I use gentoo btw

You should try NixOS, it's pretty cool.

i unfortunately using kinoite for my desktop and Debian for my servers. I am not totally in love with kinoite but I don't dislike it enough to change back to regular fedora.

After 26 years of using Linux, I did my first baremetal "immutable" distro install last week.

My youngest son is starting school and instead of the Chromebooks that they recommend, I took a chance and installed Fedora Silverblue on a $200 Lenovo "student-rugged" class laptop. Everything works and he hasn't had any issues so far. He gets access to the same student platform as the other students through Chrome, but then I can install Minetest and Tux Paint and GCompris as well.

The older kids run Debian stable for years now, but if this works out, I might transition them over next semester.

I learned how a kernel actually loads a program and switches between them by using timer interrupts and interrupt vectors that point to specific locations in memory to resume execution from. Not specifically Linux related, but I'm trying to learn more computer science, and it just clicked for me two weeks ago. I've been programming microcontrollers for ten years, but those are monolithic programs, and while I knew what interrupts were and have used them, I never understood how an OS actually runs multiple things while staying in control. Now I do. About time I understood a core concept of these machines that have been here all 42 years of my life.

It's one of those "aha!" moments like when I realized classes and structs are just data types like any other in C++ when I was starting off programming and can be used like them. OOP became fun after that.

Year of mobile linux

[ astronauts meme ]

Always has been

Fellow Linux noob, just started using it earlier this year so if someone with more experience wants to weigh in, please do.

That said, gaming on Linux is pretty good. Steam's proton makes most games playable out of the box, although it's still a good idea to check Proton DB to see if any particular game you want to play is playable.

As for your other question, I'm not totally sure what you mean by accessible and customizable, but I don't think any of your peripherals are going to be distro locked. The Arch Wiki is a pretty good resource for, well, everything, but most relevant to you for your peripherals (it also usually gives good information for any distro, not just arch)

About gaming, from my personal experience, it's overall pretty straight forward. When issues happen, you just got to have patience to read through logs and search up on Google or similar any suspicious parts of the log. Worst part is usually DRM/anticheat, but from what I can gather, usually pretty isolated cases are problematic due to compatibility, usually requiring the devs to go out of their ways to make the DRM incompatible.

As for the distros question, perhaps Linux Mint? It trades off bleeding edge updates for the sake of stability. Just avoid the Debian-based variant of Mint for now as it's still in beta.

Q1: Pretty good! Use ProtonDB to check what games work, and if you need to apply any fixes.

Q2: Linux Mint is the most popular choice for beginners, and it's extremely easy to use. Other people choose Pop!_OS because it's apparently better for gaming (I haven't tried it). However, I think the best distro for gaming, while still being extremely stable, is Nobara (a distro based on Fedora Linux).

Also, practically all Linux distros are customizable, don't worry about which one's the best.

P.S: You can browse through the most popular distros here: DistroWatch

(Background: I've been obsessively using Linux for four years.)

Games work fine, if you install linux as a dual boot, you can move the files over (windows files appear as if the windows install was a usb key). Also drivers are fine

There would be no hassle in wiping the drive, you can do it as part of the super easy installation process for any Linux distro. Ideally you would back up any important files and drop them into your fancy new file system once the install is finished. And you can pretty much launch almost any game directly out of steam and it will run. There are a few exceptions for some of those games with anti cheats that rootkit your system, but the majority just work out of the box. Drivers included, but Nvidia might be ever so slightly annoying

1. Depends on how much crap you're willing to put up with. It'll all be worth it in the end! (Pro tip: disable secure boot in BIOS)

2. I wrote a whole guide on the two options, but then accidentally deleted my comment. You can either install Linux on another drive, or shrink your NTFS partition and install Linux alongside it. You can always access NTFS from Linux, but not the other way around (by default). If you don't understand what I'm talking about, you should really look it all up. I would personally just backup and wipe, you can always reinstall Windows if you want to.

