Hi there!

Seeing the enshittification of Windows unfold, I’m curious about trying out Linux.

I don’t want to move over my main machine just yet, but I’ve got a 9 yo HP Pavilion 15-e001ed spare laptop I want to experiment with. Eventually I want a gaming laptop that can run steam games.

When I googled I found a plethora of pieces of advice, but seeing the proselytizing for Linux here, maybe I could get a bit more personal advice as a potential conscript.

So what advice would you give me to start my journey into Linux?

UPDATE: Ok my cherry is popped, writing this from a fresh Mint install. It’s suprisingly smooth sailing. Only thing is somehow software gets installed on my root partition instead of the home partition I made because people told me so.

But overall not nearly as dounting as I thought it would be. Thanks for the help everybody!

  • CornflakeDogEnglish
    7·
    4 days ago

    Hey there, I made the switch a few months ago and my Linux machine has quickly become my primary laptop! I started out with Fedora, using the KDE desktop environment.

    I know folks often recommend Ubuntu or Mint but there are reasons you might decide it’s in your best interest to avoid that. Ubuntu’s package manager (a.k.a. app store) pushes something called Snap packages. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with them, but people tend to avoid them simply because it’s a proprietary package system and the Linux community overall favors more open-source solutions. Also, Mint was an easy recommendation years ago and I’m sure it’s still nice now, but Mint really just looks like Windows 7. It feels aged as hell.

    When picking a distro, do understand you’re really picking more the assortment of things your Linux will come with and how the OS will lay things out. It sounds awfully convoluted but really you can’t go wrong here, this is such a wide community and there are guides and how tos for just about everything.

    • CornflakeDogEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      Also something to note is that the KDE Plasma desktop environment has a very similar layout to Windows 10/11. It feels incredibly similar, honestly almost 1:1 in some aspects. Tons of distributions use it as their primary DE, or at least give you the option of using it

      • nfms@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        I work in Windows (company provided laptop) so on average I spend less time on my Linux PC. And I completely agree with you.
        KDE as been my go-to desktop because of the familiarity. Some people argue that it has too much costumisation but the defaults give you everything to run a modern PC. While still allowing you to venture into the “terminal”.

        • CornflakeDogEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          The defaults really do give you everything, from a first glance, one might actually think it is Windows because of how the taskbar is set up exactly the same by default.

          • nfms@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            My partner is a long time gamer on Windows. Her Win11 laptop doesn’t have the same performance as mine so I setup a gaming account for both. I barely told her anything on how to “operate” it and after a couple of times she has no problem on her own.
            Just now, I came back to the pc and see kwrite open with a message from her. Never told her how to do that. She just searched for “notepad” on the menu like she would on Windows.

    • Akasazh@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Win 7 looks seems like a positive to me tbh, I’ll go for looks later on, first want to understand the system better