Hey guys, I’m an entry-level IT professional and tech enthusiast.
I’m getting a bit sick of windows for a multitude of reasons and want to try out some Linux distros.
I use my pc for web browsing, university (which uses office 365) where I study software design, software development (vs code, visual studio, jetbrains stuff) and gaming (99% of the time via steam).
My main concerns for switching are that I’ll have a hard time with university work because we mostly use teams for video conferences and work together with word, and other office stuff. We also are required to do some virtual machine stuff where we use virtualbox.
Also I’m a bit worried that some games on uplay, epic and other platforms aren’t available anymore.
For distros I’ve been mainly looking at Manjaro, Linux Mint or plain old Ubuntu. Can you recommend anything that might fit for me or will I maybe run into any issues with my chosen three?
Edit: Thanks a lot for all the replies. I’ve read through all of them even if I didn’t reply and it was very helpful. I will test most of your suggestions in a VM before I jump into completely changing my OS. And I’ll probably try booting from a USB Drive first. What I didn’t mention is that I’ve already worked with Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS, so I’m not scared about having to use a CLI.
Avoid Manjaro, if you plan on entering the ArchLinux space do it with EndeavourOS.
I would avoid Ubuntu, but that is more because I dislike their politics on snaps.
You are an entry-level IT pro, so, I’d suggest EndeavourOS for personal, Debian for work. Why? Simple, Debian is widely used in professional environments, nobody will look at you weird for using a “less professional” distro.
In terms of University work, you are saying you guys use Teams and Office, probably with a student license that would give you access to a full online Office experience through the browser, just use that.
In terms of gaming, things are looking pretty good nowadays, and with a more personal distro, such as EndeavourOS, you’ll get the latest advancements in gaming.
Thanks for the hint. I’m kinda curious about Arch, so I’ll definitely check out EndeavourOS.
Unfortunately for work I’m still bound to Windows then because we use Visual Studio. I guess I can just use a VM if I ever need that for personal use though!
Visual studio is available on Linux as a native app from the AUR and some distros repos, I use VS on my endeavourOS with no problems, other than it has a slight tendency to be slow on launch, but that may be due to hardware age.
Are you talking about Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code? Although there’s a lot of overlap in functionality, they are two completely different products and only VS Code has a native version. Regular VS on the other hand I’ve never seen running on Linux.
It is code, sorry for the miscommunication. My question on that though is what is the differences between the two? I don’t use micro$uck crap anymore. Haven’t for almost 15 years.
VS Code is a text editor with plugins, VS is a full blown IDE with many many many features (it’s like 10GB+ out of the box)
And probably expensive as hell to boot. Although to be fair as an IDE it does work well. I can code just like I was in an IDE. It literally suits my needs when using python, rust or any other markup language. Even seems to do some autocomplete for me.
I honestly thought they were the same really.
The only stuff I miss is the way dreamweaver worked back in the day where you can see wysiwyg as well as the code. But that was yesteryear where adobe wasn’t as money hungry
the community edition is free, don’t know what the restrictions are though
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I did forget to mention that. I don’t like flatpaks and avoid them if possible. Guess you could say I’m a Linux purist lmao
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Consider using the old VM switcheroo. On windows. try some distros out in VMs (I vote Fedora, perhaps KDE spin to ease transition, which gets you ready for RHEL, an enterprise standard server distro). Once you find what you like, get it set up and live in it as much as possible and isolate what you need WinBlows for, e.g. Visual Studio. When you’re ready, install your distro on the metal and spin up a win VM for the stuff you need.
I disagree, playing around in VMs is not giving you much experience. Rather boot from livemedia and play around with the different preshipped DEs/WMs. After you know which desktop environment is to your liking, you are free to chose whatever distro you want. The only real important part of a distro is its packet manager and documentation. Everything else can be exchanged.
Yeah, live media is an worthy option, and more realistic, and one should have one on the keychain ideally (OP look Ventoy), but it’s bog slow and not everyone has multiple machines to learn on…
Why would livemedia be slower than virtualbox? Just get a proper stick and its probably even faster.
If you do go with EndeavourOS, install Rider-EAP from the AUR. It is a professional level C# IDE and the EAP version is free. It has a time limited license but. In my experience, it will update often enough to keep the license active.
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For distros I’ve been mainly looking at Manjaro, Linux Mint or plain old Ubuntu. Can you recommend anything that might fit for me or will I maybe run into any issues with my chosen three?
