One last thing. Since you are completely new, are coming from a Windows background, and do more than just game, I’d suggest starting with Linux Mint (Cinnamon). You do not have to stick with that distribution forever, but it is probably the most painless introduction since it is Debian/Ubuntu based and most of the help/articles you’ll find on the Internet are focused on Debian/Ubuntu/Mint. Debian based distributions are more of a “set it and forget it” experience. Nice and boring.
Other major core distributions that are different from Debian/Ubuntu include Red Hat (Fedora), Arch, and OpenSuSe. Red Hat (Fedora) is a good choice for corporate users since Red Hat is the defacto Linux distribution for the corporate world. Arch is great if you REALLY want to learn Linux and truly get into tinkering with its guts. OpenSuSe is the European option and what some European governments are ditching Windows for.
That’s very helpful. Thank you, again. I think I’m going to set up a partition and play with it so I can sort of have one foot in and one foot out to not disrupt my workflow too much while I figure things out. Wish me luck.
Everybody and their mother will have recommendations on their favorite flavor of Linux, but as somebody else about to make the switch with similar priorities as you, I’d suggest also taking a look at Bazzite. It’s built on the same distro as the SteamOS and comes in at least two flavors for what your use case is. One of its selling points is that it’s an “immutable” version of Linux, which means that it’s a lot harder to accidentally break it as a new user.
One last thing. Since you are completely new, are coming from a Windows background, and do more than just game, I’d suggest starting with Linux Mint (Cinnamon). You do not have to stick with that distribution forever, but it is probably the most painless introduction since it is Debian/Ubuntu based and most of the help/articles you’ll find on the Internet are focused on Debian/Ubuntu/Mint. Debian based distributions are more of a “set it and forget it” experience. Nice and boring.
Other major core distributions that are different from Debian/Ubuntu include Red Hat (Fedora), Arch, and OpenSuSe. Red Hat (Fedora) is a good choice for corporate users since Red Hat is the defacto Linux distribution for the corporate world. Arch is great if you REALLY want to learn Linux and truly get into tinkering with its guts. OpenSuSe is the European option and what some European governments are ditching Windows for.
That’s very helpful. Thank you, again. I think I’m going to set up a partition and play with it so I can sort of have one foot in and one foot out to not disrupt my workflow too much while I figure things out. Wish me luck.
Everybody and their mother will have recommendations on their favorite flavor of Linux, but as somebody else about to make the switch with similar priorities as you, I’d suggest also taking a look at Bazzite. It’s built on the same distro as the SteamOS and comes in at least two flavors for what your use case is. One of its selling points is that it’s an “immutable” version of Linux, which means that it’s a lot harder to accidentally break it as a new user.
Mint also makes setting up dual boot pretty painless. In a few months you may wonder why you still have windows installed taking up space.