LRFotS and fellow HALO afficionado MrUNIVAC writes a follow-on request to my original poast about programming for N00BS (well, sort of), to ask about how to migrate to the Dark Side:

Realize this is a cold thread, but any recommendations for a Linux version that a lifetime Windoze user could get into without having to be in the command line every ten seconds? Use cases would be almost purely gaming and mostly older games.

I’m going to be building a new machine in the not too distant future and while it’s going to have Windoze 11 as a base (yeah…I know), I’d like to start experimenting with Linux in the hope of eventually weaning myself off of Microsoft’s monopolistic teat.

Linux has come a very long way from the days when it looked really clunky, you needed the command line to do anything useful, and hardware compatibility was… well, nearly non-existent, for some distributions. Today, modern Linux distributions are fast, lightweight, easy to use, and VERY beautiful.

I am not joking about that last part. Take a look at what the latest KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop looks like:

Without getting into the endless sperging about whether KDE is better than GNOME, or Cinnamon, or Unity, or XFCE, or whatever desktop manager you want to use – let’s all just agree that Windows CANNOT do that stuff.

This is but a taste of what you can do with Linux. The beauty of the system is that you can modify and change your Linux build into whatever YOU want. You can download and install a huge range of applications and add-ons. Your desktop and workspace looks the way YOU want it to look, not the way Mr. Softy does.

The downside of all this is the sheer range of choices available. It is overwhelming for new users to try to figure out “which distro is best”. The range of options is immense, starting with general-purpose distributions that pretty much “do everything”, to highly specialised ones designed for very particular purposes, like internet security, or serious coding and hacking.

That is before one gets to the never-ending debates about which “core” version of Linux is best. The “family tree” of Linux comes from a relatively small handful of distributions that all had their own package management and file systems, back in the day – and to anticipate the inevitable nitnoids in the comments, I am GROSSLY oversimplifying, for a REASON. Should you choose a Debian-based distribution? Or a Red Hat-based one? Or SuSE? Gentoo? Arch? Slack?

It is enough to make one’s head spin.

In my case, I have tried and sampled many distributions over the last 15 years, starting with Red Hat derivatives like Mandrake and Mandriva. Eventually, I settled on Ubuntu, and then Linux Mint.

For my money, if you want the best possible combination of simplicity, ease of use, light footprint, hardware compatibility, and ability to migrate from a WinDOZE environment – use an Ubuntu derivative.

Ubuntu was one of the first serious mass-market distributions that I can think of, that tried really hard to make Linux genuinely easy to use, as well as beautiful. Previous version of Linux tried to do one or the other, and usually failed at the ease-of-use point, mostly due to hardware compatibility issues. But Mark Shuttleworth’s Canonical Software succeeded where others had failed, by concentrating on the user experience, and by using a tried-and-tested backbone of Debian, with lots of drivers and additional packages made available.

They then went and cocked it all up when they introduced that Unity interface some years ago. I tried to like it, I really did. But I ended up abandoning it entirely, because it was just too slow, glitchy, and irritating to use. I never did like the side dock thing, after all.

That is where Linux Mint comes in.

Mint is very simple, easy to use, and looks and feels very familiar to anyone who regularly uses Windows (as I do). It lacks the bloatware and intrusive garbage that comes standard with any Win10/Win11 installation, and it allows you to choose when you want to upgrade things.

Most importantly, as far as I can tell, it “JUST WORKS”, because it very sensibly uses Ubuntu as its core, and both Dell and Lenovo offer laptops with Ubuntu installation options at shipping – which means the hardware drivers needed to run everything, ship as standard with Ubuntu itself. And that means any Ubuntu-sourced derivative will have those same drivers available.

In Linux Mint’s case, you can use NVIDIA’s Linux drivers for graphics cards, which allows you to play games through the Steam application directly in Linux. Our boy Randale6 has written several guest poasts on this, all of which are worth reading.

Now, there are two BIG caveats with moving to Linux Mint:

First, gaming is NOT a given. I have tried at least twice to get HALO: The Master Chief Collection working on Linux Mint. Both times, it has failed, I think in large measure because of the fact that I use a general-purpose Lenovo ThinkPad T14 with an MX-220 chipset, rather than a proper GeForce RTX card that you find on the high-end ASUS gaming laptops. In my case, I do have to continue to use a dual-boot system – though, honestly, given what a shit-show Windows 10 is, and how buggy the HMCC application itself is, the frustrations remain.

Seriously, there are few things more infuriating than playing through an epic HALO 4: Spartan Ops mission in Firefight, only to find the system glitching and slowing down, because WinDOZE INEVITABLY decides to update itself while you are raining Hell and fire down upon the Covenant. And WHY does it do this? Because I start up my WinDOZE partition MAYBE once a week, and it takes two hours to update.

!@#$%^&* Microsoft…

Right, where was I…

Ah yes, the other great drawback:

Second, for those of you who live and breathe MS Excel or Power BI, the way I do, you CANNOT run these natively in Linux. Just not possible. Yes, you can try to use the Wine compatibility layer, or Crossover Office, or any one of a half-dozen other solutions, but you WILL NOT be able to make it work perfectly.

Power BI is worse. It is an amazing application, but it is also a COLOSSAL resource hog. So you need to have a pretty decent PC to run it properly.

However, as with anything else in Linux, unless you want to do serious dedicated gaming, there are options and solutions.

If you want to run MS Office – particularly Excel – to its full potential, install Virtualbox virtualisation software in Linux, and then install Win10 or Win11 as a virtual machine. Install all of your must-have work applications in that, and then run it seamlessly side-by-side with your Linux desktop.

It is like magic, and it really does work – I have done it many times myself.

As for the gaming aspect – this used to be something where Linux was notoriously poor at handling and managing it. But today, things have changed completely.

Nowadays, there are dedicated Linux gaming distributions available, that ship with all of the necessary hardware drivers and software that you need to play all but the most absolutely demanding of games.

Garuda Linux is one such option:

This is based on Arch Linux, which means it is extremely customisable, fast, and powerful. I personally have never used Arch Linux, but everything I have heard about it, indicates that it is excellent for those who want to be able to modify literally every aspect of their PC. Garuda, though, works out of the box with literally everything you need included.

Another is the SteamOS distribution, which is Debian-based:

Overall, unless you are doing serious gaming of some kind, and you just want a desktop that runs quickly, smoothly, simply, and easily – try Linux Mint, or one of the Ubuntu derivatives. There are several good ones to choose from – ZorinOS and Manjaro come to mind. [EDIT: Manjaro is actually Arch-based, as it turns out. I forgot about that. My bad. Props to LRFotS Randale6 for pointing this out in the comments.]

As for installation, keep in mind, you can “try before you buy”, as it were. It is always a good idea to create a bootable USB stick with a Linux distribution on it.

You will probably want to run Windows and Linux side-by-side for at least a while, using a dual-boot approach, like I do:

But ultimately, you will probably want to make the full migration, except perhaps for gaming – and that will be a good day, because Linux is just better: