Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.
I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?
There’s oculus software for my vr but don’t know what I’m going to do with that
Small update: probably going to do Linux mint as that appears to be the most beginner friendly
Update two: that’s a lot of comments, and Thanks for all the info
Off the top of my head:
Gmail or any email: Thunderbird is pretty sweet and I need to use it more, but mostly just use the web clients anyway.
If you own GoG games, you can use Heroic Launcher instead of GoG Galaxy. It’s gotten amazingly good, really fast. :)
What do you use iTunes for? That stood out to me.
Also Chrome works fine on Linux, though Firefox is a better browser even on Windows.
For anyone who uses Apple Music, I recommend the Cider app. I believe it costs $3 and you get versions for Linux, Mac, and Windows.
I haven’t found any MP3 players on Linux that I’m totally happy with. All of them have some trivial issue (eg not displaying Album Artist correctly).
I use itunes/icoulds for side loading onto my phone
side loading apps? or files?
Apps, iOS if finiky when it comes to that, though I’ve been looking for a way that works on Linux
I have iTunes, because I have an iPhone. I don’t know of any other good way to get mp3s on my phone. (And to get games for emulators)
Thanks! I didnt realize iTunes was still supported.
https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2023/12/transfer-music-ubuntu-iphone/amp/
Seems like you can also use the iOS VLC app to get mp3s on there
Another method is to use KDE connect to transfer the files, which would also work for your game backups
Fooyin’s a really good alternative and if you can flash Rockbox onto an older iPod that supports that custom firmware, then it’ll just function as a normal external drive, no iTunes sync needed unlike with stock Apple firmware.
Star Citizen runs just fine under linux. For the most part, anyway. Being under active dev it breaks occasionally, but the Linux User Group has always gotten it working again so far.
https://github.com/starcitizen-lug/lug-helper
I would recommend using Wine directly over using Lutris right now, but that’s an option you can pick in this script. Join the discord if you have trouble, people are friendly there if you’re polite.
Don’t use Proton/Steam for it.
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If you have nothing to lose, ie. if you don’t play anything with anticheat or you don’t use any productivity software with crazy DRM platform-locking you into Windows, do it, switch over.
The bulk of all games will run in Proton or even vanilla WINE now and the minority that’s platform-locked into Windows is anything that uses kernel-level anticheat, if you only play single-player games or even virtual board games like Civilization, those will broadly work fine in WINE/Proton and even in the case of the aforementioned Civilization, those games starting from Civ5 onward even have native Linux ports, but the Windows versions tend to perform better in Proton, and as for productivity software, there’s plenty of alternatives to things like Maya, Photoshop, Lightroom, or Premiere/AfterEffects to choose from that isn’t platform-locked anywhere, eg. Blender as a Maya alternative, Krita or GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, RawTherapee or Darktable as a Lightroom alternative, and KdenLive or Davinci Resolve as a Premiere/AfterEffects alternative.
Oh, and as for Illustrator, you have Inkscape as an alternative, and for Paint Tool SAI, you got MyPaint as an alternative.
As for a good distro to get you started, Debian or OpenSUSE seem pretty solid for beginners, and Debian Stable at least has a backports repo for newer software, and there’s also ChimeraOS if you’re building your PC into a games console.
Also, if you’re looking for a good Foobar2k or iTunes alternative, Fooyin is great for that, and Whipper’s a good CD ripper and basically an open Exact Audio Copy clone, although it’s text-based. You could also use CUERipper in WINE as another good open alternative to Exact Audio Copy, which is proprietary. CUETools will work fine in Mono as well.
Gmail is web-based, you can use it with Firefox. For that matter Linux doesn’t bind you to Firefox either, you can use Chrome and other browsers. I never used office 360 or Libre, I just use google docs.
Linux mint is great
AMD DRIVERS - Linux’s built in drivers
Chrome - Chrome
gmail - gmail
Office 360 - Office 360 (web)
Norton - You don’t need such piece of adware in Linux
Py-charm - py-charm
Star citizen - Star citizen though steam
VPN - Proton VPN (my suggestion)
Windows 10 - Fedora KDE
My suggestions if you want a smoother transition, repeated ones have Linux versions
At least get clamAV setup. No OS is virus immune. And if wine is installed without proper sandboxing …
SELinux, wine (and other apps) installed via user flatpak with proper permissions configued, coupled with ufw or firewalld, secure boot enabled and an immutable system should be fine, no?
