So i have a gaming desktop that not the best or the newest. What takes up most of my drive space is games, updates, and software’s. Im wondering if i should switch to linux and if linux will improve any performance for my main machine? If you believe i should switch what os should i go with or why or why not should i switch?
I mostly game and do mess with ollama/ai tools because i think that’s cool. I want to do more things in the future but that might beyond my drive space?
What would you advise?
You can bypass the TPM requirements for windows using Rufus to get Windows 11. There are tons of videos on how to do that.
That being said, I use Linux as a daily driver and love it. You can always test it out on a USB and decide if you want to install it. It won’t run games well from a USB, but it at least will allow you to see what you like.
Either way good luck with your adventure and if you have questions this community is spectacular and really likes to help people!
My biggest problem right now it picking a linux destitution or os. There’s so many how do i choose?
Also if anyone is wondering this machine is a overpriced prebuild i got because my parents forced me to pick a prebuild instead of building a pc.
And there’s the issue. Guy is confused, and everyone is recommending him ten thousand distros. We need to understand that not everyone understands half of what we talk about more than half the time.
OP: just get mint, try it out, make a thread again in a couple months if you need help choosing another distro.
A lot of folks will recommend Mint as the first option, since it’s pretty straightforward and will feel a lot like older editions of Windows. Personally, I use Fedora Plasma, because it feels like what Windows 11 should have been, and it supports just about everything I’ve thrown at it. It’s got pretty broad support, so it’s easy to get into.
Linux takes like 5-10mins to setup. You can dedicate your first day/week to trying out a few different flavors to see which one you like.
I’d try distro’s in this order Mint with Cinnamon > fedora KDE > Ubuntu Gnome > cachyOS if you’re a baller > Arch if you want to learn and break things while doing it > NixOS if you absolutely hate having things work easily and learning transferable knowledge.
Ouch. Accurate, but ouch. 😄
I only roast NixOS from a place of love.
In the past certain distros were better for certain tasks, but not really anymore. The thing that separates distros is how they do package management and how many packages they have. All that’s to say, just pick something easy to start with like Kubuntu, Mint, or Debian if you’re ok with older software.
Yeah but for a new user its nice to see how different groups configure linux out of the box. Once you know what you’re doing you can tweak the distro to your liking but new users seem to search for a default they like and stick with it until comfortable.
I’m using Nobara and Fedora. I think Mint is the most popular.
Check out distrowatch.com it explains it well.
Choosing a distro is both very easy and very hard. The easy answer is go with the flow, look for what the most popular distros are and see what appeals from those. A common distro will have lots of other people with the possibility of having the same issues you have finding solutions. It makes troubleshooting way easier and is worth the distro not being perfect if you can get more support.
The hard answer is don’t choose a distro. Try distros. Maybe before killing your Windows install get VirtualBox and install various distros in VMs and try them out. Performance is fairly good in a VM so you can get a realistic idea if how it will work for you in terms of how intuitive it is to find things, how the workflow is, and whether it is too opinionated about how things are done.
For example, Ubuntu has a little less ability to control things at a deep level, but it is more supportable because everyone using it either does or does not have a given problem.
At the other end is something like Arch which is more of a base than a distro. You choose your desktop environment, what services you want, all the back ends, and you have to configure it yourself.
I would recommend EndeavourOS as a great Arch based distro.
All that matters is that you pick something popular enough that you can easily Google any issues that might arise.
I’m still going to ask how you ended up with a server CPU. Does it help with the tasks you do?
The big ones for general use are Ubuntu and Fedora. KDE is gonna feel most windows like on any distro.
If you want something security focused there’s quebesOS that breaks everything out into VMs. For gaming there’s bazzite which is just modified fedora and several other gaming spins like steamOS.
Bazzite isn’t just modified Fedora, it’s based on Fedora Atomics, like Silverblue and Kinoite. If OP isn’t even sure about which distro to use, tossing them into the world of
ostreemight be a little much, since a lot of the online advice doesn’t take immutable systems into account. The Discord community they have is helpful, though, and there’s more than a few users here on Lemmy who use it, who I’m sure would be willing to help.Nobara is just modified Fedora, however, and it’s also nice.
There’s a lot of good suggestions here and I wanted to add pop os! it’s a beginner friendly Linux distribution but with more of a focus on gaming.
Pop is great, but I wouldn’t currently recommend it, since they’re putting 99.9% of their effort into Cosmic. I have heard longtime users mention how certain packages and updates are behind, and while they’re willing to wait, I wouldn’t want to put that upon somebody new.
Not a bad recommendation in general, but just my two cents about the current state of things.
That’s a really good point and I had forgotten about the updates being behind. Thank you for bringing that up!
Just pick something. They are all free (nearly all of them), so you can always install something else pretty easily. Spend some time to get your feet wet and get the lay of the land. After a week or two, you’ll probably have a really good direction on what you actually want. You can also run them as live oses, so download a few with different Desktop Environments you think are interesting and test them out. Then install one.
Do you have HDR monitors? If you do and care about having the HDR part working, you’ll likely want to pick one that uses KDE Plasma for the desktop environment.