So I’ve been thinking about Linux recently, and I’m told this is where the Linux experts hang out. I have a lot of questions that I can barely articulate, so I’m just hoping someone gets where I’m coming from.
I always knew there were more than two operating systems, but the closest I got to open-source software was dabbling with Firefox and OpenOffice in college. I’m an engineer, and trying to stay compatible with all the engineering programs means you’re probably going to use Windows whether you like it or not, so I never seriously considered another OS until now. I’m proud of being good at Windows, but also bitter about it… I can’t shake the nagging feeling that I’ve been missing out.
So I started looking up guides on Linux, and I have so many questions.
I’m astonished by how many distros there are. It’s not just Ubuntu, we have Mint and Zorin and MX and enough options to make my head spin. So how do you choose a distro? Do you just know, or do you have to try them all? Trying one is daunting enough. I’m afraid people might lose respect for me and the open-source software movement if I change my mind. Is there some place where you can try distros on for size without the trouble and risk of migrating multiple times?
How do I know if Linux is right for me? How do I know Windows is wrong? If I loathe my user experience with Windows, is that the fault of Windows or just me? If Linux starts feeling comfortable, how do I know it’s because I’ve made the right choice and it’s not just inertia setting in? Does that even matter?
I’m at least good with Windows, but I lack the intuition of the average Linux user. Could I really master Linux the way I have Windows, or would my awkward personality relegate me to being a permanent tourist?
Is my hardware too old to start tinkering with OSs?
I know your choice of OS should take priority over your programs, as long as those programs aren’t vital, but I have a full Steam library and don’t look forward to losing any old friends. Can I partition my drive? Is that worth the trouble, switching from OS to OS depending on circumstances? I hear some distros these days can run some windows programs, and that you don’t have to leave your old programs behind the way you used to, but can I count on that trend continuing?
Will losing touch with the Windows environment make it more difficult for me to succeed in a Windows-dominated career?
Sorry for the ramble. I’m probably overthinking this. I overthink everything. But I also grew up in a time and place where changing OSs meant you risked losing everything.
EDIT: The post title has been updated from “Need help with Linux” to “egg🐧irl” to meet local standards. This post happened because I was writing a post for a tech forum, but had other things on my mind, things which I’ve yet to find the courage to verbalize directly. I appreciate the advice and encouragement, both about migrating to Linux, and… yaknow… “migrating to Linux.”
It’s normal to feel these things when thinking about a new OS, it can be quite a big change. You can always dual-boot, at least at first. Anyone telling you that you need to fully wipe your drive and immediately start from scratch is being silly.
Part of the fun of exploring new OSes and Linux distros is experimenting with new things! You don’t have to commit to a distros immediately, no one will judge you for distro-hopping! Even if you do eventually choose to go back to Windows, that’s okay! And just because you’re on Windows doesn’t mean you can’t use open-source software! Just because your OS is proprietary doesn’t make using FOSS any less valid.
No one is born with intrinsic knowledge of Linux, and no one should loathe their user experience of their OS. Are you made to be a Linux user, or do you just need to tinker with your Windows install? Only you can tell, but you sound like you’d regret not at least trying out a LiveUSB of some beginner-friendly distros.
Your hardware isn’t too old, in fact a new OS can often help old hardware run a lot better. Proton and WINE have made running games and Windows software on Linux easier than ever before.
Feel free to post here if you have any more questions about your potential transition 💕
Thank you so much for the uplifting words.
I’ve had a lot on my mind that I just can’t find the courage to verbalize directly, but for whatever reason I feel like I can ask it this way without making it feel so terrifyingly real. So I’m deeply grateful for your understanding.
I think maybe I need to get into the spirit of experimentation and exploration. Your OS can grow with you. It should grow with you. All the same, there’s no hurry to choose a distro and stick with it.
Your OS can grow with you. It should grow with you. All the same, there’s no hurry to choose a distro and stick with it.
Couldn’t have said it better myself! 😊 You clearly have a way with words, I very much enjoyed your post.
EDIT: I’d like to add, I know people who don’t even have a main OS, they’re just constantly distro-hopping, and that’s valid too. Sure, maybe some people would say they’re needlessly complicating their workflow with constant re-installs, but who cares if that’s what they like?
This is one hell of a metaphor, well done.
OMG!! This is seriously the best and funniest egg_irl post I’ve ever seen! I was laughing so much while reading it! And it’s even funnier seeing how many people didn’t get it. Incredible post!
Seeing someone newly and genuinely interested in Linux brings me so much joy. Welcome friend, I hope you enjoy your journey.