Ya probably. Toss in flat seal just because.
Opsec is always a balancing act.
You need to double up your newlines :)
Thank you, kind stranger, I haven’t noticed my formatting was messed up
Antivirus is completely unnecessary and terrible on windows and linux… and on linux it’s uniquely useless. Everything is installed from a centralized repo, antiviruses won’t be of any help at all. antiviruses came about because windows let executables just be run easily and simply and used them as the default way of installing software, this was beyond idiotic and the reason that OS became infested with malware. Linux never made that mistake from the start, and so antivirus is unnecessary.
Norton is basically just malware, however.
The real reason you won’t need antivirus.
Can you explain how that works?
Sorry for my ineptitude
tl;dr
You don’t need antivirus on Linux in 99% of scenarios
On windows you install things from random websites as the primary method of installing stuff, this means anything can install anything and has installers that can install bonus stuff. This is why windows has so much malware.
On linux, imagine your distro is an app store, ubuntu is an app store, mint is an app store, fedora is an app store. The apps themselves can’t manage installation so they can’t bundle nonsense with them. you just click install and you get only the thing you wanted and nothing else.
Since your distro curates all the software, as long as you trust your distro, you’ll know there’s no malware on your computer, because you get all your software from the distro (or flathub but same idea).
You can install things from random websites for Linux too, though.
You can, but on windows it’s the standard way to do things, on linux it’s almost never done.
The security model is also very different between Linux and Windows. Linux is just inherently more secure.
True for wayland, not true at all for x11
It’s true for any variation of Linux. Hell, the vulnerability (Mimikatz) that was crucial in the most expensive cyber security attack in history is still there in Windows.
And for X11 to be exploited you would need to get and run malicious code in the first place. The Linux security model kicks in before you get to that point.
all you have to do is trick the user into installing something malicious, and running it.
then with x11 it can snoop on literally everything, sure, for a server linux is inherently more secure but as an end user i don’t think it matters much.
9 times out of 10 the software you’re looking will typically land in your Distribution’s repository, before it lands in the main repository it’ll be vetted for stability and security in a testing repository.
For example; Steam-Installer is located in the main repository for Debian 12 (Bookworm) they also have a newer version in their Debian 13 (Trixie) repository for testing the next generation of Debian..
If you want to install software outside your distributions repository you will need to vet the software yourself and make sure it’s compatible with your distro.
Hope that explains it a little easier.
*Nortan
Software Linux support AMD driver ✅ open-source drivers for CPU and GPU are included in the Linux Kernel and work very well. If you have bleeding edge news hardware, check online in which Kernel version they are supposed and choose Linux distro accordingly Web Browser ✅ Chrome/chromium, ✅ Firefox. All are commonly available in your distro software repository by default, or otherwise with Flatpak Web-based email ✅ not dependent on OS. Local Email client software are available, one exemple is Thunderbird. Office suite ✅ LibreOffice, or anything web-based such as Google Docs will work independently of the OS Itunes Many music players/library managers are available on Linux, I don’t have any specific recommendations here, I am self-hosting Jellyfin for my music needs JBL not sure what you mean here ? Your headset/speakers ? Don’t see why it wouldn’t work Music score reader/editor ✅ MuseScore, I also use Guitar Pro (7, 8) inside Bottle (wine) and it works with some tweaks needed for fixing font bug Antivirus ✅ ClamAV, arguable if you need an antivirus at all Python ✅ many IDEs are available, a scary amount of Linux distribution rely on Python under the hood 😅 Remote desktop ✅ RDP protocol (many clients available), ✅ Rustdesk, ✅ anydesk, ✅ TeamViewer) Game platforms ✅ Steam, ✅ Heroic Games Launcher (for Epic and GOG), ✅ Lutris VPN ✅ OpenVPN and ✅ Wireguard protocols are supported (maybe others), you can find many providers using these protocols. Most ask you to use their app, but digging a little you often have options to configure the VPN connection without installing anything extra. I know Nord on client works on Linux, I haven’t tried other. Mulldav is a very frequent recommendation in Linux communities Windows games compatibility ✅ Wine/Proton via Steam, Lutris, Heroic and Bottles. The only thing that will block you is competitive multiplayer games with Anti-Cheat @op, they may suggest you to change your kernel version to support newer hardware, don’t do this unless you know what you are doing and can undo it from cli. its fine 90% of the time but can cause weirdness or no boot.
