Hello!
I’m interested in moving my personal computer to running Linux but I’m not sure where to even begin. As background, I am a casual user and have a desktop with hardware from around 2014 running Windows. I am hoping to setup a NAS drive as a media server in the next year or so, offloading all of the files currently on the Windows desktop and have been interested in open source software such as Jellyfin. I also mostly game on an Xbox and Nintendo Switch, but have used the desktop in the past for gaming such as with an Oculus Rift Headset and some Steam games so not huge on getting games working on the computer. But, I do sometimes torrent using the computer so don’t want to lose that capability (especially with upkeep for the media server).
With all of that said, I didn’t know how to get started with choosing what Linux OS to use, setting it up, backing up my files to make sure I can use them with the new OS, etc. Making the switch seems to have great options for customization and “choosing a distro that works for you”, but I don’t know what would work for me or what will be user friendly for a beginner.
Any tips or pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Mainly from a security standpoint PPAs are something I would want to avoid.
I’ve not used Snap since I tried it out a couple of years ago, it wasn’t as good as Flatpak in terms of performance, and there were concerns which got highlighted like it’s entirely proprietary and hosted by Canonical only, I heard Snap was being forced even when you would want through system packages, and something about forced updates.
I get why Flatpak is better in terms of sandboxing each application, but I personally prefer to use system packages wherever I can.