Good morning With recent changes to the Windows platform I’ve decided to make the swap to Linux. While it’s not the first time I’ve tried it out I’m hoping to find the transition easier this time. I’m giving Mint a go and will try and make this my main OS. I will keep windows as a dual boot option for now just in case I have to do a task that I haven’t learned how to do with Linux.
So far I’ve managed to get steam running and tested a game I’d play to confirm it was working.
I suspect the biggest challenge will be terminal.
If anyone has any feedback or suggestions I’m open to them. Heck even funny moments when you first started. I still find when Linus nuked his setup very funny.
if you have a fairly modern computer with a gpu and > 8gb ram i would give bazzite a go
it’s very friendly for new users, as it protects the core operating system and let’s you rollback changes and updates, and also makes gaming of all kinds very easy
My advice is to plan for eventually ditching windows completely. Use it in the beginning while youre learning, for tasks that you need to get done but dont know how on linux, but once you get comfortable with the general linux stuff, i recommend ditching the crutch of windows. That way youll be forced to use linux, which is the only way youll learn how to do those things on it.
Its so much more convenient to have just one system, and also windows has been known to mess up linux installs (replaces bootloader with its own m$ one which doesnt recognise linux. Not too bad to fix but its a pain you dont need for ever)
Agreed. I’m working towards that goal. I think the biggest hurdle is if a game runs on Windows but not as well on Linux I might opt to finish the game on Windows. Even with proton I did find a game I was playing recently was noticeably lower quality or “laggy”
One thing that I still sometimes trip up on: it’s ctrl+shift+c or v when copying and pasting to or from the terminal, rather just just ctrl+c or v.
Welcome!
If you think the biggest challenge is going to be the terminal then how about a fun little game that will make you more familiar. It is a quite basic game that focuses on some of the commands that are used frequently in Linux.
I assume you already know the package/update commands of course.
https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/
I gotta say, with all the nonsense about using ai to analyze notepad and every PC is now a copilot ai PC, this feels like the year of Linux. I made the switch myself to Arch(hyprland) and personally discovered how much I love tiling Windows managers.
In case you’re not aware, btrfs is amazing. I run snapshots on my days every hour. This works for my personal data and protects me if an update goes sideways.
And finally, I’m unsure about Mint, but on Arch, flatpak has been amazing for installing software. It installs as a tenant of your PC with limited privileges.
Also, since you mentioned steam, you may wish to look at gamescope in order to utilize the full steam deck ui.
I’ll check that link this weekend when I have more time.
I have limited experience with terminal. I used it to update Mint last year when I tried but had to read a lot of forums just to know what to type.
I have no idea what btrfs is or gamescope. I’ll look them up soon.
I did find the flat pak to help install programs and got a few loaded already.
Btrfs is a partition type/filesystem. It is meant to solve two problems.
One, it is meant so you can combine partitions from multiple drives (similar to raid 0,1, or 10). Technically it is capable of raid 5, but lacks reliable performance.
Two, it also provides reverse incremental snapshotting capabilities. Good for backing up data.
I’m using it in combination with grub-btrfs so if an update fails, I can boot from a snapshot to fix it without a live cd or reinstall.
Gamescope is what runs on a steam deck in gaming mode. I have my gaming PC configured to use gamescope for HDR gaming.
Finally, the link I sent is technically a war game. It is more meant to teach you to keep things secure more than anything else. In short you will control one of their cloud hosted machines over ssh and they hid the password somewhere on it. In order to win, you need a few commands: cat, vim, cd, ls, and git. It introduces them as you go. Eventually, I think it escalated to using netcat, honestly I stumbled through that part, and the git part too.
I’m not sure if mastering the terminal is a goal of yours, but I use tools to make it significantly easier. Instead of bash, I use ZSH. Combine that with Oh-my-zsh for theming and plugins(I like zsh-autocomplete, zsh-autosuggestions, zsh-syntaxhighlighting, fast-syntaxhighlighting), and zoxide to replace cd.
When it comes to updating, it can be different per distribution. Mint uses apt, typically you will need:
sudo apt update # Gets the latest version number of each package sudo apt upgrade # Install the latest version of each available updateApt is the package manager of most device based installation.
Yum/Dnf are the primary package managers for fedora and Red hat distros.
There are a few others, but I’ve gotten off topic enough.
Regardless, it is good to see someone joining the community. If you need any help with anything feel free to reach out to us, you are not in this alone. And if ever you can’t figure out a command, try running it with --help. Ex:
ls --help cd --help cat --help
Here’s my advice: On Windows, hardware either works or it needs a driver or it’s broken.
On Mac, it either works or it doesn’t.
On Linux, it either works or it doesn’t, but maybe if you find tge right obscure repo or project, you could get it to work with some heloful tutorials, or some other helpful tutorials from this other site because the first one was out of date. …but you might have to compile bimaries, because the binaries that exist for download might not work for your system because they’re from a previous version…
…so, skip all that and just treat Linux like Mac. The hardware works or it doesn’t.
In all likelihood, it’ll work. But, specially since you’re starting out, if you use NVidia, use a distro that explicitly supports that. I hear bazzite is good.
Several people are here telling you you won’t ever need terminal. They are lying to you. You will need to use it, often. Even for simple things like installing software. Because that’s often how it’s distributed.
And even when there is a graphical option, they will give you terminal commands anyway, because that’s just the way things are done on Linux.
When you feel like it, start looking up stuff you can do now that you couldn’t before, like customizing your desktop environment (“ricing”). It’s fun, and there are a lot of options out there.
And you don’t have to, because the GUI options are good too, but I make a point to install and update packages from the terminal. You’ll get more familiar with it that way.
The number one shock for most people when coming over to Linux is a reliance on package management for programs rather than the exe’s & msi’s of windows. In general on mint your installation methods in order should be
1.software manager 2.appimage 3.deb 4.tar
I may have forgotten some other formats since I haven’t used mint in a while, but this should allow for the smoothest experience when it comes to installing programs.
Once you get the hang of a shell, it’s way better and more productive than ui for a lot of things.
Especially the piping.
“I suspect the biggest challenge will be terminal.”
Ha ha ha
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
…yes. That is correct.
The standard terminal in Mint is perfectly fine. You won’t ever need anything else unless you become a system operator taking care of data centers worth of machines. It’s definitely worthwhile getting into, even if you don’t strictly need it. Just watch a few introductory videos and get sudoing. The chances you’ll break something are pretty low, if you use common sense. Having said that, always back up your data before doing anything you’re not 100% certain about.
You won’t need a terminal unless you refuse to use the GUI tools that do the same thing.
If you want to use the terminal, go for it and use the default. If you eventually find it lacking THEN start investigating different options.
Just use everything as you normally would otherwise, and you shouldn’t notice a huge shift.
At this day and age, it’s easy to avoid dealing with terminal entirely, even with the more advanced use case like system backup & restore.
The only basic task I can think of that requires terminal would be auto-removing obsolete packages like older kernels.
There are niche use cases that require terminal, but you probably won’t get into that anytime soon.