This isn’t exactly what I recommend. Only in the case the hardware is bleeding edge, as in, it was released less than 6 month ago, then check in which Kernel version it starts to be supported, as well as check the Kernel version shipping with the distribution you are interested in installing. Distro Kernel version >= Kernel version where the driver starts to be included, no problems. Otherwise, check a distro that has more frequent upgrades.
Things to check: GPU, CPU, WiFi chip, Ethernet chip. In windows you can find the information in the device manager. On Linux (e.g: test with a live USB) the command
lspciwith display the information.A common case would be: I am interested in Debian because I heard it’s the most stable, will my AMD 5070XT work with that ? Probably not very well, better Check Ubuntu non-LTS or Fedora.
I am not recommending op to modify the Kernel from the Linux distro, just consider this point in choosing the distro.
oh my observation comes from the blogs recommending it.
but i couldnt have put it better myself, except i think you mean 9070 XT
Add Steam to “Windows gaming for Linux.” Every game I bought on Windows runs great in Linux Mint. Steam has a native Linux client and ot uses a Wine layer called Proton that has all the settings for each game.
To be clear while that is true there are games that won’t work at all on Linux, because of anticheat.
And sometimes you need to read protondb for tweaks so that your games run on Linux.
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Have to agree. Mint runs on long term support versions of Ubuntu releases. A lot of times this can cause issues with gaming because the kernel is so out of date, and thus the graphics driver is as well. Plus, they have snaps which are terrible compared to flatpaks.
Yeah, +1 for Bazzite.
It looks like it’s really designed for Linux beginners. They’ve done a solid amount of work sanding off the rough edges.
As someone who has been using Linux for decades, I’m also impressed with it for a development system. I chose Bazzite because I wanted to be able to play games easily, but since I installed it a month or so ago, I’ve barely played any. I’ve installed a few to make sure they work, but I got interested in another project once I installed it, so for me it’s been a machine used to set up and administer a Kubernetes cluster, as well as doing some Go / Javascript development.
In the early 2000s, I was one of those guys who ran Gentoo and liked building all my own software on my own machine so that it was perfectly tweaked for what I wanted to do. But, these days, I really like having an OS that’s stable and gets out of my way, so I can focus on more interesting things.
Fedora (and related distros, including Bazzite) are indeed superior. The gap is even larger when comparing Atomic distros… sorry to say… Red Hat’s money does show! Now, for many to use any Red Hat’s variant, whether because of ideology, non-American (hat tip to lemmy.ml/u/eugenia), ethical, pro-human rights (no getting big checks from US army), etc… I find it concerning. The only one I find it as a valid option, specially if for an corporation in the US, is Alma Linux. I find Mint the most newbie friendly and also extremely stable. Like you, I dislike Cinnamon enormously, (puzzled why they decided to ditch KDE!) but I still recommended to new people in Linux. Personally, I still in the quest to find the one for me (been with OpenSUSE for a few months but with my eyes on TuxedoOS already). I agree that Atomic distros seems to be the future for most users, but beside Bazzite, don’t think the others are equally stable (someone correct me if I am wrong). Bazzite however, as expressed above, comes from a murky parent that many linux fans, specially those in lemmy.ml, should be wary of. Think of it as Android, as a phone OS is great, probably the best there is today, but coming from the corporation as it comes from, from the country it comes from that uses sanctions as it does, should be a ‘no thank you’ for most in the world. Now, Debian also is a US registered distro, yes, but, unlike Red Hat-IBM or Google’s products, it is far more universal and with enough human capital abroad that easily can fork it, it need be. Same apply as the Linux kernel (that is why China went that route). I however, for the future, I like the idea of Arch, and wonder if ever can be made stable and waiting for someone to propel Arch into a stable variant and not just another “gaming distro” (crossing my fingers in KDE’s new distro!). Till, then, most users I think we should still recommend some veteran Debian based and Mint still checks most boxes. [My first post in this type of social media!!]
ethical, pro-human rights (no getting big checks from US army), etc… I find it concerning.
