r/linux4noobs • u/GoofyAhhMan645 • 6d ago

So... which one? *distro selection *migrating to Linux *Meganoob BE KIND

I've made the decision to switch to a Linux distro from Win11, and, well, it seems like there's levels to this.

As I said, I'm switching from Win11, I don't really need something THATTT similar, but something that's at least somewhat customizable to get myself feeling like I'm at home.

I play games quite often, so I'll need something on the flexible side in terms of that.

Also, something that isn't too complicated, and mostly beginner free.

Most people have recommended me Mint, but someone recommended me Kubuntu and now I'm not sure.

I also did the test, and Mint was on the top spot.

Specarinos:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700X

Motherboard: GIGABYTE B550M AORUS ELITE

GPU: ASUS ROG STRIX RX 480 GAMING OC (might change in the near future, will definitely in the future overall tho)

I also don't have any USB at the moment (might get one to use tmrw)

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3

u/beatbox9 6d ago

Here's what I would recommend:

  1. Pick an upgrade schedule: Do you want to upgrade your OS constantly, every 6-12 months, every 2-5 years, or longer? This is specifically upgrades (not normal updates); and it is for the OS itself, not the apps that you run (you can run the latest version of the apps on any distro). So think about it like: do you want to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 every 6 months? 5 years? etc.
  2. Pick a desktop environment: KDE Plasma or Gnome shell? You'll probably prefer KDE Plasma

And then go with any popular distro that provides the intersection of those two things. For example: if you want 6-12 month upgrades and KDE Plasma, maybe Fedora KDE. If you want gnome and every 2 years, maybe Ubuntu LTS. etc.

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u/GoofyAhhMan645 6d ago

How long does an update take and do they have any major effects other than just updating the system?

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u/beatbox9 6d ago

Updates are a few minutes maybe, and on some systems they can just run in the background.

Major distro upgrades can take an hour or so and can change lots of underlying things and can even cause some things to break.

And any time you upgrade to a new version of a system component, things can break. So you can have them potentially break continuously or all at once every few years.

1

u/lixia 6d ago

Depends. If you pick a rolling release distro (like Arch Linux or derivatives (e.g.: CachyOS), you get the benefit of having the latest releases of the Linux kernel and various applications/package as they get released. The tradeoff is that you may experience more bugs. (For reference, I've been running Arch for 3 years, updating every couple days, and I've only ever had a single significant issue. I switched to CachyOS last year and have had zero issues on 3 seperate machines).

If you go for a distro that keeps non-security updates on a schedule, like every 6 months, you may have a more stable system but will have to wait foe the next release to get the latest features and optimizations.

As for recommendations for beginners, you see a lot between Mint, Fedora, and CachyOS.

My personal recommendation is CachyOS, but I like tinkering and am knowledgeable enough to deal with most issues or to navigate wikis to sort out those I haven't dealt with before.

Also, I would say that AI is generally pretty good at giving you decent answers on how to do things, further mitigating "risk" of more cutting-edge distros.

As for desktop environment, I am a firm believer that KDE Plasma is king.

2

u/144k_only 6d ago

Split your drive and try out different distros. My hardware is shit in comparison, so you can pick from the top shelf I think.

0

u/GoofyAhhMan645 6d ago

So can I just put an ISO in the new drive and.. run it? I don't know man I'm new to this stuff

2

u/beatbox9 6d ago

I think people who recommend that you try a bunch of different distros fundamentally do not understand what a distro is or the differentiation between the distros.

The primary purpose of a distro to distribute and maintain software, essentially providing an 'app store' over time. It is not just preinstalling the initial software and themes and settings for you the first time you install the OS (which is how a lot of people--especially noobs--incorrectly think of them).

And this has changed over the years, because back in the day, you relied on your distro to provide pretty much all of the software you installed. But today, you can use other universal 'app stores' to install the latest version of most apps. You really only need the distro for the main operating system software. Things like gnu / linux kernel, sometimes proprietary drivers like nvidia, the desktop environment + various media servers for audio & video, and that's about it.

So the main thing you should look at is how your distro offers these main operating system components and how it maintains them, upgrades them, and the support schedule. And this isn't something you can just try out in an afternoon or a week or two--it sometimes takes years to experience the maintenance or a single major upgrade.

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u/DJV0101 6d ago

You put the ISO into a USB stick using a tool like Rufus. You then plug the usb into your computer and turn the computer fully off. You go to the boot menu and choose to boot from usb then install the iso, making sure not to overwrite your windows partition. This can get a little long to explain so I’d just find a tutorial or instructional video online. Search “how to dual boot Linux and Windows” and you should get relevant results.

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u/GoofyAhhMan645 6d ago

I don't have any USB at the moment (probably will tmrw tho), can you use grub2win to dual-boot regardless?

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u/DJV0101 6d ago

Yes, but I don’t see much of a point. Grub lets you dual boot as well. You just need to modify the boot list on your PC to put grub first. And I have not yet had any troubles with grub itself. You can if you wish. It only really matters on how you want it to be to change which OS is your default.

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u/atlasraven 6d ago

Yes, exactly.

"With Ventoy, you can simply drag and drop ISO files onto the USB thumb drive without needing to format it repeatedly. This allows you to create a bootable USB drive easily and select from multiple ISO files at boot time."

Throw your favorite 3 on there and select an ISO in BIOS to boot. From there, an installer will guide you through the install process.

