Hello,
Basically I want to pick a distro and like most beginners I’m coming from windows. I don’t want to go on a full learning process from the start but I can probably handle some level of terminal usage. I, like most people play games(or thinking about playing games and it’s one of main things I’m looking into but because this isn’t the only thing I’m thinking of doing and do)
So here’s what I’m looking for to give a good idea,
-Can play steam games(since steam is compatible, this is mostly always checked(I think))
-Can play other games outside steam(like from GOG where you download the setup. Heard about apps like “bottles” but idk how good it will be)
-Video editing softwares (Resolve works but I might want to use another)
-Can run a CAD software(I do like designing and stuff so I do look forward for this(I have used some on windows and don’t know how its will be in linux. I know blender works but it’s more of a modeling than CAD))
-Programming(I don’t think this will be a problem)
-Microsoft like apps(Spreadsheet and stuff, Just need to be able to do work)
-Not sure if this is needed but I do sail the seven seas sometimes
My laptop has these if details are needed for compatibility
-GTX 1050(dedicated)
-intel i7 8th gen
-Intel UHD 630(integrated)
I heard a distro called “Pop! OS” which supports Nvidia GPUs but I also wanna know how intel stuff works too(cpu and Igraphics) It will be helpful if I can get details on how much change of performance I might have(increment or decrement as my pc is pretty weak) I just need your recommended OS and a brief explanation on what to look for in the OS and what to expect on the stuff I looked into (I’ll try doing my research according to your recommendations)\
Apologies if this is another “recommend me an OS” post, I do see all gaming related stuff but just doesn’t see much of the things that I look for
Thank you for reading!
None of your requirements are distribution specific. I do all (Steam, non Steam, Kdenlive, Blender/OpenSCAD, vim/Podman, LibreOffice, Transmission) of that and I’m running Debian with an NVIDIA GPU. Consequently I can personally recommend it.
My recommendation is, that you read ALL the other post about the same topic. Because there are plenty of answers to your question there.
Sure, Pop!OS’ll likely be fine.
AntiX first sprang to mind before reading further through your list.
Mint, MXLinux, and SuSe also came to mind.
Not sure how well each and every part sought is covered. Though probably almost any distro will do.
When someone is switching from windows to Linux the first distro I recommend is Linux Mint. Mint feels similar enough to Win7 that any windows user can drop in and learn it in no time, my, tech illiterate, 76 year old mother has been trying a Mint live USB and has needed very little help.
I say start with Mint and get to know Linux, then if you want to try other distros you can, but at least you’ll have a solid foundation to jump off from.
What ever you choose, welcome to Linux!
Bazzite or Fedora.
bazzite is imo by far the safest and most usable distro for beginners. if you fuck something up with your distro you can easily solve the issue without data loss by typing “rpm-ostree reset”. thats it, it doesnt get as simple as this anywhere else. bazzite’s dev team also tests each image and makes sure its configuration works before pushing it to you, and since each image is exactly the same you basically have your own IT team.
I’ve been very happy with Bazzite so far. It basically just works. Only thing I have had issues with is chatmix on my Steel Series headset but that seems to be a common issue.
I just jumped ship from Windows 11 about a week ago. I have not logged back into my Windows dual boot since because I have not yet found a reason to. Beware of dual booting since Windows updates sometimes hose the boot manager for your Linux partitions. I chose Linux Mint Cinnamon because I wanted a similar look/feel to windows as well as favoring longer and more stable support. Mint is also a good option for Linux noobs (like us!) since it does a lot for you. I play both Steam and GOG games. Steam was easy, just go to to the software manager and download steam then install. GOG was a little different, since they don’t seem to have a Linux version of GOG Galaxy. So, I tried both Lutris and Heroic game launchers (available in the software manager) and connected my GOG account. I have been able to get everything to play so far. I cannot speak to video editing software or programming. Use the online version of Microsoft apps if you need them, otherwise, Libre Office is preinstalled with software that does everything the Microsoft Office suite does. Since I run several storage drives in my system that I wanted to auto-mount on boot, I did have to edit my fstab file to make this happen - this was the only thing I needed to do through the terminal and there were some great videos showing what to do, then you just apply what is shown in those videos to your system setup. I really didn’t have to do this, Mint is great that i could just click the drive and it would mount it, but if my Steam opened before it was mounted, then it didn’t know where my game storage was and I had to restart Steam for it to pick up my game drive. Again, very little terminal usage was needed on my side. My printer just works, wireless, bluetooth headset works, etc. So far, I say thumbs up for Linux Mint Cinnamon!! If I go a month without hitting a wall and logging into my Windows install, I will probably just totally remove my Windows installation.