Why do you find it concerning from the perspective of using the distro? the software is still open source, and it’s not like they’re benefitting from user-count. Redhat makes its money selling support, if you don’t like their business model, simply don’t pay them for support, and you get all the benefits and none of the ethical qualms.
KDE’s new distro!). Till, then, most users I think we should still recommend some veteran Debian based and Mint still checks most boxes.
I don’t think these ethical fears are grounds enough when completely unsubstantiated to be recommending a distribution that’s fundamentally worse for beginners.
“Why do you find it concerning…?” Because with just increasing the user base, greatly benefits this corporation, even though we don’t give a penny for using Fedora. This is why Google flooded schools with “free” Android netbooks and why Microsoft winks at hundreds of millions of pirated Windows… a larger customer base benefits you by suffocating the competition… this applies to both open or closed software. Red Hat is not just a corporation after money, I am 100% fine with that, it is just one that goes after military contracts therefore lobbies for military causes as a good PR with its buyer. IBM does the same… and Amazon, HP, etc. Not all American companies are like that, not at all, but these are. Then is the problem how the US, more and more, is relying in sanctions to hurt foreign entities and peoples… this can be not only by forbidding the export of software but also altering its content.
Open software is great and a reassurance that no altering can go unnoticed but let’s be realistic, when is the last time some entity, let alone non-American) audited a entire package of Fedora, let alone every single version of it, or smaller software. Debian is a US based but highly global collaborative distro so malice is far harder to introduce and gone unnoticed. Mint is based on Ireland so hardly with an militaristic goal, either by maintainers, financiers or country. My current OpenSUSE is far more susceptible to tampering than Mint, but it still cannot reach the knees of Fedora on susceptibility. We should look at Android and Chrome… It is free, opensource, but the fact that Google de-facto controls it, uses it to dominate the landscape, first by suffocating competition and then, to steer where it wants the technology to go to. Therefore that it is opensource is great, we can check the code once in a while,
I am one of the very few that recognize Fedora is ahead of Ubuntu deviates yet I think we should steer clear from it. To newcomers, I tell them the reality; in my opinion Fedora is the marginally the best linux distro, now, if ethics (and a little bit privacy) is one of the motives to move away from Windows, you should consider distros not so heavily relying on the US and Mint usually comes first in my mind for them. We don’t want to get to the point that Fedora is so vastly superior to all the rest of Linux distros, that will be the only game in town… like we did by solely go after Android (I really miss what my Nokia N9’s Meego could have become!)
well said, but i wonder how much it will matter in the future considering that the kernel group itself has so willingly kowtowed to american hegemony in its recent expulsion of russian developers from the kernel maintainers group to align itself with american export controls.
So true eldavi! The “Russian kernel maintainers” event was a big red flag for me. I know Linux had no choice to expel them due to the law, but the fact that Linus Torvalds did not thank them for the job done (if he kept them till then , Torvalds clearly has see their contributions as beneficial), and Torvalds did not try to reassure the audience that hardly any code is posted unsupervised in a open source… that was the main scandal for me, far more than the ban. I had known that Torvalds was a rude person, many maintainers are and I am ok with that, but that event showed me that not only easily folds to government requests, but that also he believes it is ok to do these things against people you don’t like…
In his own words; “please use whatever mush you call brains. I’m Finnish”. I don’t think he referred to the Finland that thrived the most in its history during the period of maintaining a strong military culture yet NEUTRAL (1948-2023) and away from NATO, but he deeply meant the Finland that sided with Germany in the early 40s in order to stick-it to Moscow. Would he stop at firing developers or would be willing to do more for the cause? I bet many wonder.
