Hey guys, I’m an entry-level IT professional and tech enthusiast.
I’m getting a bit sick of windows for a multitude of reasons and want to try out some Linux distros.
I use my pc for web browsing, university (which uses office 365) where I study software design, software development (vs code, visual studio, jetbrains stuff) and gaming (99% of the time via steam).
My main concerns for switching are that I’ll have a hard time with university work because we mostly use teams for video conferences and work together with word, and other office stuff. We also are required to do some virtual machine stuff where we use virtualbox.
Also I’m a bit worried that some games on uplay, epic and other platforms aren’t available anymore.
For distros I’ve been mainly looking at Manjaro, Linux Mint or plain old Ubuntu. Can you recommend anything that might fit for me or will I maybe run into any issues with my chosen three?
Edit: Thanks a lot for all the replies. I’ve read through all of them even if I didn’t reply and it was very helpful. I will test most of your suggestions in a VM before I jump into completely changing my OS. And I’ll probably try booting from a USB Drive first. What I didn’t mention is that I’ve already worked with Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS, so I’m not scared about having to use a CLI.
Avoid Manjaro, if you plan on entering the ArchLinux space do it with EndeavourOS.
I would avoid Ubuntu, but that is more because I dislike their politics on snaps.
You are an entry-level IT pro, so, I’d suggest EndeavourOS for personal, Debian for work. Why? Simple, Debian is widely used in professional environments, nobody will look at you weird for using a “less professional” distro.
In terms of University work, you are saying you guys use Teams and Office, probably with a student license that would give you access to a full online Office experience through the browser, just use that.
In terms of gaming, things are looking pretty good nowadays, and with a more personal distro, such as EndeavourOS, you’ll get the latest advancements in gaming.
Thanks for the hint. I’m kinda curious about Arch, so I’ll definitely check out EndeavourOS.
Unfortunately for work I’m still bound to Windows then because we use Visual Studio. I guess I can just use a VM if I ever need that for personal use though!
Visual studio is available on Linux as a native app from the AUR and some distros repos, I use VS on my endeavourOS with no problems, other than it has a slight tendency to be slow on launch, but that may be due to hardware age.
Are you talking about Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code? Although there’s a lot of overlap in functionality, they are two completely different products and only VS Code has a native version. Regular VS on the other hand I’ve never seen running on Linux.
It is code, sorry for the miscommunication. My question on that though is what is the differences between the two? I don’t use micro$uck crap anymore. Haven’t for almost 15 years.
VS Code is a text editor with plugins, VS is a full blown IDE with many many many features (it’s like 10GB+ out of the box)
And probably expensive as hell to boot. Although to be fair as an IDE it does work well. I can code just like I was in an IDE. It literally suits my needs when using python, rust or any other markup language. Even seems to do some autocomplete for me.
I honestly thought they were the same really.
The only stuff I miss is the way dreamweaver worked back in the day where you can see wysiwyg as well as the code. But that was yesteryear where adobe wasn’t as money hungry
the community edition is free, don’t know what the restrictions are though
Besides that, it has a Flatpak package.
I did forget to mention that. I don’t like flatpaks and avoid them if possible. Guess you could say I’m a Linux purist lmao
I like Flatpak for things that have proprietary junk like VSCode because of the contention and selective permissions.
Consider using the old VM switcheroo. On windows. try some distros out in VMs (I vote Fedora, perhaps KDE spin to ease transition, which gets you ready for RHEL, an enterprise standard server distro). Once you find what you like, get it set up and live in it as much as possible and isolate what you need WinBlows for, e.g. Visual Studio. When you’re ready, install your distro on the metal and spin up a win VM for the stuff you need.
I disagree, playing around in VMs is not giving you much experience. Rather boot from livemedia and play around with the different preshipped DEs/WMs. After you know which desktop environment is to your liking, you are free to chose whatever distro you want. The only real important part of a distro is its packet manager and documentation. Everything else can be exchanged.
Yeah, live media is an worthy option, and more realistic, and one should have one on the keychain ideally (OP look Ventoy), but it’s bog slow and not everyone has multiple machines to learn on…
Why would livemedia be slower than virtualbox? Just get a proper stick and its probably even faster.
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 2•1 year ago
If you do go with EndeavourOS, install Rider-EAP from the AUR. It is a professional level C# IDE and the EAP version is free. It has a time limited license but. In my experience, it will update often enough to keep the license active.
I’d recommend opensuse tumbleweed. I would suggest Debian but it moves too slow (updates) for gaming. I think arch is good but you will have to want to learn a bit more about it. Tumbleweed falls closer to Debian with stability and still near arch as far as frequent updates.
One downside of Opensuse compared to Arch is its lacking Documentation.