I saw the windows update thing damaging the booting process of linux on a YT video. If I run on windows it’s 100% windows 10. So I might be able to get away with updates and stuff(I think)
I recommend trying CachyOS. It’s easy to use and it works out of the box and offers great support for your type of hardware out of the box too. As for the use cases you need linux, it’s more about software that you run on linux and not the OS itself in most cases. Also I have same kind of hardware as you have and I’ve been experiencing major issues with fedora and fedora-based distros like Bazzite and Nobara. I’ve seen so many people there recommending those so beware!
I think one of the main reason you have some issues is because the hardware is pretty old. So the gaming based OSs might be good for running on newer hardware and ofc their performance is good which just decrease the overall impact on them compared to older hardware. I’ll look into Cachy OS, Thanks
Nope, 3060 RTX and Intel i5 11th gen is not that old in my opinion. I maybe needed to be more specific but when I said we have same kind of hardware I meant that we both have Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU. Many linux nerds can obviously argue with me, that it’s linux and you can fix everything yourself. But because you’re beginner, I understand you need something that works right out of the box at least without major issues. That’s why I warned you about fedora-based distros. Of course it’s better to test everything yourself and like one other comment said it’s okay to distro-hop a lot in the beginning, just not too much otherwise it will be overwhelming. I did distro-hop in the beggining too. I just found reasonable to share my personal experience because we both have same brand of GPU and CPU. And good luck with trying out CachyOS and other distros, I hope you find right distro for yourself.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I thought you meant you had an older GPU like mine(GTX1050).
No worries it’s ok
Regarding the stuff you want to do: it doesn’t matter what distro you pick, they can all run the same stuff anyways.
I would recommend something Fedora-based, because that’s most people recommend. It’s very sane and user friendly. Bazzite would be the best pick imo, but the classic Fedora KDE variant is also good for most people.
All other of your questions, like gaming stuff, are (or will) be answered anyways by a dozen other people here.
But I can give you some perspective regarding CAD and video editing.
CAD on Linux sucks. Most is made as Windows only, and many people have tried running it through Wine (Bottles) or other janky methods. Don’t even try it.
FreeCAD is also not the best choice in my personal opinion, especially if you come from other CAD software. But you can try it of course, maybe you’ll like it.The only “proper” recommendation, and what I also use personally, is Onshape. It’s browser based, intuitive to use, has a good UX and many features. Downside: it’s proprietary and browser based, including all your files. If the company behind it decides to piss in your face, there is nothing that will stop them.
Video editing is a lot better.
As you already mentioned, there’s Davinci Resolve, which is available for Linux too.
I recommend you, especially if you choose Bazzite or any other distro where it isn’t available officially, to check out Distrobox and install it from there, so it won’t mess up the rest of your host OS.
But maybe try Kdenlive first. It’s a one click install and works great too, while being FOSS on top.CAD on Linux sucks. Most is made as Windows only, and many people have tried running it through Wine (Bottles) or other janky methods. Don’t even try it.
How is gaming not a problem any more, but CAD is? Shouldn’t the same tools work to enable both?
There is no Valve invested in bringing CAD to the masses.
+1 for Bazzite, I did pretty much exactly the switch you are describing a couple months ago and tried mint first but didn’t love it for gaming (problems with my Nvidia card) but have had literally no issues whatsoever with Bazzite. It just works ™
If you’re comming from Windows and don’t want to be too much distabilized ZorinOS is probably one of the best.
