Don’t make me blush bro

“Did you see that ludicrous display last night?”

The nerd team!

NOOOOOs very darth vader-y

And I would have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for your meddling logic.

One of us! One of us!

Same, did a rebuild of my PC when I cannibalized my old one into a media server (really only kept the drives, so not really more like just built a new one…), bought two nvme drives for it with the intent to put Linux on the first and Windows on the second, but held off on putting Windows onto it to force myself to stick with it until I got a real sense for what I’d need it for…

A couple months later I decided I’d just use that second drive for more storage. Hasn’t run Windows once in over ten months of use and I’ve yet to miss it.

Only took me sixteen or eighteen years of saying I’m going to switch to actually do it…

Seriously glad to hear that. It just sounded like the best way to go into this. It was very scary at first because I encountered a few hiccups that I had to do a lot of research to figure it out, but so far I’ve been great.

I felt like such an old dude when I made a list of all the programs I used on Windows so that I could begin looking for replacements on Linux lol. Some of the ones that I still have to get setup are things like MakeMKV, as I love backing up all my purchased physical movies.

Candidly there was no need for me to change my hardware out. But if I was going all in, I figured I’d go all in. My 12700k and RTX 3080 were working flawlessly on Windows, but I always heard AMD generally works much better. New OS, new hardware, new me.

Just installed this and tried it out. THANK YOU. It immediately cured most of the things that drive me nuts about GIMP!

This sounds awesome! Thank you for commenting about it

Sounds amazing. Using GIMP sounded like the worst part of this whole endeavor.

Oh that’s so awesome, I had no idea about this! I jotted this down and will definitely try it out tomorrow. Things I take for granted and know so well in Photoshop, I can’t even figure out for the life of me how to do in GIMP. It’s practice what I need, and this package sounds great to help me ease into it again. Thank you!

Rip it’s not in the aur

Can verify that photogimp is brilliant. As well as the interface it also creates photoshop like keyboard shortcuts too. There are one or two things not quite right but on the whole its a life saver.

I’m curious which of your games doesn’t work on Linux? It’s usually the ones with a particular anti-cheat system.

To each their own my friend! I thought of riding out Win 10 and installing Linux Mint on an old computer, such as my really old Macbook Pro from 2012. But for my use case, forcing myself to use it and work through hurdles seemed to be best because after a long work day I was afraid I wouldn’t spend time trying out Linux.

Thankfully, I’ve had basically 99% perfection while using Linux Mint. The 1% were the little unique problems that I’m still trying to solve, such as getting OpenRGB to work and detect my devices. Inability for CoolerControl to control my case fans, no way to control my AMD GPU fans, etc. I’ll invest time into figuring these out, but for now, all my games work and I just ignore the RGB I can’t control via software.

That’s what I like the most about it is that it’s mostly familiar. I think it’s an excellent OS to bridge users leaving Windows.

Years ago I experimented by dual booting pop_OS! and also Ubuntu. But they always ran so poorly for me, despite having great hardware at the time (i7-7700k and GTX 1080). It was just super frustrating so I abandoned it.

Last year as part of my preparation and research to get off Windows, I rolled VMs of Zorin OS and Linux Mint. Zorin was good overall, but Linux Mint just felt better to me. There’s so much information available online for Mint, and over time as I get comfortable with the Linux ecosystem, I probably won’t be using internet search terms like “install error XYZ someprogramhere on Linux Mint”. 😀

Definitely will be taking advantage of those two softwares. I tried dabbling with Syncthing when I got my Steam Deck, because I wanted the save files for my… er, Linux ISOs, to sync with my Windows PC. I couldn’t get it to reliably work (user error probably). So this time I’ll try again and hopefully it will be much better!

Serious question. Why? I see that it’s the first step in the learn Linux course on Reddit. Lots of people talk about it.

I’m damn near considering getting that started but I’d still have no idea why other than curiosity and stubbornness 😆

And with these specs, this server will be so powerful that it will actually serve other servers. Even servers that don’t exist yet. It’ll be so fast that persons will be like “whoa, this is too fast, please slow it down!”

I’m sure others have mentioned this and you know it by now. But just in case, it is possible to run a complete Linux desktop from DVD or USB without installing. It is a good check to make sure your hardware is compatible and everything works for you.

I think one failure of the Linux community is not communicating that this feature has been around for two decades now.

I mean, it’s not like I haven’t spent hours debugging windows. Why is the sound crackling? WHY?

Never solved it and Linux just worked

Agree with both commenters.

Make a live USB, see if you like it, and then install Linux alongside Windows in a dual-boot configuration. Note that it is recommended to use two different physical drives for the respective operating systems, but one will do as well.

Then do everything in Linux while feeling safe that there is still Windows to fall back to.

A direct hop is usually not the best way to move into the Linux world. The best way I’ve heard (and wished I did myself) is slowly start migrating to programs that will be available and you’ll be using, while still on Windows. Get used to how new things work and if an emergency comes up, you can fall back to your tried and true tools. Then, just keep migrating apps until most of what you use is open source stuff, or stuff widely available. (Spotify, Discord, Zoom, etc.) Once you have your workflow worked out, you’ve found substitutes for things you can’t get on Linux, then is a good time to take the plunge.

Going cold turkey is going to be really rough. I had Fedora on a side piece laptop for years before my first try on my workstation and it was a disaster. Less than a week later I had to go back to Windows. But, now I’m familiar with the tools I use and I’ve been a full convert for a few months now and it’s been great.

You can do it! Just…take it slow.

It depends on what kind of software you usually use. You should look up the programs you use regularly/can’t live without to see if they have Linux versions or if they have decent replacements. If everything there checks out, find an LTS distro. Debian/Ubuntu and derivatives (PopOS or Mint) or fedora and derivatives (I don’t know any fedora derivatives) would be good.

I started using PopOS last year for a gaming machine and all the tinkering I did, I did because I’m a nerd and I wanted to. If I wanted an easy experience without even looking at a command line I think I could’ve.

One more thing. Most (maybe all?) Linux distros can be booted and viewed in a live environment from a USB without having to erase your whole drive (just make sure you don’t go through the setup and actually erase your drive (unless you want to))

Linux Mint has been set and go for me personally. You will thank us later.