Like others I would caution against Manjaro, the distro maintainers have shown on multiple occasions that they are not exactly on top of it all.
Ubuntu derivatives are typically great works-out-of-the-box distros. Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) has made a number of questionable moves with Ubuntu over the years so I would rather suggest going for Linux Mint instead. Mint is based on Ubuntu but IMHO fixes most of these issues.
My main concerns for switching are that I’ll have a hard time with university work because we mostly use teams for video conferences and work together with word, and other office stuff.
Since Microsoft Teams is an electron app, it works very well as a web app in a chromium-based browser like Brave or
chromiumitself, there’s no real need to install any separate app. I use it daily that way and I have no issues either with screen sharing, videoconferencing or chat.Microsoft office is a tougher nut. LibreOffice may or may not work for you - there’s a good chance it won’t be 100% compatible with existing office documents, and may for example slightly change pre-existing formatting. If that doesn’t matter to you, LibreOffice could be completely fine as a replacement. Otherwise, Microsoft Office 365 in the browser works as well on Linux as on Windows, maybe try if that is a workable solution for you in most cases. I find that for me, the web version goes 95% of the way, and for the last 5% I keep a windows 10 VM with Office installed around.
We also are required to do some virtual machine stuff where we use virtualbox.
The de facto standard virtualization solution on Linux is KVM/QEMU, but Virtualbox does appear to exist for Linux, so I don’t see a blocker there.
Also I’m a bit worried that some games on uplay, epic and other platforms aren’t available anymore.
I don’t play much, but I don’t think there’s a good solution to that. Setting up non-Steam gaming setups on Linux (e.g. via Bottles or Lutris) is IMHO finicky at best. Also, AFAIK a number of online multiplayer games don’t work simply because the DRM software refuses to work on Linux. You can check ProtonDB for a database of games and their support on Linux. If there are blockers there, maybe consider a dual-boot setup.
Virtualbox works flawlessly on Linux, last used it with fedora 38
Yep virtual box works fine on Linux. But windows in a virtual machine if you really need something lie office.
I’d recommend opensuse tumbleweed. I would suggest Debian but it moves too slow (updates) for gaming. I think arch is good but you will have to want to learn a bit more about it. Tumbleweed falls closer to Debian with stability and still near arch as far as frequent updates.
One downside of Opensuse compared to Arch is its lacking Documentation.
I use Opensuse TW on my desktop machine for over 10 years now and I use Debian at work, also have a different distro on my laptop.
True there is no beating the arch wiki
I have found over the years you can apply a lot of the directions to whatever distro you are using. You just have to do some minor tweaking to the commands. Primarily using the right package manager command for your distro or using distro specific software in place of arch software. I have also found you can use a lot of the AUR programs by searching for said app in your repos.
Or they can use EndeavourOS if vanilla Arch is too complicated. You’ll still have to install things like libreoffice, steam etc. but you don’t have half the learning curve you do with vanilla arch
There is also Xero Linux
If you’re decent at programming try NixOS. 90% of your system is described by one config file and because of how it builds if a fix works for one person it’ll work for pretty much everyone
(With exceptions sometimes for hardware specific stuff like Nvidia drivers which is obviously dependant on your GPU)
It’s the one distro I’ve not really encountered any problems with out of the box
Completely agree. I made the switch from Arch to nix two weeks ago. Although I have to admit for a Linux newbie it might be a bit much at once. Maybe start with something easier like Pop is?
I keep seeing Pop recommended so hijacking for an issue I ran into switching away from it - I had to completely wipe the drive prior to formatting the drive for whatever Debian based distro I was checking out.
Long story short, it was due to the bootloader for Pop remaining and interfering with the install process. So a full wipe wouldn’t be necessary most likely, just clearing your boot partition should be enough.
I’ve found NixOS to be one of the easiest distros to use because everything is reproducible, I’m not too sure why everyone who uses it says it’s a hard one to begin with
At the start you just go with the template the installer gives you, and add packages to the package list it generates, then as you want more advanced features options start to come in handy and they’re just as straightforward
No nasty hidden surprises, everything for the most part works exactly how you’d expect (with the exception of syntax with some of the more funky features but you don’t need those to manage a system at the bare minimum
Ubuntu on the other hand when I started using it I had to run a few random commands (disabling broken Nvidia services) after hours of digging just to get my mouse pointer to work after hibernation) and had to do that every single time I switched to a different distro, wasn’t even an issue out of the box on nixos
And if you’re stuck a fix that worked for someone else will almost always work for you unless it’s a hardware specific issue
How’s nix for gaming?