I use Opensuse TW on my desktop machine for over 10 years now and I use Debian at work, also have a different distro on my laptop.
True there is no beating the arch wiki
I have found over the years you can apply a lot of the directions to whatever distro you are using. You just have to do some minor tweaking to the commands. Primarily using the right package manager command for your distro or using distro specific software in place of arch software. I have also found you can use a lot of the AUR programs by searching for said app in your repos.
Or they can use EndeavourOS if vanilla Arch is too complicated. You’ll still have to install things like libreoffice, steam etc. but you don’t have half the learning curve you do with vanilla arch
There is also Xero Linux
Stick to one of the major distros, not some little-known derivative. Also, please avoid Manjaro, it’s horribly broken, and Ubuntu, because snap. It essentially just comes down to how you want to manage your packages.
Edit: VirtualBox is fully supported on Linux, but QEMU/KVM is better.
Between the three I’d go for Linux Mint. It was my first distro too, and it makes the setup process very easy, especially for users coming from Windows. Manjaro and Ubuntu are fine, plenty of people I know love them, but they’ve both made some decisions in recent years that I don’t like. The former being negligent with security updates, and the latter forcing their own, worse, package manager on users. You shouldn’t have any issues with Mint.
Most of the apps you mentioned are available for Linux, including Teams and VirtualBox, though you’ll probably have to download those from their respective websites. Office 365 still works from a web browser, and you can open its documents locally with LibreOffice (though more complicated documents might have some formatting messed up). I haven’t heard of uPlay, but there is an unofficial Linux client for Epic Games (called Heroic Launcher), and ~90% of Windows games either support Linux or work through a compatibility layer such as Proton.
If you’re decent at programming try NixOS. 90% of your system is described by one config file and because of how it builds if a fix works for one person it’ll work for pretty much everyone
(With exceptions sometimes for hardware specific stuff like Nvidia drivers which is obviously dependant on your GPU)
It’s the one distro I’ve not really encountered any problems with out of the box
Completely agree. I made the switch from Arch to nix two weeks ago. Although I have to admit for a Linux newbie it might be a bit much at once. Maybe start with something easier like Pop is?
I keep seeing Pop recommended so hijacking for an issue I ran into switching away from it - I had to completely wipe the drive prior to formatting the drive for whatever Debian based distro I was checking out.
Long story short, it was due to the bootloader for Pop remaining and interfering with the install process. So a full wipe wouldn’t be necessary most likely, just clearing your boot partition should be enough.
I’ve found NixOS to be one of the easiest distros to use because everything is reproducible, I’m not too sure why everyone who uses it says it’s a hard one to begin with
At the start you just go with the template the installer gives you, and add packages to the package list it generates, then as you want more advanced features options start to come in handy and they’re just as straightforward
No nasty hidden surprises, everything for the most part works exactly how you’d expect (with the exception of syntax with some of the more funky features but you don’t need those to manage a system at the bare minimum
Ubuntu on the other hand when I started using it I had to run a few random commands (disabling broken Nvidia services) after hours of digging just to get my mouse pointer to work after hibernation) and had to do that every single time I switched to a different distro, wasn’t even an issue out of the box on nixos
And if you’re stuck a fix that worked for someone else will almost always work for you unless it’s a hardware specific issue
As long as you are okay with using the web versions of office, you can basically go with any distro, since all of them have at least a web browser and virtualbox in their repositories, as well as vs code. Jetbrains also works (I’ve only used intellij but I assume the others are just as easy to set up). I’ve never tried visual studio on linux though, not sure how well that works.
If you are a Windows user, I recommend Linux Mint.
- Office 365 and Teams can be both used as PWA, I think, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
- VirtualBox and other development tools are linux supported
- Games can be sometimes pain, but thanks to steamdeck the community is huge now
I’m terms of software, most distro are going to be the same, especially debian-based ones (Ubuntu, mint, pop, etc.) I think Mint is a great choice - cinnamon is a good, familiar desktop environment for windows users, and unlike ubintu it has flatpak support so you get a lot of up to date apps through that. I’ll admit I’m biased though, and manjaro is probably great as well - I’d even suggest plain Arch, the new installer makes things really easy if you’re somewhat tech savvy.
Office 365 can be accessed online, or a foss office suite like Libreoffice or Onlyoffice can edit and save to Microsoft file formats. Comparability is usually pretty good unless you’re doing something really weird.
Unfortunately visual studio is a no-go. VSCode and Jetbrains work though.
Teams will also work through the browser. I believe they also have a PWA now for chrome. My company actually uses teams all the time even though they dev team is mostly on Linux.
