• 1 Post
  • 16 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
cake
Cake day: October 27th, 2024

help-circle





  • Hey there, I made the switch a few months ago and my Linux machine has quickly become my primary laptop! I started out with Fedora, using the KDE desktop environment.

    I know folks often recommend Ubuntu or Mint but there are reasons you might decide it’s in your best interest to avoid that. Ubuntu’s package manager (a.k.a. app store) pushes something called Snap packages. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with them, but people tend to avoid them simply because it’s a proprietary package system and the Linux community overall favors more open-source solutions. Also, Mint was an easy recommendation years ago and I’m sure it’s still nice now, but Mint really just looks like Windows 7. It feels aged as hell.

    When picking a distro, do understand you’re really picking more the assortment of things your Linux will come with and how the OS will lay things out. It sounds awfully convoluted but really you can’t go wrong here, this is such a wide community and there are guides and how tos for just about everything.








  • I don’t know if you happen to have any other machines available to you, but I do recommend you consider giving it a go on a machine you don’t share with another person, or at least dual-booting on that machine. It could be pretty jarring to be dumped onto another operating system so quickly, especially as one works out how to use the programs they had been running just fine before.

    I recently made the swap to Linux myself, and a dedicated laptop for that transition has made my life a lot easier. I still have my old laptop on Windows, heavens forbid I absolutely need it, but I do find some issues with compatibility. As another person has mentioned, Roblox does not offer native Linux support, which means you have to run a program that more or less tricks Roblox into thinking you’re playing on a smartphone. You can do the same for Bedrock Minecraft if you want to play cross-platform.

    For a lot of things there are alternatives that tend to work even better in some ways. For others, there are workarounds. And for others yet, you just can’t use some applications you might have been using before.



  • Hey, I only recently dipped my toes into Linux about a month ago and I went with Fedora, more specifically the KDE spin of Fedora. My experience has been fantastic- I’m not even dual booting and this laptop has become my daily driver! My computer seems pretty similar in terms of specs, it’s a ThinkPad X1 Carbon from 2017 that’s also rocking an i7 and 16gb RAM. I see a ton of folks recommending Mint or Ubuntu or Pop! as “Linux for noobs” but I feel like you don’t necessarily need to start there. I didn’t and I’ve been having a really great time!