Basically the forced shift to the enshittified Windows 11 in october has me eyeing the fence a lot. But all I know about Linux is 1: it’s a cantankerous beast that can smell your fear and lack of computer skills and 2: that’s apparently not true any more? Making the change has slowly become a more real possibility for me, though I’m pretty much a fairly casual PC-user, I don’t do much more than play games. So I wrote down some questions I had about Linux.

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

And also, what distro might be best for me?

  • CafecitoHippo@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    16 hours ago

    Building off of this awesome and thorough response. There are some games that you might need a different version of Proton for everything to work right. I had issues with Blue Prince not being able to see any videos that played during the game. With Proton-GE, that is solved. So there might be a little adjustment and tweaks that need to be done but I’ve found everyone in the Linux community more than happy to help.

    As to your comment about security vis-a-vis open source software. I think that comes from an inherent misunderstanding about what open source software is because I had a similar thought when I was younger. If a program is open source and you can see all the bones of the software, you can see the code and know how to hack it. That was my thinking at least. But the security comes from having everyone able to view the code and patch out vulnerabilities. Closed source just means that you might have the veil of security through obscurity where it takes a little time to have your bugs exploited.