“Why do you find it concerning…?” Because with just increasing the user base, greatly benefits this corporation, even though we don’t give a penny for using Fedora. This is why Google flooded schools with “free” Android netbooks and why Microsoft winks at hundreds of millions of pirated Windows… a larger customer base benefits you by suffocating the competition…
This would make sense if redhat had partnerships with hardware vendors and was locking down systems. They’ve never done that and there’s no evidence of a plan to. Furthermore, suffocating the competition when the competition is closed source platforms like what google is doing and microsoft is a good thing. Competition isn’t inherently good, competition is good when it does good things. In the case of completely FOSS from the ground up software, there’s no benefit to competition, it just means duplication of massive amounts of effort. If fedora started doing something shitty, there is no doubt that it would INSTANTLY be forked by hundreds of users to remove that, there’s no way for redhat to create a vendor-lockin situation the same can’t be said for windows or chromeos (yes you can technically fork chromeos but they have the software vendor locked on the hardware).
Redhat simply doesn’t have that level of control and can’t ever, unless they completely change their business model, which would also instantly make them worthless.
In other words, there’s no such thing as a redhat user, fedora is just a linux distro without any way of locking the user in to their particular distro. I’d be more worried about ubuntu trying this with snap. I challenge you going down this line of thinking to actually create a scenario where this is a problem that makes strategic sense on their part.
this applies to both open or closed software.
It could, but it doesn’t when the software isn’t vendor locked and is fully open source.
Red Hat is not just a corporation after money, I am 100% fine with that, it is just one that goes after military contracts therefore lobbies for military causes as a good PR with its buyer.
Again, as a user, how does this matter? Do you not think the military should run FOSS software? If you’re anti-military it’s not like proprietary software won’t work there. I’d rather have the military running foss software than proprietary software personally. Somebody was going to do it anyway, what does it matter?
IBM does the same… and Amazon, HP, etc. Not all American companies are like that, not at all, but these are. Then is the problem how the US, more and more, is relying in sanctions to hurt foreign entities and peoples… this can be not only by forbidding the export of software but also altering its content.
Yes, the US is evil, but I don’t see what that has to do with their military running libre software.
I feel that I am being misinterpreted here. Of course FOSS if infinitely preferable to most close source, even if FOSS was created by the devil itself! And I am neutral US army branches using FOSS or not, that is not a problem for us civilians per se; the US army just using FOSS when they have unlimited budget and have home-brewed closed sources available and still choose Linux just proves that FOSS is superior! Now, that Red Hat depends heavily on US government contracts (mostly US armed forces) should be a red flag for any person concerning about ethics (again, I say ethics and a little bit privacy concerns), not technological, at least no in the short term. However, in the long term, it is bad even technologically, since the advantage will be so vastly superior than most would be not be able to compete (or even fork it easily). Huawei, for instance, is the only with the tens of billions $ and human capital enough being able to fork Android, but even still, it is proven difficult for them… now imagine a country like Brazil, Mexico or South Africa, what is the chances they can fork it properly and continue with the same level of development… Zero. That is why, the rest of the world should favor early on Linux distros that are less prone to be compromised, while they still at par with the competition, before they become the only technologically and logistical option in town, both in market share and resources. It is just a principle, of course, I tell my audience that they can use Fedora and I understand it, it is technologically a bit better than Mint, yet not quite not as an ethical choice, nor good for the technology ecosystem in the long run either. Also there is the fact that, favoring the platform that Red Hat, having a chunk of revenues coming from the US army, makes then more dependent of these contracts, and even secretly lobbing for its master. This reminds me of Mozilla… all these years taking hundreds of millions from Google was good for us, Firefox lovers, but co-created a unhealthy relationship that stiffed real competition to Chrome and, worse yet, suffocated any third competition to even try it… and here we are, an unhealthy browser landscape dominated by two trillion dollar corporations and practically impossible to compete against.
BTW, I am not anti-military, nor anti-US (I live in the US and most people and business are good hearten here). I am just anti any military going around and deliberately killing mostly civilians abroad and even cannibalizing on other priorities to do so (The US’ foreign policy also deliberately targets civilians abroad with its policies). Switzerland has a relatively strong army but that is clearly defensive, (not that Swiss people are that nice, being landlocked and surrounded by larger countries makes one pragmatic, but still, that it is the aim.)
should be a red flag for any person concerning about ethics
I agree that it’s a red flag… but in this case, I don’t think that red flag really amounts to something, just because something is a bad sign doesn’t mean it actually matters on proper analysis.
However, in the long term, it is bad even technologically, since the advantage will be so vastly superior than most would be not be able to compete (or even fork it easily).
