Hey guys, I’m an entry-level IT professional and tech enthusiast.
I’m getting a bit sick of windows for a multitude of reasons and want to try out some Linux distros.
I use my pc for web browsing, university (which uses office 365) where I study software design, software development (vs code, visual studio, jetbrains stuff) and gaming (99% of the time via steam).
My main concerns for switching are that I’ll have a hard time with university work because we mostly use teams for video conferences and work together with word, and other office stuff. We also are required to do some virtual machine stuff where we use virtualbox.
Also I’m a bit worried that some games on uplay, epic and other platforms aren’t available anymore.
For distros I’ve been mainly looking at Manjaro, Linux Mint or plain old Ubuntu. Can you recommend anything that might fit for me or will I maybe run into any issues with my chosen three?
Edit: Thanks a lot for all the replies. I’ve read through all of them even if I didn’t reply and it was very helpful. I will test most of your suggestions in a VM before I jump into completely changing my OS. And I’ll probably try booting from a USB Drive first. What I didn’t mention is that I’ve already worked with Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS, so I’m not scared about having to use a CLI.
As long as you are okay with using the web versions of office, you can basically go with any distro, since all of them have at least a web browser and virtualbox in their repositories, as well as vs code. Jetbrains also works (I’ve only used intellij but I assume the others are just as easy to set up). I’ve never tried visual studio on linux though, not sure how well that works.
ubuntu is the most widely used distro and very simple to setup and gaming out of the box with steam is very simple. Distro end of the day doesn’t matter all that much because you can change them to your hearts content, but for a beginner, you’d probably have the easiest time with an ubuntu distro.
Doesn’t hurt to have virtual box windows on your linux box just so you can easily do some of that other stuff. While I have done fine with libre office for a long time there are definitely problems with formatting so having a windows VM would just solve that issue. Plus teams and w/e.
Epic games will take some serious tweaking, but not impossible.
i used mint for a few years, it’s pretty good and if something works on ubuntu 99% of the time it works on mint too which is handy for tech support
i used manjaro for 3 days before i switched to endeavourOS (another arch based distro) after very strong recommendations to ditch it from a very large number of people lolI use Pop OS for gaming & working and I personally suggest that, never had problems.
For games, you can check protondb for compatibility with proton/steam. For other launchers you can use Heroic Games Launcher for epic and gog. For EA Play (or how tf it is called now, ex origin) I run it from steam as a shortcut but in general you can use Lutris for them and there are particular games (like league of legends) that are executed via Lutris.
For what concerns Microsoft Teams, you can use a web browser as I do. While for office you said that you have an office 365 subscription so I suppose you can use word from a web browser.
You can use virtualbox without problems.
Use Mint. Manjaro is a joke, and Mint fixes the Ubuntu’s wrongdoings. The average UI experience is also like Windows. LibreOffice has a config that makes it almost like MicrosoftOffice called “tabbed”. I personally thinks that to set up a Virtual Box in Linux is easier than in Windows. For non-steam games you can use Lutris or Heroic for Epic, nowadays you only have unfixable problems with online multiplayer anti-cheat, Valorant, for example.
In fact, Mint adds even more bugs to the distro than Ubuntu originally has.
I was about to ask basically the same question! I’m actually about to make the same move for my home pc, which I mostly use for streaming and gaming. I already gave a try to Fedora on a VM (gotta say this is the nerdiest name out there) , and I was REALLY impress by how simple, smooth and polish this thing is. To the point where I believe 80% of standard users would be better serve by Linux then Windoss or macOS. The univ and college where I work also uses stupid Office365, but I think you can manage most of your requiere interaction with the browser version. I’m gonna keep a Windows partition because audio and video editing isn’t quite there yet, and VR doest work, but I mostly use my MacBook (not my choice) for those project so my home PC will probably run Linux 99% of the time, now that gaming works.
I used Manjaro and Ubuntu for a while before settling on Garuda.