3. Have you heard of Valve's Steam Deck? It's a handheld gaming device that can play nearly every PC game, and it runs Linux! Valve made gaming on Linux an absolute breeze thanks to Proton. There are some popular games that don't work, either because Tim Sweeney hates Linux (yes, really) or because the anti-cheat won't accept Linux, but I only know about Destiny 2 and Rust that have that problem. Easy Anticheat works just fine, I play Apex Legends and Deep Rock Galactic with no issues!

4. If you have AMD, you don't even have to think about it. Their drivers are part of the Linux kernel. Nvidia is not impossible to use, but you might have some issues. I experience random desktop environment crashes that I can only attribute to their drivers, but it only happens on startup sometimes, which is the least annoying it could be. If you choose a distro that doesn't mind automatically installing non-free software, you probably won't need to think about it either. The open source driver, Nouveau, works fine but performs awfully in games (or at least it did a year ago).

If you just want some clear instructions: backup your files, wipe your disk and install Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. It's easy peasy to use and getting the proprietary graphics drivers is only a few clicks away. Just configure your Steam games to run through Proton and you might not even tell the difference.

Fun fact: The "Windows key" (or "Command key" for Mac users) has its own generic name: the Super key!

Not trying to be a smartass here; I genuinely find it fascinating! :D

If you can boot back into windows, turn off quick startup/shutdown, run chkdsk or whatever on the drives, reboot back into windows then boot back into Linux and you’ll be okay.

Quick startup is a kind of weird sleep/hibernate mutant that leaves drives in an unclean state when it turns off, so the Linux drivers for ntfs say “I’m not gonna touch that possibly damaged drive”.

I think the disks could be Dynamic Disks on which it would not be a good idea to install a linux distro.

Unfortunately Microsoft's own advice to change it to a basic disk (since it considers dynamic deprecated) WILL RESULT IN DATA LOSS.

Since you only want to access them it seem to be possible with ldmtool. While it is a cli tool there is a corresponding service that at least according to some askubuntu posts and arcwiki should make them behave like normal filesystems.

i'd suggest starting by finding out what package in your distro actually decides where audio goes - mostly it is pulseaudio (older) or pipewire (newer).

depending on the details of how your distro and the dongle work, it could either be a simple "pactl set-default-sink ", or a more complicated set of udev rules or pipewire/wireplumber scripts.

note that distros using pipewire still often support a lot of pactl commands, so it may be worth looking at the simple option even when not using pulseaudio.

This would depend on the distro you use. Most distros will require you to enable a non-free repository before you can install anything that isn't Foss or open source from the official repos. You could also use an FSF approved distro. Keep in mind, the FSF will only approve distros that don't include any non-free anything in the official repos. Besides that, you just have to know the licensing before you install it.

The language you want is “nonfree” in Debian derivatives.

Depends on the distribution, many package managers can filter by license. So you can find anything that doesn't have an open source license.

1. I usually stick with distros that have large userbases. I've tried smaller and niche distros before, and inevitably they stop being maintained, or move in a direction I don't like. The larger distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, have more resources (people, time, money) to spend on testing updates, and have reliable update schedules. When I was younger I didn't care about that kind of thing, but these days I use my PC almost exclusively for work 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, I need my PC to not break when I update it.

Another technique I use is to go to the vendor site for software I use and look at which Linux distros they officially support. Usually they will publish at least an Ubuntu package, sometimes a universal deb file that works on Ubuntu, Debian or Mint. Sometimes an RPM package for Fedora/CentOS too. This is getting less relevant these days with Appimage files and Flapak images that work the same across all distros.

It's natural to get bored or frustrated with one distro and want to try out others. Imagine if Microsoft made many different flavours of Windows that each look and operate differently, everyone who is bored and frustrated with default Windows would be trying them all out, comparing them, debating the pros and cons, communities would form around common favourites.

I have a small gaming PC that I use to test out other distros, I'm currently on Nobara, that I actually highly recommend for a gaming-focused distro.