It will always be incredibly easy to fork because they have to follow the GPL.
Huawei, for instance, is the only with the tens of billions $ and human capital enough being able to fork Android, but even still, it is proven difficult for them…
Forking android is extremely easy, the part of android that they’re unable to fork is the google play store… which is proprietary. Redhat has no equivalent and if they ever made one, they’d instantly be abandoned because the whole point of their business model is being FOSS.
now imagine a country like Brazil, Mexico or South Africa, what is the chances they can fork it properly and continue with the same level of development… Zero
Literally anyone in their basement can do it, tbh, i don’t know why you think this is difficult, android is a terrible example for this since it is mostly proprietary, sure the OS itself isn’t, but google play services are the hard part, again.
That is why, the rest of the world should favor early on Linux distros that are less prone to be compromised, while they still at par with the competition, before they become the only technologically and logistical option in town, both in market share and resources
No, that’s why we should favor the GPL to the MIT license, and FOSS to proprietary software.
Also there is the fact that, favoring the platform that Red Hat, having a chunk of revenues coming from the US army, makes then more dependent of these contracts, and even secretly lobbing for its master.
Except in this case their advantage is their free open source nature, which is literally the only reason the government has contracts with them.
This reminds me of Mozilla… all these years taking hundreds of millions from Google was good for us, Firefox lovers, but co-created a unhealthy relationship that stiffed real competition to Chrome and, worse yet, suffocated any third competition to even try it… and here we are, an unhealthy browser landscape dominated by two trillion dollar corporations and practically impossible to compete against.
we’re purely better off for it. librewolf exists, servo is picking up funding if you don’t like librewolf for some reason. The only reason firefox exists as a competitor is because of this antitrust situation, if we didn’t use firefox because we were concerned about this, we’d have literally nothing. It’s also a counter-example to this idea you have that forking is difficult… librewolf happened and it was easy.
BTW, I am not anti-military, nor anti-US (I live in the US and most people and business are good hearten here). I am just anti any military going around and deliberately killing mostly civilians abroad and even cannibalizing on other priorities to do so (The US’ foreign policy also deliberately targets civilians abroad with its policies). Switzerland has a relatively strong army but that is clearly defensive, (not that Swiss people are that nice, being landlocked and surrounded by larger countries makes one pragmatic, but still, that it is the aim.)
I’m openly anti-military and anti-US, but I don’t think you’ve thought these arguments fully through.
I am still no able to get my message through.
Of course, it is easy to fork, is that when you depend solely on a entity that it is prone to abandon you, you wont have the resources to continue the development. US has overwhelmingly all the developers of Fedora. If Fedora wins over all other linux based distros (and at this time it could be easily do in a near future), developers in other countries will move on into other projects (or move to the US). If the US, once Fedora is so clear dominant and Debian and Arch ceased to exists down the road, the US will find it compelling to close source Fedora and leave the rest of the world with a forked version but unable to develop for the time being since there is no Linux experts around left. This is not far fetched, this is what happens with Android and Firefox. If Firefox closes, the dudes in librewolf will survive for a few months (I’m in Librewolf), that is it; none of them are capable of keeping developing Gecko (the engine of Firefox). Imagine that Google close sources Android, no one in the world (besides Huawei) could keep develop it competitively for at least a decade!
I am afraid we are taking different things here… I look in a long perspective view, you in a inmediate future, where, as you said, no big changes if a dominant FOSS project goes hostile. The lack of expertise, culture makes it really hard in fact. Look at this… SWIFT (an interbanking payment system) , when US, in spite being European, dominates it completely, Russia and China has been for half a decade create and alternative… it is not a mayor technically difficult platform to replicate, but it is proven very hard… relying on it for decades had left every country at its merci and now that most of the world wants an alternative still could not come up with a viable alternative. Remember also when France/EU wanted to create a payment system with Iran… well, never came to fruition. Haven relying in the US for decades left Europe powerless for these innovations. The same could happen with Fedora if we start adopting it in mass.
I have a deep hatred of flatpak and so strongly disagree with this comment.
Your hatred of flatpak is probably stemming from your experience with other systems, when recommending for beginners, you must look past such biases.
That’s fair.
