I’m so glad I switched to Linux when I did (a couple months ago). I was dual booting for a bit but two weeks ago I removed my windows partition. Feels good to be free.
The only time I’ve booted into Windows in the last month is for the Battlefield beta and my work’s annoying proprietary VPN. Other than that I’d say Linux is finally ready for the desktop. Proton was the straw that broke Microsoft’s back for me.
I personally went with Debian and have had little to no complaints, definitely BASH/Shell/Terminal heavy so if you’re not willing to learn BASH I would probably use an immutable distro that you can’t easily break like Bazzite.
Classic recommendations are Linux Mint and Ubuntu, I think Zorin as well, but there are many others. For starters which one you use won’t matter too much, because more likely than not you’re gonna switch again.
I started with Ubuntu because it’s easy to use and I was new. One can argue over the pros and cons. I’m looking at Manjaro at the minute, an easy to install and beginner friendly Arch distro. Really, you can just try most of them out online though. Check out DistroSea and you can actually emulate the OSs with several desktop environments right in your browser.
I distro hopped a bit but landed on CachyOS, which is arch-based (btw) but a lot more straightforward to install and has a faster kernel supposedly. It’s been fantastic, I much prefer it to windows. Still getting used to the occasional hiccup but it’s worth it. I was never too attached to windows anyway. I’m currently running KDE Plasma but I want to try out Hyprland or something similar. It seems really cool. I have to look into how to download it though.
Nice! CachyOS and Nix are on my bucket list but I’m content with fedora atm. Used to run the CachyOS kernel on fedora before though. I think it’s an interesting choice to enable LTO for the entire kernel, and the performance was top notch! Too bad it broke my kernel headers package which broke the nvidia drivers so I had to cut my losses and purge everything back then.
Everyone I’ve read that’s used Fedora has liked it. I’d consider it on a secondary machine or something maybe.
Cachy has been awesome, I’d recommend it if you decide to change distros in the future. I’m enjoying Arch as a base more than Ubuntu for sure. I haven’t tried anything based on Fedora though other than Bazzite which is immutable, so I’m not sure if that really counts.
Nix seems cool but its big selling point that I’ve read is easy reproduction which I don’t think I’d utilize much. I might be missing something, but Arch seems more for me personally.
Nix isn’t just for reproduction. It has immutability so if you break your system configuration you can revert to a previous profile, and the way installations are managed allows you to install software that uses incompatible versions of the same dependencies at the same time.
I’d love to build my own pc, maybe in a few years. I’m currently using a gaming laptop which is good enough for most games, but when I feel the need to upgrade I’m gonna build.
I’m so glad I switched to Linux when I did (a couple months ago). I was dual booting for a bit but two weeks ago I removed my windows partition. Feels good to be free.
The only time I’ve booted into Windows in the last month is for the Battlefield beta and my work’s annoying proprietary VPN. Other than that I’d say Linux is finally ready for the desktop. Proton was the straw that broke Microsoft’s back for me.
i had an annoying proprietary vpn for work that was unwittingly compatible with the openvpn client
What OS do you recommend for desktop Linux. I’m mostly into protecting my data.
That really depends on you, keep in mind a lot of distro’s like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux are based off of Debian just using different repositories and with system files in different locations.
I personally went with Debian and have had little to no complaints, definitely BASH/Shell/Terminal heavy so if you’re not willing to learn BASH I would probably use an immutable distro that you can’t easily break like Bazzite.
Debian. Not Ubuntu - just Debian. Or Linux Mint Debian Edition (Debian with Cinnamon on top).
What distro, and how do you like it compared to windows so far? (And I’m assuming you’re not using Arch since you didn’t say anything)
Classic recommendations are Linux Mint and Ubuntu, I think Zorin as well, but there are many others. For starters which one you use won’t matter too much, because more likely than not you’re gonna switch again.
I started with Ubuntu because it’s easy to use and I was new. One can argue over the pros and cons. I’m looking at Manjaro at the minute, an easy to install and beginner friendly Arch distro. Really, you can just try most of them out online though. Check out DistroSea and you can actually emulate the OSs with several desktop environments right in your browser.
I distro hopped a bit but landed on CachyOS, which is arch-based (btw) but a lot more straightforward to install and has a faster kernel supposedly. It’s been fantastic, I much prefer it to windows. Still getting used to the occasional hiccup but it’s worth it. I was never too attached to windows anyway. I’m currently running KDE Plasma but I want to try out Hyprland or something similar. It seems really cool. I have to look into how to download it though.
Nice! CachyOS and Nix are on my bucket list but I’m content with fedora atm. Used to run the CachyOS kernel on fedora before though. I think it’s an interesting choice to enable LTO for the entire kernel, and the performance was top notch! Too bad it broke my kernel headers package which broke the nvidia drivers so I had to cut my losses and purge everything back then.
Everyone I’ve read that’s used Fedora has liked it. I’d consider it on a secondary machine or something maybe.
Cachy has been awesome, I’d recommend it if you decide to change distros in the future. I’m enjoying Arch as a base more than Ubuntu for sure. I haven’t tried anything based on Fedora though other than Bazzite which is immutable, so I’m not sure if that really counts.
Nix seems cool but its big selling point that I’ve read is easy reproduction which I don’t think I’d utilize much. I might be missing something, but Arch seems more for me personally.
Nix isn’t just for reproduction. It has immutability so if you break your system configuration you can revert to a previous profile, and the way installations are managed allows you to install software that uses incompatible versions of the same dependencies at the same time.
I switched to Linux when i built my first tower in 2022
And have never looked back
I’d love to build my own pc, maybe in a few years. I’m currently using a gaming laptop which is good enough for most games, but when I feel the need to upgrade I’m gonna build.