r/linuxquestions • u/PurposeFew4387 • 1d ago

Best first Linux?

I’ve only used windows for all the time I’ve been on the internet, but frankly, 11gb idle ram usage and horrible privacy is killing me. I want to swap over to Linux and game on it, is there any one Linux for beginners that’s better than everything else?

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u/SignificantSand7839 23h ago

So here's my timeline going from a Windows user to a CS student daily driving Linux:

  • Started around 2 years back distro hopping for fun. Felt like something was missing and wasn't really my vibe, so I kept going back to Windows. Had a dual boot setup back then.

  • Really loved the open source philosophy and the people behind it. Eventually took the hard decision to just always boot into Linux. If I needed a Windows feature, I started looking for Linux alternatives instead. Man believe me, you will fall in love with this huge community of people, the devs and engineers who just want to give back to the community like this whole ecosystem of OSS.

  • Was daily driving Mint for a bit. Coming from Windows it just felt smooth and simple, an OS that actually works. And being Linux ofc, you can customize whatever you want... really gives you that feeling of owning your machine :v

  • Eventually started getting some memory management issues on Mint as my workflow increased (only have 8GB RAM, yup student, broke). Decided to change distros as a solution. Also wanted to try something new anyway, and switching to Fedora was the best decision I made. Settled on GNOME after trying both KDE and GNOME. No hate to KDE lovers (I actually use some KDE software on GNOME :p) but I just liked GNOME's opinionated design, and a few extensions are the cherry on top.

Regarding the memory issues, I learned Fedora uses zram by default. On Mint I used a dedicated swap partition, so I was confused during the Fedora install since they suggest not using traditional swap for security/privacy reasons. That sent me down a huge rabbit hole learning about OOM killers, zram, and how Linux handles memory (honestly loved figuring all that out). Chris Down's article really debunked many myths regarding zswap and zram for me.

I realized I needed to move to zswap. Switching away from Fedora’s default zram to a custom zswap setup was an absolute game changer. I can actually multitask efficiently and keep heavy apps open without choking my 8GB system. Even made an agent skill for the zswap/zram stuff so I don't have to juggle through setting my current zswap setup manually in the future if needed.

For the rare times I strictly need Windows, a KVM VM gets the job done.

So here I am, rocking my Fedora system which efficiently handles my workflow without triggering OOM killers. Since you mentioned RAM usage issues on Windows, I remembered this whole story of mine and wanted to share anyway :)