Hiya,
I don’t suppose anyone has a good source / 15 minutes and a drive to lecture a Linux noobie on some basic Linux functions or things to read up on?
Perhaps unsurprising given the gestures wildly to everything, but I have been planning to switch over to Linux on my home machine for a long time now and I feel like Microsoft slowly, inexorably, forcing the swap to Win11 is as great an excuse to finally bite the bullet as I’m likely to get.
A bit of background, I am an IT guy with many years of experience in Windows and some small bit in Mac. I am an experienced coder with a good fundamental understanding of Unix environments and how to make systems talk to each other. Im comfortable with deep, technical stuff, but, especially in new systems I have a bit of a hard time with abbreviations and acronyms. So I don’t need a whole “Linux for Dummies” as I feel like I have a pretty firm grasp on the basics. I just want to know if there’s any convenient tips or tricks to make the transition easier.
For example, I have literally no idea what distro I should use lol. I’ve spent a while researching but given how customizable it all is, after a while it all kinda just mushed itself into a gray maisma in my brain. I use my home machine almost exclusively for gaming and some light coding projects, but I also want to be able to play around with it and do some independent learning.
I just need a good source that can give me the basics on where and how to translate my knowledge of Windows to insert Linux distro. I know it’s a completely new OS so I will need to learn a lot of new things. But at their core computers are computers so some things need to be the same, I’m just not sure what to look for.
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When choosing your first distro it’s probably best to go with one that is very popular - Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Mint, etc. Niche distros are a surefire path to immediate troubleshooting.
From there, decide what desktop environment you want. Most distros offer releases with various environments (KDE, Gnome).
There are differences with package managers… who cares, you either run this command or that one to update.
I second using a Live USB to run any distro release first so you can test drive it. If you use Ventoy on your USB drive you can put multiple distro ISOs on it instead of having to flash only one at a time.
Since you are more familiar with Windows, Linux Mint may be a good start. Can also try PopOS for a different desktop layout, more similar to Mac. These are Ubuntu based systems. Can also give Fedora a try, but may require a bit more of a learning curve. There is also Nobora for a more gaming oriented version of fedora. Try out the live previews before installing to make sure your system works properly.
Not sure if this is something that will help but the site Linux Journey might help you learn how to use and understand Linux more. This is more the core stuff and command line oriented.
For easier transition, start using programs that are available on both systems so you don’t have to jump in cold turkey, if that may be too much. When looking for programs on Linux, always use the provided store first to search. Since you are a programmer, you are aware that there will always be multiple ways to do the same thing, web searching is your friend, just make sure you are searching for the right based system, in the examples above, Fedora or Ubuntu. For programming you are going to enjoy Linux more than windows :).
Remember this is a journey and will take time. Have fun!
This is all fantastic info and exactly what I wss looking for, thank you!
I didnt even realize live previews were a thing lol. Only 1 question really, I though Ubuntu was an OS, but there are others built on it? Is that just how some distros are or is this a fundamental misunderstanding on my part?
In a high level, you are correct that Ubuntu is a standalone OS like Fedora. Other distributions have used the background packages that make up Ubuntu to form their own OS with changes here and there. It is similar to how Ubuntu is built on top of Debian.
Sure others can explain this better.
Because linux is open source, distro design is iterative. You can build everything from scratch, or you can take someone else’s distro, change a couple things, and maintain your own version. If someone else has already done 90% of the work, you can save lots of time and energy by just starting there and building on it.
For example, Debian is built from scratch. Ubuntu is derived Debian. Pop!_OS is derived Ubuntu. Mint has distros derived from either Ubuntu or Debian. Some distros like Ubuntu have flavors, where everything under the hood is kept the same but the desktop is different: for example, Kubuntu is Ubuntu with the KDE Plasma desktop environment, and is maintained by the Kubuntu project.
When you go to choose a distro, the choices may seem daunting. But once you realize just how many distros are starting with some other distro and making a few small changes, the more you’ll realize that the distinctions between them don’t really matter and distro selection is more a matter of taste. Sure, Ubuntu may have dozens of derivatives, but all those derivatives are basically just Ubuntu with a slightly different look and feel, so the choice really isn’t as big as it seems.
