Basically the forced shift to the enshittified Windows 11 in october has me eyeing the fence a lot. But all I know about Linux is 1: it’s a cantankerous beast that can smell your fear and lack of computer skills and 2: that’s apparently not true any more? Making the change has slowly become a more real possibility for me, though I’m pretty much a fairly casual PC-user, I don’t do much more than play games. So I wrote down some questions I had about Linux.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
And also, what distro might be best for me?
We’ve already established that a lot of people will recommend Mint. What do you think, why do a lot of people recommend Mint?
Simple, it was the best choice for a long time and hasn’t done anything to piss people off.
it’s no longer the best choice but mint people are still happy so they still recommend it even though it is objectively the wrong choice to start with for a beginner.
We’ve was it the best choice?
Dunno, a long time ago at this point.
Stupid autocorrect. Why was it the best choice?
Back then ubuntu had pretty much all of linux cornered, the vast majority of distros were ubuntu based or ubuntu adjacent, and ubuntu was beloved, however, it came with a number of flaws, mint just rectified those flaws and was otherwise basically just ubuntu.
By being ubuntu based and getting rid of the stuff that made people angry, you ended up with a highly supported, beloved distro. These days things have changed, however, fedora is just as if not more well supported than ubuntu, same with arch based distros.
The only reason Mint is suggested to beginners is because it’s “a highly supported, beloved distro”? A reason that has very little to do with beginners?
That does NOT have very little to do with beginners, being a highly supported distro is one of the most important things for beginners, having guides for how to do things written specifically for your distro is fantastic for new people.
It being beloved is why it’s recommended, yes, and that doesn’t benefit new people, but that’s an obvious reason why one might recommend it…
There’s also the fact that it’s designed to be easy to use, but that also applies to fedora, and fedora is significantly more well-developed, so it’s not really relevant here.
Beingly highly supported is a prerequisite to being a good beginner distro, but it’s not a reason to recommend a distro. If we take it as a reason then Mint having a GUI is also a reason to recommend to beginners.
This is where we’re going to completely disagree. Guides in general are good, but I doubt any beginner actually cares about guides, unless it’s a guide telling you what to click where on the GUI. A good beginner distro has to work for the user without the need of any guides.
Instead of playing the prying game where I keep prying until you give straight answers (because people don’t love Mint just because it’s an Ubuntu fork) I’m just going to conclude that either you deliberately don’t want to say why people recommend Mint to beginners or you actually don’t know why people recommend Mint. I don’t care which it is because both invalidate your opinion of the Mint suggestion being outdated.
Somehow you think the ease of use isn’t relevant because it also applies to Fedora, but support is relevant despite it also applying to Fedora? How about some consistency in your arguments.