Absolutely aggree about KDE, I helped a bunch of people switch to Linux, and for experienced users, KDE was the key. Not only it works better, but it also follows the logic people are used to, but with more freedom.
I appreciate the fact that you went through your reasoning in such detail. Most of the time people are just like “use xxxx” with nothing more and comments like that are pretty worthless for someone with little familiarity with Linux.
Thank you, feel free to DM if you want more info on any distros or have any questions. I could go on for ages.
AMD drivers: Native, will auto-install as the mesa library, AMD is tits in Linux, it just works.
Gmail: Thunderbird works with Gmail accounts and can sync the calendar.
iTunes: Rhythmbox has a very similar layout to iTunes and so should feel pretty familiar.
Anti-virus: Linux doesn’t really need antivirus in the same way Windows does because it’s more locked down and doesn’t have the same vectors of attack. If someone is hacking a Linux machine, it’s a corporate server, not your desktop PC. If you still think you might need one ClamAV is available for Linux distributions. (.deb for Debian derivaties and .rpm for Fedora derivatives)
Py-Charm: As others have noted, Python is installed natively and is usually already implemented “out of the box” on a fresh install. No need for a program to run it, Python is just… there already.
Remote Desktop: Whatever distribution you have will likely also come with a Remote Desktop client. I am unaware of whether or not they will connect natively to iOS.
Star Citizen: You should be able to add this as a non-Steam game to Steam and use Steam’s Proton compatibility layer to play it. A few years ago they were literally asking for Linux players to test it with Proton and Easy Anti-Cheat.
VPN: Linux has extensive VPN support including “roll your own” through either OpenVPN or Wireguard.
Windows Games: Steam, using the Proton compatibility layer, which is essentially WINe, just made a little easier. As with Star Citizen, just add it as a non-Steam game and viola.
Windows 10: The Distribution of your Dreams is just around the corner… I’ve heard Mint isn’t a terrible place to start.
If OP is a gamer and not too comfortable with Linux, Bazzite is a good choice of distribution.
It’s a so-called “Atomic” distro. Basically what that means is that it works more like Android / iOS than Windows or a traditional Linux distribution.
The base system including drivers and key applications is built as an image by Fedora. Every 2 weeks or so, they release a new one, and Bazzite users get the new one the next time they reboot. Everything in that base image is tested to work together, so you don’t get weird incompatibilities. You can still install all the other software you want, but you tend to do it using Flatpaks rather than rpms/debs. (For someone who doesn’t know what that means, Bazzite is a nice OS because that’s something you don’t need to learn right away.)
Bazzite is meant to be something that you can install on a SteamDeck, or another handheld gaming PC, but it also works great for desktop machines. But, because it’s meant for handheld machines, they’ve worked extra hard to sand away some of the rough edges.
If you’re a more advanced user, Bazzite is still good because you can still do almost everything you’d do on a normal distribution, you’re just discouraged from doing things that affect the base image because it makes updates slower and means they’re not guaranteed to work. I actually really like some of the things you’re encouraged to do in Atomic distros that you wouldn’t do normally. For example, using distrobox as a way to install certain kinds of dev tools. I currently have one project I’m running in an Ubuntu distrobox and another I’m running in a Fedora distrobox. It keeps some of the tools isolated to the “box” where they’re needed. I haven’t used Fedora much lately, so it’s fun to have the more familiar Ubuntu environment in one, and then the other one where I can experiment and learn.
For someone who doesn’t play games, Bazzite probably isn’t ideal, but I’d still recommend an Atomic build. There are downsides, but unless you’re the kind of person who really likes building their own kernel and making sure it’s optimal for their system, it’s so nice to have a stable base image so you can focus on the other stuff.
Py-Charm isn’t a Python interpreter, it’s an IDE. It has a purpose.
Star Citizen works great on linux with Lutris. https://lutris.net/games/star-citizen/
As good as it runs on Windows, anyway… It is still Star Citizen ;P
(No shade, really promising and most of it is pretty slick and impressive when it’s working and I hope they get it stable sometime soon-ish)
nearly, it’s too bad they’re hung up on wine 8 default. have to manually switch to proton since 8-26 is too old
Using either ProtonUp-qt or ProtonPlus you can install newer/alternative Proton versions, including one optimized for Star Citizen
but alas that isn’t automatic. if things don’t work out of the box it’s a point against Linux every time
PyCharm is a Java application. And it runs perfectly on Linux.