On PopOS i would wait until the new UI, as the current one has many incompatibilities. I would fully recommend linux mint, its stable, workable and easily customizable with their own ui cinamon.
People have made distro recomendations already, so I want to talk a bit about what makes a distro a distro: application repositories and management, update cadence, and what’s installed by default. That’s pretty much it. Anything else can likely be transplanted from distro to distro.
Out of the default applications by far the most important is the desktop environment. Have a look at Gnome, KDE (and others, cinnamon, etc.). Pick something you like the look of. Gnome is known to be closer to Mac styling and sentiments, including the our-way-or-the-highway philosophy, limited customisability in the name of consistency, etc… KDE is the ‘we heard you like customisation so we put customisations on your customisations’ kind of environment.
Update cadence really boils down to one of two things - do you want a new OS version every few months where the distro maintainers manually release a bunch of software all tested together (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora), or do you want each application released individually after it’s been tested to work with everything else (Arch)? Note that the former are sometimes called ‘stable’ releases but not because they are less likely to crash, but because there are simply fewer updates. The latter are called ‘rolling’ releases.
The application management philosophies are a lot harder to nail down, especially as a newbie. You will probably just have to accept that the first distro you try will likely not be the one you settle on. For instance I started with Ubuntu until I got fed up how difficult it was to install anything not found in the main repository (a surprising amount of software): In Debian-based distros (like Ubuntu) unofficial software is fragmented across thousands of ‘personal’ repositories that you must manually add URLs and signing keys for, it feels very clunky. Because they are personal respositories it’s easy for the owner to abandon it or just not push updates and you won’t even notice until it breaks after a system update. Once I had some Linux experience under my belt I found the Arch repository style much easier to work with: One central official repository, and one ‘unofficial’ repository. I’ve heard Fedora has a similar system.
But the single most important piece of advice - just pick something. The great thing about Linux is it makes hopping distros easy: A package manager makes it trivial to export a list of installed programs so you can reinstall them on your next distro. You won’t be enslaved to a distro once you decide, so just pick something and use it for a bit. Learn what you like and what you don’t. Use that to decide on your next pick.
This is a pretty good starting point, but I would like to add that Flatpaks and Flathub can make software stupid easy as well. There are a few distros that have support right out of the gate.
I just want to know if there’s any convenient tips or tricks to make the transition easier.
dualboot, i always recomend that, you gonna break your distro while learning and that’s good, but you still uses windows, and need a funcional system, so keep the dual boot while you’re learning
about what distro, you need to test, and because you have a background in unix and macos it isn’t gonna be as hard for you, distro hopping is normal
I’d add my ballot in to recommend Mint or Pop! for someone who wants to game. Newer WINE and Proton versions have made gaming so very nice on Linux. Cinnamon, Mate, and XFCE environments are what I’d recommend for your graphical shell. Cinnamon is kinda Mint’s flagship DE. I’d recommend it for anyone new to Linux or even new to computers in general.
I spent many, many years administering Suse and RHEL systems for work. I found that while I was more comfortable with configuring Red Hat/Fedora-style systems from a terminal/shell-only POV, Mint+Cinnamon were what made Desktop Linux work for me when I realized I absolutely was not going from Win 7 to Win 10. I feel like it’s only gotten better since.
I currently use Endeavour + Cinnamon, but Endeavour is Arch-based, and more for tinkering with than ‘Install and it just werks’ the way Mint or Pop! are.
If you have a computer background already then dive in! For a gaming rig try PopOS or Nobara.
PopOS is Ubuntu based and used Gnome. They’re hard at work on a new custom DE that appears Gnome-like. PopOS is made by hardware company System76 to improve upon Ubuntu’s support of newer hardware they wish to sell.
Nobara is Fedora based and recently switched to KDE Plasma which aligns with the Steam Deck. Nobara is specifically tweaked for gaming.
for me as someone who does not want to setup much I like zorin. Out of box it emulates the look and feel of windows and has all sorts of applications pre installed including wine/play on linux. its the most install and go distro I have used,