Other great choice are:
- bazzite
- Linux Mint
- Pop_OS!
However CAD on Linux is not great, there is some free tools but they are so much more limited than the proprietary windows suite of tools. Maybe WinBoat could make your software run good enough.
Check out Distrosea. Its a website where you can test different Linux distros, before installing anything.
Woah, that’s wild. If you run the browser in fullscreen mode (F11) it’s almost like you’re running it on your own machine. Pretty cool service.
First thing I wanna implore you do is create a separate partition on your boot drive for your /home folder. Distro hopping is super normal when you’re starting out, and by separating your home folder makes distro hopping very easy.
Bazzite, like others suggested, is your best bet at a first attempt because it’s much harder to cause irreparable damage with a stray terminal command.
All of the apps you listed should work just fine under Linux. Bazzite ships with Steam and Lutris (it’s a game store aggregator) to get you started with gaming. Use Microsoft 365 online or one of the open sourced alternatives like libreoffice for office apps. The rest of the programs should either be able to be run with wine/bottles/WinApps.
A 1050 is kinda paltry by today’s standards, so just don’t expect a big bump in gaming performance or super snappy emulation.
First thing I wanna implore you do is create a separate partition on your boot drive for your /home folder. Distro hopping is super normal when you’re starting out, and by separating your home folder makes distro hopping very easy.
Nowadays with the various distros’ differences in filesystem preference and layout, I think an external backup would be better.
I’ve used both Bazzite and Garuda. Both have an Nvidia install, both are gamer focused, and both have been easy.
Bazzite was immutable, which I ended up not liking.
May I ask:
Are these your first Linux experiences?
What is it about Bazzite that you didn’t like?I’m asking for future reference, I’ve got friends who are getting curious and to me Bazzite seems quite beginner-friendly, but I’m not a beginner so maybe I’m missing something
CAD is going to be your achilles heel, unfortunately.
If Blender can do what you need, then you are fine, but if you need CAD for things like architecture, I’m afraid it’s one of the most painful gaps in Linux, currently.
Try Bazzite first. If you find you need more control, then switch to Fedora KDE.
Avoid POP_OS for now. Their new desktop environment is currently in beta and it still has some bugs. When it finally releases later this month and the remaining bugs have been fixed, it may be worth a try. The nice thing about Linux is that it’s very quick and easy to install, so you can try different distros quickly and easily.
I recommend getting yourself a dedicated thumb drive and put Ventoy on it. Ventoy lets you selectively boot to any iso you put on the thumb drive. It’s just wonderful.
For CAD, I really like Onshape. It’s free for personal use and runs in a web browser but is not open-source. I’ve used Creo and SolidWorks before and, IMO, Onshape blows them out of the water for being intuitive and feature complete. But again, web-based and closed source.
I might keep my windows just for CAD and other things for a while. Other than that I think I will probably go with Pop OS. I don’t know much but from what I’ve seen, bazzite is an “immutable” OS. It’s a “read only OS”. I’m guessing you can’t modify much stuff as others.
SO about Pop OS, I won’t be installing in the next few days and will be looking to pick one and install mostly by the end of this month. How do I keep in touch with the updates of it to know whether the bugs and stuff are fixed and stable.It’s now slated to leave beta on December 11. I plan on giving it another try at that point, because I loved the Cosmic beta but kept running into frustrating GUI bugs. I’m back on KDE Plasma for now, but keeping a close eye on Cosmic.
I’m extremely happy with bazzite, it’s basically impossible to break, and great for gaming.
Just be aware that it is very focused on flatpaks, so installing anything that doesn’t have a flatpak version does require some extra steps.
And for beginners, a flatpak is a particular way of bundling software so that:
A) all of the dependencies come with the program so you can just download one thing and run it
and
B) it has some level of sandboxing, which means you have some level of control over what the software you downloaded has access to on your machine. In theory.
So what they’re saying is that if some software you want isn’t already bundled as a flatpak, you’re going to have a hard time with bazzite, as it’s geared around making flatpaks easy, and requires more work to install things using other methods. Still works, just not as easy.