2. This one is really hard to say. It depends on so many factors like what hardware you are running, what software you plan to run, how tech savvy you are, even your definition of what is an issue. Mint is very stable and easy to use, you may run into zero issues getting it installed, running VSCode, playing some Factorio. Or you might run into a small incompatibility between your GPU and the bundled kernel drivers and run into a whole world of hurt spending days tinkering on the command line with no usable graphics driver.

3. I believe Mint still comes with the Cinnamon Desktop, that is specifically designed to be familiar and easy for users transitioning from Windows. It's not super customisable, but I think it can do what you described. I'm not the best person to answer, I haven't used Mint or Cinnamon since 2012.

4. File extensions are optional in Linux for some kinds of files. Linux usually tries to identify a file type using a "Magic string", meaning it will read the first 8 to 16 bytes of the start of a file and will be able to tell with a great deal of accuracy what kind of file it is. Executables, drivers, shell scripts, and many others use this method and do not need a file extension. You can definitely still use extensions though. Eg, libre Office will still save documents with a doc extension (.odt). Often Linux will use a combination of both the magic string and the file extension to determine the file type. Eg, the magic string identifies it as an open office file, and the extension tells you it's a document kind of office file.

Your Linux photo editor will still save images with a .png or .jpeg extension, because these are the convention (and may be required if you will be opening those files on a different OS). Similarly, your project files created on Windows will still work fine on Linux (if the equivalent Linux app supports that file format).

First time Linux user you mean?

I wouldn't recommend it, unless you can navigate the terminal well. When you install arch, it installs no desktop environment, only the ability to talk to a terminal.

It's technically possible and very doable with some googling, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Depends what your goals are. With Arch, you will need to closely follow a guide to get it installed, if anything goes wrong you will need to search through the Arch Wiki for answers. Arch has an insane amount of customisation options, you will spend a lot of time in the Arch Wiki learning about them. By installing Arch you will learn a lot about Linux. Is that your goal?

You will spend more time reading and learning, but come out further ahead than someone who first installs Ubuntu or Mint.

However if your goal is to simply install Linux on your PC to try it out, (if you don't even know if you will like it, and don't know if you want to learn it's mechanics) then Arch wouldn't be my first choice.

First suggestion: commit to using Ubuntu for a set period of time. Could be a week, could be 2 hours. When you encounter issues, force yourself to stay on Ubuntu.

What you'll find is that at first, errors will seem like gibberish, then you'll do some snooping online, and find out how to access some log files or poke around your loaded modules. You'll slowly learn commands and what they do.

Eventually, something will click, ie; "wait a minute, I just checked to see which kernel modules are loaded, and I'm missing one that was mentioned in my error, that must mean I need to load that module at boot." You load that module, reboot, try your command again, and bam, everything works. You've learned how to troubleshoot an issue.

The best way to learn Linux is to immerse yourself in it. You can't efficiently learn German if, every time you hear a phrase you don't understand, you switch back to English, right?

Ubuntu Wiki Ask Ubuntu Ubuntu Forums

The wiki has some information and should correspond to how Ubuntu specifically is configured. You can ask for ubuntu specific help in those communities. You can also ask here and on several Linux communities on Lemmy.

The Arch Wiki I find to be more in depth than the ubuntu wiki. Of course some things may differ from Ubuntu's defaults but I found it a useful resource when using Ubuntu.

Finally I suggest you learn a bit about how Linux works in general, what is in what directory, what is wayland and xorg, understand how drives are named etc and some understanding of the terminal (moving around in directories, how to use sudo etc, no need to learn to make bash scripts).

Just come ask here when you have trouble, and we'll try to help.

When troubleshooting, the biggest thing is searching the web honestly. But some more things to help you out: look for logs. Linux has loads of logs and sometimes can tell you how to fix the problem.

Logs may not be immediately apparent. Some programs have their own log files that you can look into. Sometimes, if you run the program from the terminal, it'll print out logs there. Otherwise, you read look through journalctl, although this has logs for everything so might be harder to search.

Another useful tip, particularly for system tools and terminal tools, is manual pages. Just run man ls and replace ls with any command, you'll get the documentation on how to use that tool.