Always eat your greens!
My gaming rig has been running Nobara for years now, it’s built off of Fedora by the developer who does the glorious eggroll version of Proton.
It’s got multiple desktop environment versions and is optimized for Linux gaming. It has a bunch of gaming-specific kernel patches and optimizations. Extra drivers pre-installed for controllers and Nvidia GPUs, etc.
It has a very easy update wizard, I run it once every few weeks, works awesome.
My advice: Don’t wait until you have to switch to start learning, it will frustrate you if you’re under pressure to figure it out all at once.
Buy a cheapo SSD online, 500GB ones are out there for $35 and install Mint on it.
Use that to dual boot and play around with Linux. Start slow, if you get frustrated, take a break. It will be a much smoother experience than you probably expect these days.
Mint is very easy to get started with, very Windows-like in its UI. And it has easy options to install Nvidia drivers if you need to, and the app store is very easy to use.
It’s really solid.
KDE on my main gaming PC, or if I want something that looks really modern and sleek without tons of setup/tweaking on another PC.
Mint with Cinnamon if I want a #justworks setup that is rock stable and I don’t need to look sexy.
My side business laptop uses LMDE with Cinnamon for that reason. I need that thing to be rock stable and dependable at all times.
Cinnamon has been more stable for me than any other DE, and in my experience, is just as performant as other low-spec favorites like XFCE. My fresh install of LMDE with Cinnamon right after boot uses about 850MB of memory. My testing with XFCE was about the same, maybe 50-75MB less, which for my use case is effectively identical.
Not crapping on XFCE though, I like playing with it on one of my old thinkpads. Not a fan at all of Gnome, I’ve tried to like it for years, but I just don’t care for it, and I experience quite a few bugs.
I plan on trying the new Cosmic DE soon, it seems like Gnome done better, and I could see myself liking it from the reviews I’ve watched.
My current company is being absorbed into a much larger company right now, got bought out earlier this year.
I was the only IT for the smaller company, and I was using 100% Linux (Debian with KDE Plasma) on my laptop to administrate everything in our environment, which is mostly Windows.
Now that we got bought out, I am being forced off my Linux laptop and onto the new company’s Windows laptop, which really sucks. I am planning on quitting soon, as I hate using Windows and I am very underpaid at my current job as it is. Only real perk was not having to report to any IT manager/CTO, and being able to use Linux.
Your hardware is nearly identical to mine. On my gaming PC, I use Nobara.
It’s a distro created and maintained by the developer who works on the Glorious Eggroll version of Proton, so very well known in the Linux gaming community.
It’s based on Fedora, but has a ton of Linux gaming tweaks for extra performance and compatibility patched into it and pre-installed.
It’s very easy to download the ISO and install, and requires basically zero configuration out of the box to start gaming and using the PC.
The only thing I would caution you about, is the only use the built-in Nobara updater app to update your system. Don’t use Fedora commands like DNF to update stuff, it will cause conflicts.
As long as you do that though, you should be fine. I’ve been using Nobara on my gaming PC for about 2 years now, and it’s been awesome.
Worse, Vista you could wrestle into submission, Windows11 is so deeply embedded with ads, spyware, bloat, and spaghetti code, it’s almost impossible to get it clean.
And even when you do, you have to constantly fight to keep it that way. The fact that Windows will change your settings for default apps and privacy preferences without your permission after a major update is absolutely insane and disgusting.
I shouldn’t have to constantly be on guard for my OS Which I paid $200 for professional licensing to just sneak its own preferences and settings back to what it wants.
My current company just got bought out earlier this year, we are in the process of rolling all our stuff into their IT infrastructure.
I was lucky enough to get to use Debian as my OS on my old company laptop because I was the only IT at this company. Last week they finally issued me my new corporate laptop, which of course is Windows because the company that bought us out is a 100% Microsoft house.
One of their sys admins was on a call with me to get the laptop set up and working on their VPN, MFA enrollment, it was supposed to be a “quick 15 minute call.”
