This is just to share my experience with everyone, especially the people still undecided.
I was planning the switch for months, and finally had a couple hours undisturbed from the wife and the kids :)
It was a slightly rocky start, as my USB wifi receiver did not have native drivers, but with wired internet and the official Mint tutorial the rest of the transition was super smooth.
The OS install went flawlessly and within an hour I had all the basic programs, browser and utilities up and running. I love that I just download the app from the dedicated place, no pointless web surfing for the latest versions.
I backed up my steam folder (with the rest of my files of course), so after installing the steam client and some quick synchronization I had my installed games library back in minutes. I did some testing and everything works great. As I own a steam deck I already had some experience with games not running natively on Linux, but a saw many great tutorials for beginners. I cant wait to test out some more games!
Edit: thank you for all the positivity and great feedback! I know Lemmy users love Linux and I have to admit I feel a little bit more included :D
Who knows, maybe I will start warching Star Trek next…
Reverse defenestration (throwing Windows out of your computer)! Congrats!
I love that I just download the app from the dedicated place, no pointless web surfing for the latest versions.
IMO this is a huge thing, Linux actually does a lot better than Windows. I know the Windows Store exists, but it is lacking in lots of ways.
Welcome to the club! I did the same thing earlier this year, although I ended up moving from Mint to openSUSE Tumbleweed after a couple weeks due to needing support for some bleeding edge hardware.
Thanks to Steam / Proton it’s been relatively painless!
Welcome to the world of Linux gaming (minus your Deck, of course)! Hope you have fun.
Good times! Thanks for sharing your experience!
Having a Linux PC and a SteamDeck, as well, I’ve been quite pleased with the various ways they compliment - streaming, install from peer, etc.
That is for later, but definetly will do some experimenting with the deck.
Welcome brother.
Yea I switched from Windows to Fedora and aside from issues with music production, I have been happy with the switch. Its a weight off my mind knowing i dont have to worry about Windows stealing my data anymore.
I’m probably going to be switching to Ubuntu or something Ubuntu based since it seems it will be a bit easier to work with for making music. Not that Fedora hasnt been great in general but i think my specific needs like having yabridge for Windows vsts is making me consider switching.
Take a look at AV Linux and Fedora Jam.
Highly recommend Reaper fwiw.
I have looked at Fedora jam, my issue with it is the same issue I currently have with no way to use yabridge that I could find though this may have chnaged since i last looked.
AV linux does look promising, just haven’t deep dived on it yet. My concern was that its done by a single dev iirc but again i haven’t done a deep dive quite yet.
And also a huge fan of reaper. Been using it for years now and I love it so very solid recommendations. I appreciate it. :)
For Fedora, it’s three commands:
sudo dnf copr enable patrickl/yabridge
sudo dnf install yabridge --refresh
After a wine update, run:
yabridgectl sync
And AV Linux is one dev yeah, but it doesn’t much matter. It’s just a tweaked build, it’s based on MX so you’re still getting all the updates needed, just with some config changes more or less.
Fwiw I use straight Debian, but I’ve also been using Debian for so long that it’s graduated college, met a partner, got married and is considering kids.
Ubuntu I avoid these days because I think Canonical is running it into the toilet, with so many bad decisions (snaps, pro subscription, etc) that I just won’t touch it.
That said, AV Linux is essentially deb based anyway (MX is based on Debian), so it’s a nice setup if you don’t want to have to think about your kernel.
Fedora I also like, I’m just less of a yum/dnd guy than an apt guy (which I have literally typed into RHEL machines before remembering I was being an idiot).
I will have to give this a go then on Fedora because i would rather not reinstall for a third time since switching lol. I appreciate the advice.
When i last checked, the copr for yabridge was out of date but i was looking at this months ago and its also entirely possible i was looking in the wrong place or was reading information that was out of date.
Again, very much appreciate the help. Linux is still a new thing for me so any help is always welcome.
I’m proud of you. Linux Mint was my first daily-driver distro and it’s still one I’d recommend to newcomers. I hope you have a great time with it!
I dont know you but it means a lot :)
Welcome to the club! You might need to enable proton in the steam settings, I think it’s under compatibility?
I’m surprised this still isn’t enabled by default
I think it is technically still counted as a beta.
Thank you! Yes, it needs to be enabled there. Its basically just 3 extra clicks and the game is good to go :)
You may know this already from the Steam Deck, but I highly recommend installing protonup-qt which will enable you to install the glorious eggroll versions of Proton. A lot of game cutscenes don’t work with vanilla proton but will with ProtonGE.
Not found a better OS for me than Mint :)
So far loving it!
I’m psyched for you! I just researched hardware benchmarks and ordered a new AMD laptop and planned to run Linux. But I didn’t research well, because the Wifi card doesn’t have official drivers yet and I couldn’t be bothered to learn to edit, make from source, and load alternate drivers, so I retreated to Win10 for a little. I’ll try again later.
That’s great to hear! I am still dual booting mint and windows but I am slowly moving towards being fully on mint. I recommend checking out Lutris if you have games on other stores, it also works well with running windows games.
Thank you. I have a relatively big GoG library, so Fedora is already installed :)
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Thank you. I will look into it!
This is the exact path I’m taking in the near future, glad it went well. What gpu do you have? That’s my biggest concern at the moment with my 3070
Sorry, I have a Radeon rx580, no experience with Nvidia yet.
I have a 5600X3D and 3070 and had issues with PopOS and Fedora but EndeavourOS which wraps arch works like a dream. Others have reported no issues with nvidia and PopOS and other distros but you may need to try more than 1
Congrats! As a Linux user of nearly 6 years, I hope you feel welcome here.
It’s a good time to migrate to Linux!
If you need to run the EA launcher, I found it works best in Bottles.
