Hi everyone, looking to make the switch from windows. I’m reasonably technically apt but not a programmer by any means. I’ve been doing some homework on which distro I would like to use and pop_os kinda feels like the right direction. I’m running an Nvidia 3060TI on a Ryzen 5600 chip set on an Asus tuf motherboard. Any other distros I should be looking at, and does somebody have a link for a comprehensive guide to installing? I’m looking to continue running windows on the side until such a time as I am comfortable enough with linux that I don’t need it.
Welcome aboard! There is no need to be a programmer to work on Linux. I’m no programmer either and have been enjoying Linux for many years.
About the distro, it’s a conversation ad old as the first fork lol. It depends in part what you want to do with it. I’ve used many in 20+ years. I’ve settled eith endeavourOS for my desktop (after a few years of Linux Mint) and debian on the servers. I play and work on it without any problems (although I have a radeon rx580 card).
I’ve never used popOS, but all major distros have a fairly simple install process, especially if you use the whole hd and don’t need fancy config. Or you can start relatively hard and use gentoo. It will take a while (and thanks the fact that stage1 is not the default anymore) but you’ll learn a lot of how linux works.
Feel free to ask if you want to know more.
I think I need to give endeavourOS another try (I played around very briefly in a VM), I always see good things about it.
It was my first full-time Linux distro. It’s definitely a solid system if you want Arch without installing through a cli.
if you don’t mind having to install updates every day it’s nice. I use Cinnamon and there was a small issue at the beginning (dbus-something IIRC) so some apps (calculator, firefox, libreoffice) were taking a long time to start (waiting on a timemeout on something). But that’s the only issue I had in the past 6 months. I installed lutris and play steam and Epic games. I have docker (not the desktop version) installed. System is lean and snappy. Do I see a massive change from when I was using Linux Mint? Not really. I changed because I borked my LM installation and needed to reinstall anyway. Installed EndeavourOS on a spare SSD to try it out and ended as my daily driver. I still have LM on the other SSD, but I only went back once to transfer my documents/stuff. TBH I tried it out because I saw everyone banging on about Arch, but couldn’t be bothered to install from scratch. I’d only used RedHat or Debian derivative (I’m old, Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian in my mind because I remember how it started out) distros in the past 20+ years (well, and gentoo for some time when it first came out. Also Mandrake, but can’t remember what package manager it had), so I wanted to try something new. I’m happy with it, but I don’t make the distro I use a matter or religion. It works, it’s stable, I learn something new, job done.