I watched him as he fought remotely with my machine for almost an hour. The VPN wouldn’t work no matter what he tried, then the GUI started acting up, then RDP wasn’t working right, then MFA wasn’t working. This was a brand new installation from their golden image too on a brand new high end laptop.
After about 20 minutes, I told him I was gunna stay on the call muted and to just let me know when everything was working properly. Then I hopped back onto my Linux laptop and spent the rest of the call getting actual work done while their new Windows machine was pooping the bed.
He didn’t actually even get it working at the end of the hour lol. He had to remote in later that evening to finish doing a bunch of registry fixes and file purges to finally get the VPN to connect.
My experience exactly. My current company is rolling out new W11 laptops as the old ones age out.
I’m consistently amazed at how poorly Windows 11 runs on these brand new, $1500 enterprise grade machines. They all have the latest Intel i7 chips, 16GB of DDR5 memory, Nvme 1TB drives, 1440p beautiful screens, and they perform like ass.
Constant lockups, stuttering, slow to wake up, slow to open programs, the fans constantly spin up super loud with almost nothing running in the foreground.
I see frequent GUI glitches and bugs, literally had the WiFi stop working on one yesterday, just wouldn’t connect to anything and the tray app wouldn’t pop up when clicked. Had to restart the whole computer and log in again to get it to connect.
Meanwhile, the 11 year old retired desktops that I repurposed for internal company resources like Open Project, Uptime Kuma, and Ansible are running plain old Debian with KDE Plasma and are rock solid. They never crash, never freeze up, are always super responsive, and are fast to update. The longest one of them has taken to update was maybe 3 minutes?
Windows on the other hand… Lets just say there’s a reason I push updates at the end of the day.
Totally agree. If I was an experienced Dev, I would love to work on that as a feature/plugin.
Permanent kiosk is the use case I am looking for. I am aware of cage, it looks pretty interesting and I am planning on trying it sometime soon.
I should clarify, I don’t think that Windows kiosks are better than Linux kiosks in their general functions, I would say Linux kiosks take that crown too.
I’m referring specifically to the ease of setup in Windows vs Linux. With Windows, I can convert any machine to a kiosk in less than 5 minutes. No scripting, no changes to login credentials or permissions, no extra packages installed.
I just wish Linux had something that easy. I would even be happy if it was tied to a specific distro or desktop environment, like a special mode in Plasma or Cinnamon.
Early this year, I switched my parents from Windows 10 to Linux Mint.
Very old, low power desktop, it was already running super slowly with Windows.
It’s been great, the computer is much more responsive now, everything works just fine. Browser is the same, Spotify app from the store is great, printer/scanner, icons on the desktop, their ultrawide monitor, it all #justworks.
I also don’t have to worry now about my dad clicking every weird and sketchy email link and ad.
Automatic updates are set up, and Timeshift snapshots are too, in case something breaks and needs rollback.
It’s my IDE of choice, I love it!
Lol, I wouldn’t even use MS Office on Windows, Libre Office all the way.
Happy birthday! KDE is my favorite DE and it just keeps getting better every year!
He’s an old time Linux guy who went off the deep end and became a conspiracy theorist. He’s one of those people who cries about things “becoming political” just because people decide to make a statement about being inclusive of LGBT folks in their code of conduct.
He’s also been caught just straight up lying about things in his various “investigations.”
Here’s a long video on some of it if you are interested: Video on Lunduke
Jellyfin for only music streaming would probably be fine, if it’s just you using it. PiHole would be good, you could probably get a low impact distro on there to run Docker containers, but only pretty light services on it.
About to build my first really nice homelab NAS for Jellyfin, archiving, etc. targeting between 30-40TB if all goes well :)
Noob friendly? Linux Mint. It’s not the prettiest, but it looks nice enough, especially if you tweak the themes a little, which is super easy.
It’s a fantastic all-around distro, and if you use the default Cinnamon desktop environment, it’s rock stable and super easy to navigate.
It’s what I use on all my personal laptops and also what I set my parents up with when I switched them from Windows to Linux.