Hello!
I’m interested in moving my personal computer to running Linux but I’m not sure where to even begin. As background, I am a casual user and have a desktop with hardware from around 2014 running Windows. I am hoping to setup a NAS drive as a media server in the next year or so, offloading all of the files currently on the Windows desktop and have been interested in open source software such as Jellyfin. I also mostly game on an Xbox and Nintendo Switch, but have used the desktop in the past for gaming such as with an Oculus Rift Headset and some Steam games so not huge on getting games working on the computer. But, I do sometimes torrent using the computer so don’t want to lose that capability (especially with upkeep for the media server).
With all of that said, I didn’t know how to get started with choosing what Linux OS to use, setting it up, backing up my files to make sure I can use them with the new OS, etc. Making the switch seems to have great options for customization and “choosing a distro that works for you”, but I don’t know what would work for me or what will be user friendly for a beginner.
Any tips or pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
I think my biggest tip is to manage your expectations. What you are attempting is not the same as simply moving to a new version of Windows – literally everything will be different. You’ve spent a lifetime learning how to perform all these tasks until they became second-nature, but now you plan to move to a whole new system. Thing will be in different places, the way you tweak settings or access content will be different, and it’s going to be very frustrating because hey, this task should be easy. Don’t expect to cram all those years of experience into re-learning a new system in a few weeks.
The good news is that there’s a huge support community, and just about anything you want to do has already been asked and can be found through a quick search. Stick with it, and you’ll discover that linux actually gives you quite a lot more control over what you can do with your hardware (not to mention nearly all the software is free). It won’t be long before you’re asking how you ever survived without many of these tools.
Okay thank you! Could you give some examples about tasks that “should be easy” but aren’t? I’ve worked with MacOS casually and I thought it was based on Unix (maybe?), so I was at least aware that the way to maneuver through the desktop/settings/file searches are different from Windows of course. I am certainly not a power user, just getting frustrated with companies overstepping more and more and want to cut myself from their whims, if that makes sense.
In the beginning it seemed like everything was a task – how do I install new software, how do I set up the right display or printer driver, how do I upgrade the whole OS? Then it quickly got down to making things look and act in a way that made more sense to me, or even adding and moving things around on the start menu. Back when I started, setting up dual monitors required manually building an X11 startup file and upgrading the OS usually meant compiling a new display driver, but that was around 2005 so of course things are MUCH better now.
Eventually you’ll get down to the point of simply finding compatible software to reproduce something you did in Windows, which usually isn’t difficult. A lot of this is going to depend on exactly how you use your computer and what you expect from it. I was already using Firefox and Thunderbird when I made the switch so that covered like half the things I needed at the time. Microsoft Office is (thankfully) gone although some parts of Libre Office still feel a bit rough. There’s pretty much no remaining support for Adobe pdf files, so if your employer makes use of advanced features for filling out forms then you may run into trouble (of course standard PDFs are very well supported). You will find things along the way where some business has made a point of locking people in to their product and there’s not much you can do except point out to your employer that they’re buying licenses for something that is free and more widely supported in open source products, but mostly you’ll just find your own solutions to work around these issues.
I’ll be stuck with Windows on my work laptop, that’s not something that I will be able to change anyway. I can point out as things come up, but with industry accepted software (like SolidWorks for example) that we use daily I can’t see us switching to any alternative.
Somebody at my company got a hard-on for Microsoft products several years ago and I’d like to beat them senseless with all the problems it has caused. They started by moving all email to Microsoft “because we’ll save a ton of money not having to pay techs to manage the servers.” Within the month our mailboxes were full of spam and they’ve had to open up multiple new tech teams to deal with the constant fallout from phishing scams. And they just keep doubling down and ignoring things like the recent news of Microsoft ignoring a full remote-access vulnerability for more than a year and then mis-representing it when they did finally decide to patch it.
Yeah that’s what has made me apprehensive to be honest. I feel pretty comfortable in windows doing many things, and my wife has a MacBook that I’m also pretty comfortable using so learning a new, third OS does seem obtuse. I like the idea of having more control over the software, but don’t want to lose the “it just works” feeling of an OS or software I am used to using.
That mindset unfortunately leads you to being locked into vendor-specific ecosystems with no control about the software you’re using. The big vendors (MS, Apple) know this and have already started extracting more value (in form of data) from their users. Next step will be to put more stuff into their clouds and sell you a subscription. You’ll be renting software with included spyware then. With zero control yourself. Linux and FOSS gives you control back. It’s also quite easy to use in 2023.
That’s why I’m wanting to make the switch now! I’m really disliking how constrained I’ve felt with what applications and especially subscription based services.
It doesn’t really take long to get the basic stuff figured out though, but there is definitely that initial feeling of being lost. As others have suggested, start out running something in a VM on your Windows desktop, then you can quickly go back and forth to practice doing things in linux as you have time (plus it’s a huge benefit to have a working browser in Windows so you can do a search if something breaks).
Linux has a number of different desktop environments to choose from, and what’s cool is you can load up multiple types and select one at the login screen. If you want to start with something that is reasonably comfortable, try loading the ‘Mate’ desktop. Maybe I’m just used to old-school Windows (Win2K was the last one I used), but I’ve always thought Mate did a good job of putting all everything in logical places. As for the OS itself, there’s also been a lot of suggestions so I’ll throw mine in as well… I’m a die-hard Debian fan, both on my desktop and on my servers. It does NOT push bleeding-edge releases on you, so this means you won’t have the very latest updates but to me it’s more important to have a rock-solid system that I can always rely on. I’ve been using it for about 15 years now and it has never failed me.
Do others auto-update or are users prompted as updates become available?
On the desktop you will likely be notified when updates are available. On my servers I do automatic security updates, but leave the rest for manual updates so I can do one machine at a time and know right away if an update breaks something.