I’ll be switching from manjaro soon, kind of at the crossroads between arch and nix
Prettt good actually as long as you install steam via programs.steam.enable = true rather than just adding it to packages
Also programs.steam.openFirewall = true if you want game streaming
Its worked great for me, I switched a couple months ago. Getting nvidia working was a breeze.
Yeah just turn off the compositor if you’re in kde and start noticing slowing in the UI after installing the Nvidia drivers.
My dumb ass didn’t figure that out before just reinstalling, then encountering the issue when adding Nvidia again.
Had I not been a total dipshit, I would’ve just removed clauses from the config until the issue went away, so I could pinpoint the issue. But the problem is that I’m a bonehead.
Edit: out force full composition pipeline to keep the compositor on.
As for Office, you’ll need to use the browser version or use a VM (or container or whatever). Besides that, you can expect like 90% of games to run either via Lutris or by adding them to Steam.
If you want to play around, I recomend to try Garuda Linux Dr460nized Gaming. Yes, it is very bloated and has a very gamery aesthetic, but it comes with a lot of cool software and customizations to explore. I recently started to recreate what I like about it on EndeavourOS and it’s a very good learning exercise :)
What did you like about it that I can also copy?
Some very neat things like how btrfs works, how you get automatic snapshots going with snapper + snap-pac, that fish is a fantastic shell, how to use libalpm hooks, what tools there are for performance and powersaving tweaks, gaming and probably a few more things.
Then also a lot of silly stuff like the importance of Nerd Fonts, Starship and Fastfetch for being able to brag with your distro without saying anything lol
Office 365 won’t work. If you need that specific piece of software, give up and stay on windows. It can however be replaced with libreoffice or OpenOffice. If these work for you, you’re in luck because just about everything supports them. Software design is better on Linux than windows imo, and most if not all of your tools will be available. As for gaming from steam your set. Proton can run just about any game you throw at it. Teams has a Linux client that works, and afaik there is also a web client. Virtual machines are better than on windows by a mile. If you need virtual box it does exist and work, there is however virtual machine manager which is even more powerful and just plain better. Uplay games are a bit trickier, you can use a program called bottles to run the launcher and play your games there, but if you need/want any per-game tweaks you can’t do that. Epic is easy, heroic games launcher is an almost fully-featured epic games launcher replacement with proper wine integration.
For distribution, I have to recommend you steer clear of manjaro. They have had numerous security problems in the past few years, some having been repeated showing they aren’t learning from their mistakes. Additionally it lets you use the aur but that can easily break your system. It’s a poorly managed distribution that I can’t recommend. Ubuntu as well has made some anti-user moves like forcing their tech on users rather than adopting the standards everyone else has. Mint try’s to correct this, and it does a good job. I can recommend mint, however it is fairly slow to get updates and hence is gonna be bad for gaming.
What I recommend is gonna be nobara or fedora. Fedora is a bit trickier to use because the setup and configuration will probably require the command line, however once it’s running it’s really stable and has a lot of newer software so everything you have is up to date. Nobara adds some gaming tweaks on top of that and is a little slow to update major versions, but it has a graphical way to configure probably everything you need and has some qol patches for things like vrr that others don’t have. Additionally as you mentioned you are in IT I think this will be a good fit as the server software that you will interact with is most likely gonna be rhel as it’s the most popular enterprise Linux. It is based upon fedora, so you will be able to interact with it easier should you ever need to.
You can use Office365 in the browser and it will work fine. If you need a desktop app that can handle Office formats use OnlyOffice. It’s free and works great with office.
Development stuff is equally available on all distros so you aren’t limited by that at all.
Steam should work on all distros as well, however only the rolling releases will always have the latest libraries and drivers. LTS releases like Ubuntu and Mint won’t update those frequently but it doesn’t mean Steam won’t work necessarily.
I use Mint because it has a lighter RAM requirement than gnome Ubuntu.
The best, most stable rolling release is opensuse Tumbleweed. Everything is tested before release, it’s always on the latest and greatest, and it has system rollback built in, in the event that you need to roll back an update. But this never really happens on opensuse, it’s very reliable.
