Afternoon all.
I’m looking to make the switch away from Windows, and I wondered if people had any advice, distro suggestions and so on.
My main use cases for my PC are Gaming, Writing and Image editing. Things I’d love to have working are all my games, Epic, Steam, GoG and Game pass. I already use OpenOffice so I’m probably fine with that. And I currently use Photoshop, so a good alternative for that would be good. Finally Spotify, Discord and VPNs etc
Any and all help and suggestions would be welcomed, thanks in advance.
So from my personal experience I have a few pointer
Don’t dualboot because you’ll keep switching to windows instead of finding solutions to your issues that you inevitably will encounter
There is no replacement to Photoshop but you can do mostly all things with Gimp. It is just different and you’ll need to figure out how. This in itself can be very frustrating because you know how to do a thing in Photoshop but will need to learn it again in Gimp. This is part of it though and imo worth the time. Just like when you learned Photoshop
You may need to use the terminal a few times when you start but in the long run when things are setup you rarely need it unless you really want to mess with things under the hood. For me, I haven’t used the terminal for well over a year
I switched to Mint 2 years ago
Be patient and use the forums or discord servers. And also be thankful and kind to people offering their help for free. Try to find a solution first, and if that does not work, give them as much information as possible when asking for a question. In Linux, find system info and export the system information as a txt file. Share that whenever you ask questions
There’s an extension for GIMP that makes it look and feel more like PS. Might make the transition easier.
Changing the shortcuts to copy the ones from Photoshop was the main thing that worked for me!
Dualboot is also much more complicated. No newbie should have to deal with that, imo.
For best out of the box experience you may want to try Bazzite (https://bazzite.gg/), it will have pretty much everything included for gaming, except Microsoft Store as noted above. This system is harder to break by doing something stupid and has good documentation on their website.
Alternatively you may try a more traditional “batteries included” distribution like Ultramarine Linux or Linux Mint.
Step 1) Find a Distro which you are comfortable with using. Over the years I’ve tried Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch, and I’ve settled on Linux Mint since it’s familiar to me, but also easy to use and lots of forums with trouble shooting since it’s based on Ubuntu/Debian. Arch is my close second if you want the bleeding edge and are OK with stability.
Step 2) Find the right UI. Most distro’s default desktop environments are good, but I found Cinnamon and KDE Plasma to be perfect for me. If you are looking for a more Mac like experience Gnome is a good starting point too. Though you can customize any distro to look like any OS with enough time and effort.
Step 3) Software.
Games is a solved problem these days. Steam works natively and Proton is good enough for lie 99% of your games. You just need to enable it and you will be good to go. If you are playing non steam games, Heroic is a simple application which works, though if you are installing anything more complicated, i.e. a CD game Lutris is your friend. Not sure about gamepass as the Microsoft store is Windows exclusive.
Office Software: LibreOffice is installed by default on all OS’s and is based off of OpenOffice, but it’s actually still in development.
Photoshop: Yeah this is going to be your make or break it situation. Photoshop has no real substitute in linux. GIMP isn’t bad, but is only good for image manipulation not creation. Kirta is more of an art studio rather than Photoshop. What I personally do is a lot of work. Affinity Photo is a close second place for Photoshop but it’s Mac/Windows only. Good News, with Proton you can run it. Bad News it’s a pain in the rear to do so. I strongly suggest Bottles and the ElementalWarrior build of Wine to get it working there are some guides on how to do it. But again it’s a pain in the rear.
In some regards how I get around Windows Limitation is just have a virtual machine with windows on it to run when I need it. Doesn’t need much power and I use it when I need it. I…e backing up my iPhone or sending music files to it.
- don’t worry about it too much. The only cost of switching again is time if you find that you don’t like one in practice
Yup, my tower still has my Windows 10 drive in it. If I need it it’s there, but for the most part I don’t need it.
Game Pass doesn’t work on Linux. It could very easily, but M$ doesn’t want it to.
Everything else should be good to go.
Another vote for Bazzite, or really any of the Universal Blue images. There is no other distro out that is as full-featured and bulletproof for Linux newbies. Since gaming is important to you, Bazzite is almost certainly the best choice. It comes in both Gnome and KDE flavors. KDE will feel more familiar coming from Windows.