This was so well written, I am not equipped to even respond to all of your questions as I’m new to Linux myself.
Just experiment and try different distros out as you go. You also have the option to dual boot 😉
Masterclass post my friend :) I’m sure it left many people with egg on their face!
You are overthinking this.
The distro you chose is important when you start to do serious things : running a web server, deploying applications for a company, etc.
At your level this is irrelevant. You want to play with Linux, get a taste of it? Install VirtualBox on your PC, create a new VM and install Linux Mint Cinnamon. Is it the best to begin with? Maybe yes, maybe no, who cares, it’s one of the noob friendly distros and it is based on Ubuntu Linux (it’s virtually the same minus some proprietary crap) which has TONS of documentation online, and forums filled with answers to almost any question you can think of. You run into a problem? Paste the error message in Google and a post on the Ubuntu forums will be on the top of the search results.
In one evening, you will have learned how to run and configure Virtualbox (very easy) and install an “easy” Linux distro. And you will have your playground ready.
Now just look around, try the environment. Open a console and start trying some commands. Find yourself a little project that will force you to look under the hood : setting up a basic LAMP webserver for example. That will teach you how to use package repositories to install new software, where the different components of these software end up in the system folders, how to run command lines, etc. Give it a few evenings.
Then pick up two-three other distributions with different Windows Managers and reinstall your VM (or make a new one) with them. To see the differences. Manjaro with KDE. Fedora XFCE. Endeavour i3 (an amazing Arch based distro but with a very steep learning curve. For later).
Just fool around in a VM. Don’t take that seriously. Explore Linux. Give up. Come back to it. Nobody cares, just have fun and try. You won’t know if you like it unless you play with it.
Then if you fall in love replace Windows with your favorite distro and run Windows in a QEMU virtual machine… :P
When I ask about my gender on StackExchange, people tell me to just use Arch, but I don’t think I’m fully a trans woman?
Clearly Arch is the superior gender.
Legendary post.
You’ve posted this in the wrong community; this community is for memes about both cracked and uncracked eggs. Might want to post this in a different community.
I was writing a post for a tech forum, but I had other things on my mind, stuff I’ve been too nervous to verbalize directly. One thing led to another, and… well, I think you’ll catch my drift if you read the post again.
I hope you don’t mind me being so very circumspect. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to talk about this.
Fml, I would not have caught that without your explanation, lmao
What an expertly crafted post!
Ok, I can accept this as a text-only egg meme. But you’re still breaking rule #1 with the title, and don’t wanna have to delete your post if someone reports this. egg🐧irl would be a valid title!
It might help to make an alt account just for talking about these feelings and experiences. It can help you “let go” so-to-speak, and explore who you want to be (or who you really are) in a safe space. Besides this community, there are other good ones on this instance for more serious conversations, if and when you feel ready for that.
Take care, and love yourself 💖
Thanks for the kind words and the understanding. I’d like to think that once I have the courage to ask these questions directly, I’ll no longer need to ask them. But it’s really encouraging to know there are good support communities out there.
Saying a community of eggs is full of Linux experts is rather funny though, isn’t it
Got a good chuckle out of me
I mean yeah, many of us ARE unix nerds, nobody was questioning THAT :)
There’s a million distros but they fall into some pretty broad categories. The biggest categories are corporate vs community and rolling vs stable/intermittent updates.
Corporate distros are built by or sponsored/heavily influenced by corporations. (Though they’re often built on top of a community distro, not from whole cloth) Ubuntu is developed by canonical, Fedora by Red Hat (now IBM), SUSE by Novell which is currently owned by some firm I don’t know anything about. They tend to be developed for a wide variety of use cases and often have paid support tiers or have one project that’s sold with support to organizations and another free tier that doesn’t have the paid support. Community based distro are made by volunteers and foundations and don’t have a profit motivated arm, like Debian or Arch.
Then there’s rolling vs. Stable. Rolling releases update every software package as the update comes in. New versions, bugfixes, etc, you get them as they’re released. Stable or intermittent releases release on a set time period and the idea is everything is compatible at the time of release, and only bugfixes are released until the next big version. There are exceptions to that but it’s the basic idea.
The last thing to keep an eye on is the desktop environment. This is the look, feel, and workflow of your UI and how you interact with the computer. There are two big ones, Gnome and KDE. Gnome is used on Ubuntu and most of it’s derivatives, and has a pretty specific workflow though it’s customizable through extensions. KDE is extremely customizable but in my opinion looks a bit more old fashioned by default.
You can make a live USB of most Linux distros and play around with them without altering your computer. You’d boot from the USB as if it were a hard drive and try it out. Most distros home page have step by step instructions for this.