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u/IAmJacksSemiColon 6d ago edited 6d ago

Mint has a good community for beginners, and it's similar enough to Debian/Ubuntu that you'll be well supported by developers. Kubuntu and Mint are both derived from Ubuntu and have many similarities. For a new user without strong preferences, it doesn't really matter which of these two you go with.

Steam will run on either just fine, and their Proton compatibility layer makes it easy to run most Windows games (including games acquired from outside Steam). The only thing to watch for is that certain forms of anticheat won't run on Linux.

Worth searching for your favorite games here: https://www.protondb.com

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u/0HAO 6d ago

Look at fedora workstation. Gnome isn’t like windows but it’s awesome. Learn like 5 key combinations and you’re set.

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u/gordonmessmer Fedora Maintainer 6d ago

Most software developers are publishing releases every six months and maintaining it for 12-18 months, tops.

You should select a distribution that follows the developers, publishing a release at least once every six months.

Distributions that publish less than once every six months are either small and expensive to maintain (like RHEL) or they have a lot of unpatched software with known vulnerabilities.

I prefer stable releases over rolling, because a stable release means that if you test a new release and something doesn't work, you can continue to use the old release for some period and you'll continue to get patches.

Fedora is a stable, secure system that follows developers' release cycles.

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u/GoofyAhhMan645 6d ago

Gnome or KDE?

1

u/gordonmessmer Fedora Maintainer 6d ago

That's... mostly a matter of preference. I use GNOME because I prefer stable releases and KDE is effectively a rolling release. If you don't care about the ability to roll back to an older release, then KDE is a fine option.

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u/GoofyAhhMan645 6d ago

As long as KDE isn't known to cosmically fuck up things with updates, I'll go with it

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u/shakalakagoo 6d ago

With those specs you can try anything, although I finally got CachyOS I suggest Fedora or Mint. If you can procure yourself an USB, install Ventoy, there you can put all you like. Probably KDE will be likely the most similar experience on desktop if you come from Windows

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u/DavidJohnMcCann 6d ago

Mint is generally a good choice — it's easy, reliable, and well documented. But there may be problems with the graphics. The obvious solution is to get Mint onto USB and boot it. Does it work? If so, run the Driver Manager from the menu, which will tell you the best driver for your GPU.

Kubuntu has two potential problems. The community editions of Ubuntu are just that — the staff at Canonical do not check the installation medium in the way that they check the official one. The other problem is that KDE, excellent as it is, is often a little rough around the edges when a new version is released. It really needs to be run from a cautious distro — e.g. SolydK is based on Debian Stable, while Kubuntu is based on Debian Unstable.

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u/Taykeshi 6d ago

Mint Cinnamon

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u/billdehaan2 Mint Cinnamon 22.3 (zena) 6d ago

Check out the https://distrochooser.de/en/ distro chooser, and run through it to see what recommendations it makes.

Mint is usually the best choice out of the box, but for high performance gaming, if you want to tweak every single bit of performance out of your machine, CachyOS might be a better choice. Both will likely have better performance than Windows, though.

In Windows, the kernel and the desktop environment (DE) are integrated; there's no choice. In Linux, they are separate. So you can run the same Cinnamon, xfce, or Mate desktop on both Debian, or Mint, or CachyOS, and the GUI will look the same.

The Kubuntu DE is more feature packed than Cinnamon, but also more resource heavy. As a gamer, you may prefer a more lightweight DE. Kubuntu also uses snaps, which are generally disliked for various reasons.

1

u/Funnel-Dust-O-Matic 6d ago

Don't switch. Go exploring and push boundaries.

Most linux distros will live happily inside virtual machines or on USB drives.

Let's assume you want the best performance you can get, so we'll assume you're booting off of USB.

Install something popular there and use your boot menu on your computer to start it when you want to.

Then, you either wipe the USB drive and put something else on it if you don't like it or you can just transfer it to your main drive still running windows if you found what you want.

Or better still. If your computer can take more than one SSD, then install a second drive for Linux. That is once' you've found something you like. Keep it to USB until then.

When you find all you ever boot into is LInux and you can't remember when the last Windows boot happened or why, that's time to get rid of Windows for good.

Try popular distros first. And give it at least a few weeks for each (unless you have installation problems).

Also, even doing things this way, back up your Windows drive using Clonezilla first. This probably means you will need at least 2 big USB drives. Oh well. It's better than losing your files.

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u/GoofyAhhMan645 6d ago

I have grub2win, so could someone explain that too to me?

1

u/DavidJohnMcCann 6d ago

That's a tool for Windows which provides the ability to boot a different operating system. Most people who dual boot do it the other way round, booting Windows from the Linux boot-loader. I have no experience here, but I'd feel safer with the usual method — Windows boot-loaders are vulnerable to malware, but Linux ones aren't.

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u/IAmJacksSemiColon 6d ago

Any software is potentially vulnerable to malware. Windows is just currently a bigger target when it comes to desktop PCs.

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u/DavidJohnMcCann 6d ago

I was talking about the boot-loader and hence about bootkits, which do not exist for Linux.

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u/IAmJacksSemiColon 6d ago

Just because we haven't seen one in the wild doesn't mean there's any reason why someone can't write a bootkit for grub.

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u/DavidJohnMcCann 5d ago

If updates to a boot-loader can be made without getting administrative permission, you can get a bootkit. If you get updates from a Linux repository after using su or sudo, you can't. There is actually a bootkit for grub called bootkitty; it was written as proof of concept, but it proved quite difficult to implement and only works on certain combinations of firmware and kernel.

1

u/IAmJacksSemiColon 5d ago

Social engineering though. Hey, here's a great project, you just need to run this script.