There are alternative launchers for games outside of steam. Heroic is one I personally use - it supports Epic and GOG. Just check protondb to see if the games you care about work. IDK about Uplay but if you look around you might find something.
openSUSE Tumbleweed is my choice, I also used Pop_OS! for almost a year but if you plan on gaming and having the latest Mesa drivers and Wine + kernel updates, openSUSE is the way to go. It works the best for me and if you feel that you may want to change change your desktop beetween kde/gnome/x11/wayland I find that openSUSE simplifies that process a lot.
In my opinion, rolling release distros have less issues in the gaming and software development area.
I use my PC for a combination of office work, programming and gaming. OpenSUSE is also my choice!
openSUSE is so under-rated.
Zorin is great! but, if gaming is really important i’d recommend dual booting so you can switch back and forth. eventually you will just let your windows os collect dust
Linux Mint is great, Ubuntu is ok, I’d stay away from Manjaro. The Manjaro team is known for selectively delaying updates, which can break systems sometimes.
Teams and VirtualBox both work fine on Linux, though personally I’d recommend just using teams in the browser vs downloading the app from Microsoft.
Most games work great on Linux! A really good resource for seeing if the game you want to play works is ProtonDB. There’s a compatibility rating for almost every game on Steam there (even if you didn’t buy the game on Steam, ratings for the Steam version should be fairly accurate). For non-steam games, WineHQ AppDB is another good resource, though I’ve found it can sometimes be a bit out of date when it comes to compatibility (in a good way, it’ll say games are broken sometimes when they actually work fine).
For Epic, you can use the Heroic Games Launcher. It’s an open-source launcher for Epic and GOG games. It’ll automatically handle setting up a wine prefix for you and everything, so all you should need to do is click “install” and then “play” once it’s done. Uplay is a bit more difficult, since there’s no Linux-native launcher, but it’s not impossible. I believe Lutris has an installer for it, you can definitely find instructions on how to do this online.
I’m not gonna lie and say that gaming on Linux is as easy as it is on Windows, especially for a beginner. These games and apps were designed for use on Windows, and if any consideration was given for Linux, it was an afterthought. However, it’s completely possible for many people to never have to use Windows for gaming. It’s so, sooooo much better than it was just a few years ago, and it’s only going to improve from here. You might struggle a bit as a beginner, but with time you’ll learn more about how all this stuff works and eventually, if a game doesn’t work, in most cases you’ll be able to figure out why and fix it.
Personally, I can’t remember the last time I just wasn’t able to get a game running on Linux at all. There was like, one instance where cutscenes didn’t work, that’s the worst case I’ve ever encountered. I mostly stick to single-player games, but still.
I use Pop OS for gaming & working and I personally suggest that, never had problems.
For games, you can check protondb for compatibility with proton/steam. For other launchers you can use Heroic Games Launcher for epic and gog. For EA Play (or how tf it is called now, ex origin) I run it from steam as a shortcut but in general you can use Lutris for them and there are particular games (like league of legends) that are executed via Lutris.
For what concerns Microsoft Teams, you can use a web browser as I do. While for office you said that you have an office 365 subscription so I suppose you can use word from a web browser.
You can use virtualbox without problems.
ubuntu is the most widely used distro and very simple to setup and gaming out of the box with steam is very simple. Distro end of the day doesn’t matter all that much because you can change them to your hearts content, but for a beginner, you’d probably have the easiest time with an ubuntu distro.
Doesn’t hurt to have virtual box windows on your linux box just so you can easily do some of that other stuff. While I have done fine with libre office for a long time there are definitely problems with formatting so having a windows VM would just solve that issue. Plus teams and w/e.
Epic games will take some serious tweaking, but not impossible.
I was about to ask basically the same question! I’m actually about to make the same move for my home pc, which I mostly use for streaming and gaming. I already gave a try to Fedora on a VM (gotta say this is the nerdiest name out there) , and I was REALLY impress by how simple, smooth and polish this thing is. To the point where I believe 80% of standard users would be better serve by Linux then Windoss or macOS. The univ and college where I work also uses stupid Office365, but I think you can manage most of your requiere interaction with the browser version. I’m gonna keep a Windows partition because audio and video editing isn’t quite there yet, and VR doest work, but I mostly use my MacBook (not my choice) for those project so my home PC will probably run Linux 99% of the time, now that gaming works.
I’d go with MX/Xfce, it’s based on Debian. Once system is installed you’ll not see a big diff between a MX/Xfce and a Manjaro/Xfce, visually, but under the hood they are completely different for instance.
Want to install xrdp to access your PC from windows RDP client? In Manjaro you have to enable AUR, download the source and compile them, it’s missing all kind of base-development that you need to install, then at the end you have to tinker some config file or your screen is black, etc. In MX, it just work fine.
So try something that works fine first, like MX23 AHS version.