Gaming on Linux is currently in a pretty good place. Ive been able to play new AAA games in the launch week on Linux and also some old games from the early 2000’s. If a game is extremely obscure or has anti-cheat, you might have issues but it’s been surprisingly smooth for me and my partner, who is a complete Linux noob and is gaming fully on a fedora based distro I installed for them.
My advice would be to try out Pop!_OS, fedora, and anything that catches your eye and decide. I’d recommend against Arch for a first distro if you’re worried about being overwhelmed, the install takes a bit more understanding of how a Linux system works. I’d also recommend against Manjaro, as it’s had some issues in the past that caused some people to.lose faith in the dev team, And I’d recommend against Ubuntu which is currently working on a semi-walled garden that bothers some people both for ideological and performance reasons.
I’m personally on Nobara, which is based on Fedora with a lot of gaming necessities built in, so installing your operating system also installs steam and a lot of the compatibility software it needs. It’s a great distro and also one I think would be easy to use.
Feel free to PM me with any questions, I’d.love to help more if needed. I’m not an engineer so I can’t really help with regard to engineering software but I can probably help more if I know your specific hardware and can help with any questions that come up.
I’ve been using Linux for many years but I’m very much just a “user”, not a Linux expert.
My advice would be to start with the most common beginner-friendly un-fancy distro. For me this is plain ubuntu. The reason is, thousands of people will have already encountered any questions or problems you run into so good answers and solutions will be readily available.
Install on a live USB. This means you don’t have to commit by installing on your hard drive.
Good thing is that Linux can support pretty much every hardware regardless how old it is. Bad thing is that Linux Users have it hard in a Windows dominated Landscape which makes transitioning from Windows to Linux quite harrowing. I took the plunge and never looked back. Heck my workflows and games even feel better than ever, it’s glorious thanks to Glorious Eggroll (did that user and developer chose that name on purpose though?)
It’s understandable to feel that way about trying a new OS. It’s a pretty big decision. I think the only way to know would be to try one out. and see if you like it. Linux can run pretty well on old hardware, so I wouldn’t be too concerned there.
There’s a few ways to try out linux without committing to even a dual boot. You could try running it in a VM in windows. I’ve used VirtualBox in the past to do that and it worked out fine. You may not get to properly see how well your hardware does in a VM tho.
You can also create a LiveUSB with Persistence, if you’ve got a spare USB thumbdrive lying around thats large enough (>= 4GB at smallest, maybe?). This will allow you to boot your computer into Linux off of a USB drive and try it out. the Persistence setting will allow you to save any changes you make to it like installing software or creating files to persist on the USB drive so you can go back to Windows and come back and all your changes will be there. It won’t do anything to your Windows install at all.
You said you have an engineering background and use proprietary software. It’s possible that some of it may run on Linux. Is it software you run on your own personal machine, or just use at work? You can check the WINE Appdb to see how any software you may need thats non-negotiable (as in an alternative just wont cut it) will work. A lot of times, the issue isn’t really that things wont run on Linux or WINE, but that they have antipiracy or anticheat measures that won’t accept an OS other than the one it was written for.
Valve has really done a lot for gaming on linux, and a lot of Steam games do work well. Idk what kind of games you play, but you can always check ProtonDB for Steam compatibility. Just be sure to click on “PC” once you select the game you’re looking for. Sometimes there are tweaks you may need to do (Lookin at you Blue Reflection, lmao) in order to get things to work. Other times, stuff will just run out of the box (eyyy Sekiro). For games outside of steam, I’d look at Lutris, or again, the WINE AppDB. AreWeAntiCheatYet? maintains a list of games that have anticheat systems and if they have, or have plans to implement, linux support.
I would recommend you start with Linux Mint. It’s based on Ubuntu, which is a really popular distro, so there’s tons of support you’ll be able to find out there on the internet that should apply. The standard Cinnamon package should be good, unless you really feel your PC is old, then maybe the XFCE version will be better. (It’s more lightweight than Cinnamon). If you do ever go down the route of distro hopping if you choose to do a dual boot, I’d recommend maybe setting up a separate /home partition when you’re installing Linux, but that’s wayy further down the line from just trying it out.
Have fun with it!
Your is choice should be based on what you plan to use the device for.
It’s a bit like I live horses but if I need a means of transportation I will pick a car if speed and long distances are involved.
When I get enough money I can get a horse as well even if it’s just for going to the local market.
I think for learning the ropes you should pick something easy and basic. You’ll get drawn into other distros as you learn.
If you want to learn about how the system works at the base level Linux from scratch is a great way of learning.
