Edit2: Writing this from Pop_Os! I had experience with Mint for my Self hosting rig and wanted to see other pastures. Decided to rearrange my three drives, two of them are still Windows, another I emptied and dedicated to Pop OS. That way I still have easy fallback to Windows if I need to do something fast and then I'll know what I have to add to Linux over time.
First things first, I've setup auto-back up. For now it's google drive because it's the easy one. I have to figure how to self host Nextcloud and then use this as a backup storage.
Steam is installed and to be fair, I'm happy with the native linux games. Still going to take a look at Lutris and co out of curiosity.
I mostly miss MusicBee right now. Any recommendation for the most solid music player? Also, what's a good movie player? I used MPV, I need something capable to deal with 3440x1440 resolution and stretch properly.
Also, I wanted to install Bitwarden and the first thing that showed up is Snap Store. I remember hearing about Canonical in a bad way so should I stay clear from that?
Hey!
Today is the day. I finally got fed up with Windows booting up with an advert that I already had yesterday and had clicked on "remind me in three days" reluctantly. I'm finally tired of killing Telemetry.
Now that gaming is less important for me, I feel like now is a good time to switch mainly to Linux. I might keep a small spare drive with a Windows/Steam partition for the occasional incompatible game.
I've just started transferring my precious files to an external drive and I'm preparing for my Exodus.
Still unsure about the distro I'll choose, I would like to avoid distro hoping. But now I made up my mind, I'm leaving windows for the foreseable future.
I started self-hosting three months ago as a way to trialing Linux with the added bonus of being useful and my server is still up and alive so I'm confident I can use Linux without breaking it.
Any welcoming tips?
I'm a bit anxious about the big change, but also relieved I won't have to put up with the bloat/adverts.
Edit: Two hours in and so many kind and useful comments. Thanks for the welcome party! You're all a bunch of good humans :)
Welcome to the family!
I've been using Linux for ~14 years and am not a computer person at all. Of all the distros, Linux Mint is by far the easiest, most intuitive, and works without problems. I think that the installation is even easier than Windows. There's also a large supportive community in case you should into any problems, abd because it's tailored for newer users, whatever problem you run into has likely already been resolved by someone else.
My personal favorite at the moment is KDE Neon tho.
So far I've tried Debian12 on my old laptop and Mint on my self hosting rig. I think I'll sping so VMs and test new distros before commiting to a full install. I wasn't too happy with Mint because its boot time is much slower than Debian on a comparatively better machine so I'm not too tempted to go for it again. But maybe I messed up something and caused slow boot times.
You could try MX Linux if you want something performant and stable. It’s built on top of Debian and is easier to use.
Yeah, Mint will tend to be a little slower than Debian since Mint is Debian plus Ubuntu plus Mint. If you're looking for speed, LMDE or XFCE desktop environments would be the quickest. Of those 2, LMDE might be faster, but it's almost a bare bones GUI. XFCE might be just a little slower, but the GUI will be more adjustable.
Good luck!! 😀