I use gnome personally but KDE has a couple really important features for a gamer. Good support for fractional scaling and software control of monitor brightness.
Chiming in to emphasize that the biggest deal to you probably will be the desktop environment, not the underlying distro. Given your stated requirements, most distros could work.
As usual: begin with Linux Mint (Cinnamon), that’s the best beginner distro.
Steam is natively supported. Gog and Epic are easy using Heroic Games Launcher. GamePass is impossible.
If you need Photoshop, you can run it through wine, at least the old CS6 version runs fine. I think I once had CC 2014 and it worked well, too.
Spotify and Discord work well. As for VPNs, you’d have to be more specific.
What do you use Photoshop for? I ask because if you’re just having fun with it or making simple edits like saturation or color curves, it’s probably easier to find a replacement. GIMP still has a bit of a clunky interface, but has become much more livable since it got some non-destructive editing in 3.0. Personally, I use a combination of Inkscape and GIMP for a lot of stuff.
However, if you’re using Photoshop in a professional capacity as say, a photographer or a graphic designer, I’m not sure you can effectively abandon Photoshop. As much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is unfortunately an industry standard, and it’s rather difficult to get running reliably under Linux. There are ways, but I wouldn’t call them reliable. I thus can not in good conscience recommend you switch all your machines to Windows, though perhaps you can run Linux on one device and keep a dedicated Photoshop box if that’s possible for you.
Everything else should probably be fine. Depending on what you play, you might lose a few games to kernel-level anticheat, but honestly, my thought is “Why should I give a company access to an important part of my operating system just to play a video game?”
As others have said, you should probably use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; the latter isn’t really developed anymore, and the former maintains compatibility with your old files while having vastly better maintenance and feature updates.
Spotify and Discord both have native apps for Linux, so you should be good. I don’t really use VPN services (I could rant about why, but that’s best left for another time), but there’s probably ways to get them working.
- Opensuse, or Fedora/Bazzite.
- Steam for steam, Heroic for the Rest.
- Gimp/Krita
- Spotify, discord, etc is just a Web app, but I recommend Freetube
- Mullvad as VPN.
you game pass/microsoft store games are probably fucked, but steam, epic, and gog all should work on linux just fine (except maybe those that need anticheat)
for steam just use the official client, and you can play epic and gog through the Heroic launcher which is actually significantly nicer than epic games launcher or whatever
the distro doesn’t matter really, just use mint or something
You’d recommend Heroic launcher over Lutris? Epic didn’t install via Lutris for me, but I haven’t got around to looking into it.
I’ve used both, and I’ve found that Heroic is much easier and generally works out of the box. At this point, I only use Lutris for things that need extremely fine-grained control.
I use heroic because it uses an epic games store emulator instead of actually using the epic games store, and so it’s way faster and nicer than the shitty official binary running under wine or whatever (which is what lutris does)
I was going to switch to Nobara soon because it’s supposed to have all the graphics card drivers out of the box, etc. The only thing holding me back is I’m afraid it’s going to be difficult to get SolidWorks working right. I love base Debian though, and Ubuntu is very popular.
Something that can make the switch easier is that, like with OpenOffice, many alternatives can be used before you switch as they’re cross platform :)
So if you need a replacement for Photoshop, you can start learning it before you’re also simultaneously learning linux. Gimp has a modified version to make it more like Photoshop I know many folks like, that might be worth exploring
The other alternative would likely be krita, which is generally better regarded for its comparative competency as a project, but is more aimed at illustration than photo editing, so it may not be able to meet your needs
Discord works cross platform, I think most VPNs do too, but I could be mistaken
On the distro front, my votes go to mint and fedora. That gives you a wide range of desktops to choose from, try them out by booting from a flash drive and pick what you like. Most distro stuff is about living with the os long term, but the desktop will immediately feel alien or like home. And maybe you like alien! That can be fun, but it really depends on you.
Fedora comes with some asterisks like not making non-free software available by default, including things like drivers and media codecs. That can be a pain to deal with as a new user. And the community isn’t super newbie focused. Mint is great, but doesn’t offer either of the biggest desktop environments that you might wanna use, and I have less personal experience with it.
Open suse also has an exceptional reputation, but I’m less familiar with it. Pop os many folks like, but my experience with it has unfortunately always been kinda buggy and rough around the edges, your milage may vary.