If you want a rolling release I wouldn’t look any further. Arch is a pain and breaks frequently. Fedora releases a new version every 6 months so it may be a possible option, but opensuse is better. Also ethically opensuse is better because Fedora is Red hat and they hate the Linux community. I’d stay well away from Fedora and Red Hat.
Currently Ubuntu 23.04 is acting as a rolling release so try it out with your desktop of choice and see if it works for you. They should eventually revert to every 6 months as from version 24
As an example, i use mint as the base of my kvm/qemu virtual machine since i run an arc 380 on base and nvidia gpu for the guest. I made the mistake of updating my experimental kernel and forgot to set quiet and mint menu on grub to select the kernel at boot time. I popped in the install disc i had used previusly and fixed it by using the inlcuded programs to edit the grub and undo my kernel update. Fixed and i saved a timevault snapshot of the fix in case i mess up again. Linux mint saved me from reinstalling my entire os from a simple mistake.
As long as you are okay with using the web versions of office, you can basically go with any distro, since all of them have at least a web browser and virtualbox in their repositories, as well as vs code. Jetbrains also works (I’ve only used intellij but I assume the others are just as easy to set up). I’ve never tried visual studio on linux though, not sure how well that works.
i used mint for a few years, it’s pretty good and if something works on ubuntu 99% of the time it works on mint too which is handy for tech support
i used manjaro for 3 days before i switched to endeavourOS (another arch based distro) after very strong recommendations to ditch it from a very large number of people lolI’m terms of software, most distro are going to be the same, especially debian-based ones (Ubuntu, mint, pop, etc.) I think Mint is a great choice - cinnamon is a good, familiar desktop environment for windows users, and unlike ubintu it has flatpak support so you get a lot of up to date apps through that. I’ll admit I’m biased though, and manjaro is probably great as well - I’d even suggest plain Arch, the new installer makes things really easy if you’re somewhat tech savvy.
Office 365 can be accessed online, or a foss office suite like Libreoffice or Onlyoffice can edit and save to Microsoft file formats. Comparability is usually pretty good unless you’re doing something really weird.
Unfortunately visual studio is a no-go. VSCode and Jetbrains work though.
Teams will also work through the browser. I believe they also have a PWA now for chrome. My company actually uses teams all the time even though they dev team is mostly on Linux.
There are alternative launchers for games outside of steam. Heroic is one I personally use - it supports Epic and GOG. Just check protondb to see if the games you care about work. IDK about Uplay but if you look around you might find something.
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openSUSE Tumbleweed is my choice, I also used Pop_OS! for almost a year but if you plan on gaming and having the latest Mesa drivers and Wine + kernel updates, openSUSE is the way to go. It works the best for me and if you feel that you may want to change change your desktop beetween kde/gnome/x11/wayland I find that openSUSE simplifies that process a lot.
In my opinion, rolling release distros have less issues in the gaming and software development area.
I use my PC for a combination of office work, programming and gaming. OpenSUSE is also my choice!
openSUSE is so under-rated.
Between the three I’d go for Linux Mint. It was my first distro too, and it makes the setup process very easy, especially for users coming from Windows. Manjaro and Ubuntu are fine, plenty of people I know love them, but they’ve both made some decisions in recent years that I don’t like. The former being negligent with security updates, and the latter forcing their own, worse, package manager on users. You shouldn’t have any issues with Mint.
Most of the apps you mentioned are available for Linux, including Teams and VirtualBox, though you’ll probably have to download those from their respective websites. Office 365 still works from a web browser, and you can open its documents locally with LibreOffice (though more complicated documents might have some formatting messed up). I haven’t heard of uPlay, but there is an unofficial Linux client for Epic Games (called Heroic Launcher), and ~90% of Windows games either support Linux or work through a compatibility layer such as Proton.
Stick to one of the major distros, not some little-known derivative. Also, please avoid Manjaro, it’s horribly broken, and Ubuntu, because snap. It essentially just comes down to how you want to manage your packages.
Edit: VirtualBox is fully supported on Linux, but QEMU/KVM is better.
As an engineer with years of experience in tech with more in kernel engineering there is only one distro you should use.
The one you like! Debian is great, solid, with a major market share in servers and cloud infra, with a lot of great distros broken from it for consumer use. RHEL distros are great as well but not that practice for personal use imo.
Pick something like Pop or Ubuntu for daily use and then get docker to play with other more cloud infra distros like ubuntu server, centos, aml, and get web services running through those if you want to expand your knowledge.
