Hi everyone, I’m planning on moving from w11 to kubuntu (lts release - 24.04). I’m a gamer at heart, a game designer by education, and wanting to get away from Windows. I could really use some top tips, best practices, and things to look out for. I have run Linux on a Chromebook, but never as my primary PC.
I’m preparing by copying tax info, critical documents, game prototypes, and D&D documents to a USB.
Then run Linus from a different USB on restart?
Thank you for your help, and any references to specific how-to’s 😅.
Run a live version of kubuntu from a usb drive to confirm wifi/lan drivers work and you can access the internet.
Yes indeed! That’s the plan!
Just to be safe you may want to copy important files to a cloud storage AND usb drive before formatting the drive.
Also don’t overthink this and there is nothing wrong with Kubuntu, but Kinoite is going to be very similar and a little more resistant to n00b tinkering mistakes.
I have 20 years in the video game industry, plenty of PC experience, just less In Linux. I’m not too worried about making mistakes that cannot be fixed 😁
Be careful using a USB drive as a backup, they are for temporary storage and fail over time.
Good call, there was a cloud recommendation. I’ll probably follow that route
I did this same move two years ago. Make a list of critical must have functions. Get a second storage drive like your current one, swap out the old and install Kubuntu. Get those critical apps installed and tested. Create a virtual machine out of your old primary drive. Boot that inside Linux when needed.
Good call, I’ll have to look into proton for steam games I think? Or maybe a wine compatibility layer? (I don’t know what that means, but will check it out. Just from top Internet search)
I’ve had good success either using steam (proton is basically seamless and mostly runs by itself in the background without me having to do anything), or lutris for non-steam games
Protondb is a really good source for that information. I do want to mention protonupqt though. Basically when you go on Protondb you might see that some people are using versions of proton that aren’t included with steam(like proton-GE, aka glorious eggroll). Protonupqt provides a tool that downloads some of those for you and even installs them in steam.
And for games that aren’t on steam using the heroic launcher (for epic, gog, and amazon(?) games) or lutris (everything else) is the way to go.
Ty for the recommendation, I have heard that the epic store doesn’t play nice on Linux
You’re already using Obsidian, so my suggestion is… Take notes! Take notes on cool software you’ve discovered, take notes on your settings and configurations, take notes on any issues and bugs you’ve had to fix, take notes on how to use unfamiliar programs, take notes on Linux terminology. You have a huge personal knowledge base from years of using Windows. Linux is not hard to use, but it takes time to become second nature to you.
I use obsidian for d&d notes 😅. Could be useful otherwise though, and get me off of Google keep
I use Keep for checklists and disposable notes, and Joplin (similar to Obsidian, but open source) for my “forever” notes. I look for apps that give you the option of exporting notes in a common format (currently markdown), and I have notes that have followed me through several changes of note taking programs.
Check compatibility for all your programs before you move. Most Linux programs work on Windows but not vice versa. If you’re not in a rush, try switching to programs that have a Linux equivalent before you move so that you’ll have less of a culture shock. If you need any killer apps that don’t have a Linux equivalent you’re going to have to make your peace with that ahead of time, otherwise you’re just going to end up switching back.
KDE is a good choice, and Kubuntu should serve you fine; if you end up going with Kubuntu, I would recommend sticking with it for at least half a year or so before considering switching to something else, as that will give you time to really understand what you like and don’t like about how Kubuntu and KDE work.
Sounds reasonable to me! Thank you!
My biggest use apps are steam, obsidian, gamemaker, ue, and discord.
Do yourself a favor and use either the flatpak of Discord or just use the website since its an Electron app anyway. The *.deb install will force you to endlessly download and manually install new *.deb files to keep using it. A true pain in the ass, there was even a meme about it here on Lemmy recently.
Good call, deffos
Also looks like both gamemaker and UE have native Linux versions, although gamemakers is still in beta.
try not to get yourself in decision paralysis, if you mess something up it’ll be pretty easy to redo it anyway because you’ve learnt it already
Unless you are actually using your PC. Setting up everything involves much more than just installing the OS. If I want to get all my apps working and my data transferred to where it needs to go, and all my peripherals and stuff running, it takes me a day or two.
That’s why I’m still stuck on a distro with more issues than things going for it.
Steam, wine and dosbox with them, you can effectively play any game worth playing. Beyond that I never needed to know.
Yeah, I think I need to investigate proton and wine? 😅
I guess the best distro for gamers is https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite
I’m no gamer but if I were, I’d go with that. Thus could be helpful as well https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/
Ty for the links, I’ll check them out!
The most important thing: Tell us, the community, what your critical application needs are, and get suggestions for applications to use. So many people jump through fifty hoops because they Google search first and the first thing they try turns out to be deprecated, the second thing they try doesn’t work on their system, the third thing they try has everything they need minus the most important part, the fourth thing they try turns out to be proprietary and half-broken, and so on.
You will not find good solutions just by searching around, you honestly, truly, need fucking nerds in this community who live this shit daily to help you know what the genuine best available solutions are. Otherwise you will spend weeks pounding your head against the keyboard using the wrong solutions, not because of anything you did wrong but because there are often so many different implementations of the same thing that it’s nearly impossible to know which ones are the ones you need for your use case without directly asking some people.
Once you’ve been using it a few years, you’ll be familiar enough with working solutions to keep track of this kind of thing yourself, but trust me, it takes a while. So please do yourself a favor and make a thread asking which applications people suggest for the distribution you’ve chosen to use and what kind of framework to install them from (repository or flatpak). You will save yourself a lot of trouble.
Also, as for keeping your backed up data from Windows on a USB, I think best practice is to always keep that kind of info backed up on an external drive, no matter the OS you use, or whether you plan on switching, so if anything fails, the drive will always still be there and readable (unless the drive fails, of course).
Thank you for the recommendation, let’s see…
My critical apps are (and Linux solution?)
- obsidian - files are organized to be referenced cross platform
- steam - works
- talespire - requires proton (need to investigate how this works)
- discord - works using browser (will need to test for video chat), might move to revolt if things in discord get worse.
Discord also has an app from Linux - you can get it as a Flatpak (an official one) or as a native package, although they don’t provide a repo for native packages and expect you to manually download a package file every time there is an update.
For the native packages issue, someone created an apt repo on Github, and if you look in the CI routine, you can tell they’re using the official Discord packages and not modifying them.
Honestly, I should probably be sandboxing it more.
It’s annoying to use a proprietary service, but the This Might Be a Wiki community is rather enjoyable.
Talespire you shouldn’t have any issues with as long as you run it through Steam.
The main thing is that proton is enabled in Linux in Steam out of the box but only for some games. You will need to open your Steam settings and choose the Compatibility tab and choose to enable proton for all games (“Enable Steam Play for all other titles”). That should make it so that any game launched via Steam will run through the proton compatibility layer.
For non-Steam games check out Lutris.
As for Obsidian (not familiar, basing this on quick search), if its the “personal Wikipedia” note taking app they have multiple native Linux versions including a deb and a flatpak.
Discord, as I said elsewhere, use the website or the flatpak.
