Things To Know Before Switching To Linux

there are a lot of videos on YouTube about why you should switch from Windows or Mac OS over to Linux especially with the absolute State Microsoft is pushing Windows towards while these videos are certainly helpful for understanding why you'd want to use Linux in the first place I figured I'd give some advice on how to make the switch not in terms of installing the OS but rather the things I feel that new users should know so the first thing you should know is that Linux is not a standalone operating system when you switch to Linux the thing you actually install on your computer is a Linux drro so what is a drro well there are a bunch of things that make up an operating system and in the case of Linux a Dro is basically a default selection of those things that work well together however most dros are standardized to some extent for example most dros use grub for the boot loader now a question most beginners ask is what drro should I use it depends but if I had to give a concrete answer Linux Mint not because it's objectively the best or because it's my favorite but having used it in the past I can confidently say it's stable easy to use lightweight and generally doesn't have compatibility issues there's also zor in OS if you want something that looks a bit more modern and Polished and both of these are based on auntu the second Point kind of ties into the first point and that is Linux is not Windows well duh obviously what I mean by this is Linux doesn't function the same way Windows does for instance Windows uses the NTFS file system although Linux can read and write to NTFS drives the main file systems would be things like ext4 butfs and xfs if you don't know what any of this means don't worry however I'd argue the most significant difference and probably the one that really matters is how software is installed on Linux which is usually done through a package package manager rather than downloading a file from your browser most package managers are command line tools however many beginner friendly ders like Linux Mint and Zoran OS have a GUI program where you can install software kind of like an app store speaking of software the third thing you should consider is the software that you use not all programs run on Linux say I know heartbreaking this includes popular tools like Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office so if you absolutely need to run Windows in some capacity then I suggest dual booting which is where you run Windows and Linux on the same computer you run Linux most of the time and only run Windows when you need to there are other Solutions such as using wine and running VMS but they have their own problems but if these programs are just nice to have rather than essential then I would encourage you to look into software that does natively run on Linux especially FSE software because a lot of those programs are designed for Linux first and then ported to Windows and Mac OS later in my case I was using quite a lot of free software on Windows so I didn't have to learn a whole new workflow and in general quite a lot of software is natively supported on Linux and of course you also have web apps which I don't really like but they are option and a lot of people are already using them and since they run in the browser the OS is sort of irrelevant the fourth thing I would recommend is taking the fact you use Linux into consideration for example when you buy new hardware I'm not talking about devices which are basically plug andplay like a USB mouse or a basic pair of speakers I'm talking about things like printers where drivers can be fin key if you're looking for a printer I would recommend the brother HL 1210 w besides running very well on Linux it's just a great printer overall likewise if you're building a PC and you're buying a Bluetooth adapter Wi-Fi adapter network card look up how well they play with Linux I should also clarify that if any hardware or software isn't supported on Linux it's usually not the fault of Linux but rather the fault of the company choosing not to support Linux especially if it's proprietary so you sort of need this mindset of if they don't support Linux I don't support bought them you know you wouldn't buy an iPhone case for your Android phone and then complain that it doesn't fit the fifth thing I would suggest is Don't Fear the terminal although the terminal might seem daunting at first I'd encourage you to at least learn the basics of it and the reason is because you may need to use the terminal for troubleshooting and it's helpful to know the gist of the commands you're running plus when you become good at the terminal it's often faster to use it for certain tasks for example you can install multi programs with just one command the sixth thing I'd recommend is before you install Linux and even while you use Linux have backups even if you're a Windows or Mac User you should be making backups things can and do go wrong it's not unique to Linux that's just how computers are sometimes an update can break something sometimes you can delete or mess something up because of human error and sometimes you can lose data because of Hardware failure however by keeping backups of important data you significantly reduce the risk Some Ds like Linux Mint come with a tool called time shift it can be used to back up your files but it's more of a system restore tool also keep a Linux live USB on hand because if you know what you did wrong you can actually fix the problem within that live environment let's say you mess up your fstab file and the final point is just about Linux gaming of course not everyone plays video games which is why I left this point until the very end there's a misconception that you simply cannot play video games on Linux but I've demonstrated on this channel that it just isn't the case in fact I've even pushed Linux gaming to its limits by running games on netbooks cheap hardware and even on arm devices so the fact that Linux can't game at all just isn't true now it's true that not all games run on Linux however a lot of popular games are natively supported and because of tools like valve proton lutris and the heroic games launcher a lot of Windows only games run on Linux about as well as they run on Windows the main limitation with Linux gaming is with anti-che software games like valerant and fortnite for instance just will not work however things have gotten better and I've gotten games like Dead by daylight and Apex Legends to run on Linux so that's it for today I hope you enjoyed I hope this advice was useful to you and until next time cheerio

Channel: GNULectures

Views: 22,577

Keywords: linux, windows, gaming, gnu, switch

Id: PSkFUemQ8Uw

Length: 7min 2sec (422 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2024