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?

  • GoodEye8@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    Mint focuses on stability reliability as evident from its decision to use Ubuntu LTS versions as it’s base. In case I need to spell it out, LTS versions are generally more reliable.

    And you brought up X11 as a negative, but there’s a good reason Mint is staying on X11. Yes, Wayland is the future and eventually Mint will adopt Wayland as well, when Wayland becomes more stable reliable. I’m the mean time Mint stays on X11 because X11 is very stable reliable, extremely stable reliable compared to Wayland if you have an Nvidia card.

    Mint also has better out the box support. For example to my knowledge for Nvidia Fedora comes with Nouvuea drivers which means for gaming you need to go through an extra process to get proprietary drivers. Mint has out the box support for Nvidia drivers. This is less of a thing when compared to Bazzite, but still a reason why to pick Mint as a beginner distro.

    FTFY you little grammar nazi.

    • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
      0·
      4 days ago

      Mint focuses on stability reliability as evident from its decision to use Ubuntu LTS versions as it’s base. In case I need to spell it out, LTS versions are generally more reliable.

      This is false, they’re just less likely to change. They can crash more frequently.

      And you brought up X11 as a negative, but there’s a good reason Mint is staying on X11. Yes, Wayland is the future and eventually Mint will adopt Wayland as well, when Wayland becomes more stable reliable. I’m the mean time Mint stays on X11 because X11 is very stable reliable, extremely stable reliable compared to Wayland if you have an Nvidia card.

      There’s no evidence that X11 is less reliable than wayland, and the reason mint stays on x11 has NOTHING to do with this, and everything to do with cinnamon not yet supporting it…

      Mint also has better out the box support. For example to my knowledge for Nvidia Fedora comes with Nouvuea drivers which means for gaming you need to go through an extra process to get proprietary drivers. Mint has out the box support for Nvidia drivers. This is less of a thing when compared to Bazzite, but still a reason why to pick Mint as a beginner distro.

      This is still false, stable distros have worse support out of the box because they use an older kernel version and the kernel ships the drivers.

      That set of fixes still left everything being wrong or unsupported by any evidence.

      • GoodEye8@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        4 days ago

        They can crash more frequently.

        Where are your stats for this.

        and the reason mint stays on x11 has NOTHING to do with this

        source?

        stable distros have worse support out of the box because they use an older kernel version and the kernel ships the drivers.

        At this point I don’t even know what that means because maybe you have some other weird definition to pull out of your ass. Give me that in 5th grader level.