Garuda is Arch based* (like SteamOS) and offers the latest software immediately, but also has a built in snapshot system that allows you to roll back your system if any of the updates break something (Snapper automatically makes a snapshot of your system before it updates).
There are GUI apps for editing system settings (which isn’t a thing on all distros! sometimes you’re just editing a text config file), as well as a gaming app specific installer (Wine, Proton, Lutris, Steam, Retroarch etc)
I’ve used Teams, but never attempted Office365 so I can’t help you there, but it sounds like you can access it via a web interface.
I code using VS Codium, the open source branch of VS Code, but I’m not sure that Visual Studio is working on Linux. There are also Microsoft specific extensions in the VS Code Extension library that won’t work without third party workarounds.Since you’re already familiar with virtualbox you can spin up some of the recommended distros. and see which one you like best.
I tried Endeavour, but found that it was Garuda with fewer of the helper apps that I was used to.
Coming from MacOS/Windows, I liked having the extra apps and pre-built functionality.
I could absolutely customize it to be whatever I wanted, and some people prefer more bare-bones distros, but I found Garuda was what I was looking for straight out of the box. (except for the slightly garish theme).
I haven’t seen anyone recommend Nobara yet, but that’s one you should check out if gaming is a concern.If you haven’t checked out KVM/QEMU and virt-manager, I’d strongly recommend giving them a look. I set up Windows 10 and MacOS VMs that launch from icons on my dock any time I want to use Mac or Windows. If they were on discrete disks then I could get near native performance.
If you have more than one drive in your machine you don’t even need to give up Mac or Win to go Linux.
I set it up on a laptop, so I didn’t have a discrete disk or GPU, which impacted performance, but my plan for my desktop is to run Linux on the bare metal and use QEMU for any Mac or Microsoft products.*I use Arch, btw
As for Office, you’ll need to use the browser version or use a VM (or container or whatever). Besides that, you can expect like 90% of games to run either via Lutris or by adding them to Steam.
If you want to play around, I recomend to try Garuda Linux Dr460nized Gaming. Yes, it is very bloated and has a very gamery aesthetic, but it comes with a lot of cool software and customizations to explore. I recently started to recreate what I like about it on EndeavourOS and it’s a very good learning exercise :)
What did you like about it that I can also copy?
Some very neat things like how btrfs works, how you get automatic snapshots going with snapper + snap-pac, that fish is a fantastic shell, how to use libalpm hooks, what tools there are for performance and powersaving tweaks, gaming and probably a few more things.
Then also a lot of silly stuff like the importance of Nerd Fonts, Starship and Fastfetch for being able to brag with your distro without saying anything lol
You can use Office365 in the browser and it will work fine. If you need a desktop app that can handle Office formats use OnlyOffice. It’s free and works great with office.
Development stuff is equally available on all distros so you aren’t limited by that at all.
Steam should work on all distros as well, however only the rolling releases will always have the latest libraries and drivers. LTS releases like Ubuntu and Mint won’t update those frequently but it doesn’t mean Steam won’t work necessarily.
I use Mint because it has a lighter RAM requirement than gnome Ubuntu.
The best, most stable rolling release is opensuse Tumbleweed. Everything is tested before release, it’s always on the latest and greatest, and it has system rollback built in, in the event that you need to roll back an update. But this never really happens on opensuse, it’s very reliable.
If you want a rolling release I wouldn’t look any further. Arch is a pain and breaks frequently. Fedora releases a new version every 6 months so it may be a possible option, but opensuse is better. Also ethically opensuse is better because Fedora is Red hat and they hate the Linux community. I’d stay well away from Fedora and Red Hat.
