Hiya,
I don’t suppose anyone has a good source / 15 minutes and a drive to lecture a Linux noobie on some basic Linux functions or things to read up on?
Perhaps unsurprising given the gestures wildly to everything, but I have been planning to switch over to Linux on my home machine for a long time now and I feel like Microsoft slowly, inexorably, forcing the swap to Win11 is as great an excuse to finally bite the bullet as I’m likely to get.
A bit of background, I am an IT guy with many years of experience in Windows and some small bit in Mac. I am an experienced coder with a good fundamental understanding of Unix environments and how to make systems talk to each other. Im comfortable with deep, technical stuff, but, especially in new systems I have a bit of a hard time with abbreviations and acronyms. So I don’t need a whole “Linux for Dummies” as I feel like I have a pretty firm grasp on the basics. I just want to know if there’s any convenient tips or tricks to make the transition easier.
For example, I have literally no idea what distro I should use lol. I’ve spent a while researching but given how customizable it all is, after a while it all kinda just mushed itself into a gray maisma in my brain. I use my home machine almost exclusively for gaming and some light coding projects, but I also want to be able to play around with it and do some independent learning.
I just need a good source that can give me the basics on where and how to translate my knowledge of Windows to insert Linux distro. I know it’s a completely new OS so I will need to learn a lot of new things. But at their core computers are computers so some things need to be the same, I’m just not sure what to look for.
When choosing your first distro it’s probably best to go with one that is very popular - Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Mint, etc. Niche distros are a surefire path to immediate troubleshooting.
From there, decide what desktop environment you want. Most distros offer releases with various environments (KDE, Gnome).
There are differences with package managers… who cares, you either run this command or that one to update.
I second using a Live USB to run any distro release first so you can test drive it. If you use Ventoy on your USB drive you can put multiple distro ISOs on it instead of having to flash only one at a time.
I’d add my ballot in to recommend Mint or Pop! for someone who wants to game. Newer WINE and Proton versions have made gaming so very nice on Linux. Cinnamon, Mate, and XFCE environments are what I’d recommend for your graphical shell. Cinnamon is kinda Mint’s flagship DE. I’d recommend it for anyone new to Linux or even new to computers in general.
I spent many, many years administering Suse and RHEL systems for work. I found that while I was more comfortable with configuring Red Hat/Fedora-style systems from a terminal/shell-only POV, Mint+Cinnamon were what made Desktop Linux work for me when I realized I absolutely was not going from Win 7 to Win 10. I feel like it’s only gotten better since.
I currently use Endeavour + Cinnamon, but Endeavour is Arch-based, and more for tinkering with than ‘Install and it just werks’ the way Mint or Pop! are.
for me as someone who does not want to setup much I like zorin. Out of box it emulates the look and feel of windows and has all sorts of applications pre installed including wine/play on linux. its the most install and go distro I have used,
I just want to know if there’s any convenient tips or tricks to make the transition easier.
dualboot, i always recomend that, you gonna break your distro while learning and that’s good, but you still uses windows, and need a funcional system, so keep the dual boot while you’re learning
about what distro, you need to test, and because you have a background in unix and macos it isn’t gonna be as hard for you, distro hopping is normal
