hard drive for all my media rather than thumb drives! :) My external HDD is a "USB drive" I guess, it's just a big one.

I felt like such an old dude when I made a list of all the programs I used on Windows so that I could begin looking for replacements on Linux lol. Some of the ones that I still have to get setup are things like MakeMKV, as I love backing up all my purchased physical movies.

Candidly there was no need for me to change my hardware out. But if I was going all in, I figured I'd go all in. My 12700k and RTX 3080 were working flawlessly on Windows, but I always heard AMD generally works much better. New OS, new hardware, new me.

That's what I like the most about it is that it's mostly familiar. I think it's an excellent OS to bridge users leaving Windows.

Years ago I experimented by dual booting pop_OS! and also Ubuntu. But they always ran so poorly for me, despite having great hardware at the time (i7-7700k and GTX 1080). It was just super frustrating so I abandoned it.

Last year as part of my preparation and research to get off Windows, I rolled VMs of Zorin OS and Linux Mint. Zorin was good overall, but Linux Mint just felt better to me. There's so much information available online for Mint, and over time as I get comfortable with the Linux ecosystem, I probably won't be using internet search terms like "install error XYZ someprogramhere on Linux Mint". 😀

Heck yeah, and I got it for retail price! Best gaming CPU, and my first AMD since like... Athlon days.

Always great advice. I set up Time Shift to take daily and weekly snapshots. Is that all I need or is there a "backup" thing I need to engage.

My history of this in Windows was System Restore, but that was always hit or miss for me back in the Windows XP days. Although I was a teen so I probably didn't know fully well what I was doing.

My first month was finding out how to unbreak that thing I shouldn't have touched, knew I shouldn't have touched, but touched it anyways. Step 1 is snapshots.

Woah now there buddy. This fellar just starting down the long trail of Linux and you are already trying to shanghai them to terminal land?

When I studied I had classes in bash lol. So when I tried out distro of linux, I found myself relying more on terminal than desktop x_x (then proceeded to terminally kill my desktop enviroment, damage some wifi apps, change shit up and had to reinstall :| )

Why wait?

Not sure I'm hot enough to pull that look off

Thanks bud, saving some links for reference. I've heard about proton-ge, and from some quick high-level reading, it appears to be some kind of fork of steam's proton, but has some other fixes that I believe are community oriented or address things that Steam cannot. I'm gonna doing some reading into that to understand more about it and see how it can help me in other games.

The others are helpful! I remember MangoHud from Steam Deck, but only at a surface level. Didn't even think about putting that onto my new system as I've just been using System Profiler to see some metrics when I play! I come from the MSI Afterburner crowd, so I'm hoping MangoHud will meet my performance monitoring needs!

The proton db site is very confusing to me. I tried submitting a report but the UI is just so wonky. It needs a little love, but it seems like a really good resource still.

Thanks for the suggestion on tiling, I will look into that as well. I remember one thing I heard about Pop_OS was it's excellent implementation of tiling, so this sounds interesting to me.

Curiously I forgot to try EndeavourOS. I'll roll Linux Mint for now and then if my use case changes, I'll explore it. So far I've only recently tried Pop_OS!, Zorin, and Ubuntu. Linux Mint felt best for how I currently use computers. I'm interested in the idea of whatever an "AUR", so I'll do some research on that too and log that away for some ideas.

Serious question. Why? I see that it’s the first step in the learn Linux course on Reddit. Lots of people talk about it.

I’m damn near considering getting that started but I’d still have no idea why other than curiosity and stubbornness 😆

And with these specs, this server will be so powerful that it will actually serve other servers. Even servers that don't exist yet. It'll be so fast that persons will be like "whoa, this is too fast, please slow it down!"

Good to know! Somewhere in this thread I mentioned that I heard AMD typically works better, so it gave me an excuse to also upgrade my video card and pick up an RX 7900 XTX. Lesson learned though! But I can't complain too much as I got a big uplift along with a massive improvement in VRAM - 10 GB to 24 GB.

I installed my RTX 3080 into my home theater PC where my spouse and I will game on from time to time when we want a couch TV game on PC. We recently set up PS VR2 on that PC, and with the 3080, the games run so great.

What about my GeForce 6600 GT?

Definitely will be taking advantage of those two softwares. I tried dabbling with Syncthing when I got my Steam Deck, because I wanted the save files for my... er, Linux ISOs, to sync with my Windows PC. I couldn't get it to reliably work (user error probably). So this time I'll try again and hopefully it will be much better!

I’m curious which of your games doesn’t work on Linux? It’s usually the ones with a particular anti-cheat system.

To each their own my friend! I thought of riding out Win 10 and installing Linux Mint on an old computer, such as my really old Macbook Pro from 2012. But for my use case, forcing myself to use it and work through hurdles seemed to be best because after a long work day I was afraid I wouldn't spend time trying out Linux.

Thankfully, I've had basically 99% perfection while using Linux Mint. The 1% were the little unique problems that I'm still trying to solve, such as getting OpenRGB to work and detect my devices. Inability for CoolerControl to control my case fans, no way to control my AMD GPU fans, etc. I'll invest time into figuring these out, but for now, all my games work and I just ignore the RGB I can't control via software.

Yep, I definitely chose hard mode. I wanted to minimise the chance of me giving up and reverting to Windows. By eliminating it entirely, I've made it much more difficult for myself as I'm forcing myself to manage, learn, and try to get things working in Linux.

At some point, perhaps months down the road, where I find that I'm fully comfortable, then I'll most likely add a secondary drive with Windows on it for those edge-cases that I can't get working on Linux.

Fullscreen Xorg windows that use the gpu bypass everything, so it should be the same. Wayland could even be "worse". Both also support direct input.

I use wayland only because moving windows around is smoother. It's still a bigger pain overall. "Not quite there yet" is how I would describe it.