Currently Ubuntu 23.04 is acting as a rolling release so try it out with your desktop of choice and see if it works for you. They should eventually revert to every 6 months as from version 24
As an example, i use mint as the base of my kvm/qemu virtual machine since i run an arc 380 on base and nvidia gpu for the guest. I made the mistake of updating my experimental kernel and forgot to set quiet and mint menu on grub to select the kernel at boot time. I popped in the install disc i had used previusly and fixed it by using the inlcuded programs to edit the grub and undo my kernel update. Fixed and i saved a timevault snapshot of the fix in case i mess up again. Linux mint saved me from reinstalling my entire os from a simple mistake.
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Clear Linux looks very performant which is interesting for gaming. And it provides choice between DEs !
I’d recommend opensuse tumbleweed. I would suggest Debian but it moves too slow (updates) for gaming. I think arch is good but you will have to want to learn a bit more about it. Tumbleweed falls closer to Debian with stability and still near arch as far as frequent updates.
Or they can use EndeavourOS if vanilla Arch is too complicated. You’ll still have to install things like libreoffice, steam etc. but you don’t have half the learning curve you do with vanilla arch
There is also Xero Linux
One downside of Opensuse compared to Arch is its lacking Documentation.
I use Opensuse TW on my desktop machine for over 10 years now and I use Debian at work, also have a different distro on my laptop.
True there is no beating the arch wiki
I have found over the years you can apply a lot of the directions to whatever distro you are using. You just have to do some minor tweaking to the commands. Primarily using the right package manager command for your distro or using distro specific software in place of arch software. I have also found you can use a lot of the AUR programs by searching for said app in your repos.
For the university work you could try libreoffice, it works on windows too if would like to try, Epic games work through Heroic games launcher or the Epic games launcher trough wine. Please do not use Manjaro as your starter distro, it’s very unstable, Ubuntu is not your best option, Linux mint might be the way to go if you want something simple. You could try out fedora workstation, or fedora kde spin, it’s great, only remember to use flatpak for your multimedia apps.
If you’re decent at programming try NixOS. 90% of your system is described by one config file and because of how it builds if a fix works for one person it’ll work for pretty much everyone
(With exceptions sometimes for hardware specific stuff like Nvidia drivers which is obviously dependant on your GPU)
It’s the one distro I’ve not really encountered any problems with out of the box
Its worked great for me, I switched a couple months ago. Getting nvidia working was a breeze.
Yeah just turn off the compositor if you’re in kde and start noticing slowing in the UI after installing the Nvidia drivers.
My dumb ass didn’t figure that out before just reinstalling, then encountering the issue when adding Nvidia again.
Had I not been a total dipshit, I would’ve just removed clauses from the config until the issue went away, so I could pinpoint the issue. But the problem is that I’m a bonehead.
Prettt good actually as long as you install steam via programs.steam.enable = true rather than just adding it to packages
Also programs.steam.openFirewall = true if you want game streaming
Completely agree. I made the switch from Arch to nix two weeks ago. Although I have to admit for a Linux newbie it might be a bit much at once. Maybe start with something easier like Pop is?
I keep seeing Pop recommended so hijacking for an issue I ran into switching away from it - I had to completely wipe the drive prior to formatting the drive for whatever Debian based distro I was checking out.
Long story short, it was due to the bootloader for Pop remaining and interfering with the install process. So a full wipe wouldn’t be necessary most likely, just clearing your boot partition should be enough.
I’ve found NixOS to be one of the easiest distros to use because everything is reproducible, I’m not too sure why everyone who uses it says it’s a hard one to begin with
At the start you just go with the template the installer gives you, and add packages to the package list it generates, then as you want more advanced features options start to come in handy and they’re just as straightforward
No nasty hidden surprises, everything for the most part works exactly how you’d expect (with the exception of syntax with some of the more funky features but you don’t need those to manage a system at the bare minimum
Ubuntu on the other hand when I started using it I had to run a few random commands (disabling broken Nvidia services) after hours of digging just to get my mouse pointer to work after hibernation) and had to do that every single time I switched to a different distro, wasn’t even an issue out of the box on nixos
And if you’re stuck a fix that worked for someone else will almost always work for you unless it’s a hardware specific issue