Depends on your setup. If you use a 4k screen with fractional scaling in Gnome, Pycharm and all Jetbrain editors have blurry text and run under xwayland.
But vs code works fine, also zed and many others.
I believe you can force pycharm to launch using Wayland. There’s some option you can pass to it when you launch it.
I think the biggest thing about itunes is that it can be used to write music to iphones and do OS restores, I couldn’t get the usb functionality to work with wine so I just use it in a vm personally
As with Star Citizen, just add it as a non-Steam game and viola.
You need a viola these days to run a game on linux?
And people are wondering why Linux is less popular :p
That’s where I’m going wrong! I’m missing the viola. Hopefully my distro has it in their repo!
- AMD Drivers: Good news! They work even better on Linux. Bad news, you’re probably referring to the AMD “control panel” type application instead of the drivers themselves, which doesn’t have a direct equivalent. The drivers should come pre-installed, though depening on distro you may need to select/install “radv” or “vulkan-radeon” manually. Most of the control panel functionality can be found in other applications, like OBS for recording or CoreCtrl for clock speeds.
- Chrome: Although Firefox is pre-installed in most cases, you have full freedom of choice here. Most people find that Firefox works basically the same after using it for a bit, but if it doesn’t fit you, there’s other options. Google Chrome is most likely available in your distros app store, but there’s also less “spying” options like ungoogled-chromium.
- Gmail: You can access this on the website, or through a mail client like thunderbird. You can switch if you want to, you’re not limited by any means here.
- Office 360: Though LibreOffice is a great alternative, some find themselves forced to use MS office for compatibility reasons. This is still possible, buy only in a webbrowser.
- ITunes: This is a hard one to find alternatives for, depending on what you use it for. For managing iPhones from a PC, you essentially need Windows or macOS. For playing music, there’s plenty of options.
- JBL: I’m unsure as I don’t use any of their products, but assuming you mean audio related “control panels”, there’s many options available. Though they may need a bit of tweaking and searching around to get things to sound the way you want.
- Musescore: I also don’t use this, but it’s available on Flathub, meaning you can (and probably should) use your distros “App Store” to install this.
- Norton AV: Not many AVs targeting Linux exist, and they’re not the greatest quality. Though it’s doable to go without one, as long as you don’t download and run random files off the internet. Stick to the app store, and you should be totally fine.
- PyCharm: This is available on Linux, also in the “app store”. There’s other IDEs available too, like vscode.
- Remote Desktop to iOS: I haven’t owned an iOS device since 2019, so I don’t know which protocol they use. It’s possible this isn’t supported at all.
- Star Citizen: It looks like this is playable through Proton. You can use Steam (add non-steam game), Lutris, or Bottles to launch non-steam Windows apps/games.
- Steam: Works great
- VPN: As you didn’t put a previous VPN provider here, I’m not able to tell you if it works on Linux. Personally I have a hard time recommending any VPN service, but Mullvad stands out as being the least untrustworthy. Almost all others like Nord, Express, etc. share some common traits that make them very untrustworthy to me.
- Windows Games: This is a bit more complicated. Games from the Microsoft Store are very unlikely to run, and require messing about to even try in the first place. Other games made for Windows likely work (even outside Steam), using management tools like Lutris or Bottles is often easier than manually using Wine.
If a tool (or distro) works well for you, it’s a good option. Everyone has different opinions on the “best” distro, but since it’s very subjective, there is no single “best” distro. There’s only 2 distros I recommend against, that’s Ubuntu (and close spin-offs) and Manjaro, because they have major objective downsides compared to equivalents like Mint or Endeavour. The distros I generally recommend to new users are Mint and Fedora, but feel free to look around, you’re not forced to pick a specific one.
You noted you were likely going to choose Linux Mint, great! It’s a “stable” distro, as in, it doesn’t change much with small updates. Instead, new release versions (23, 24, 25, etc) come with new changes. Linux Mint comes with an App Store that can install from Flathub, which should be the first place to check for installing new applications.
As for VR, it depends heavily on which exact headset you have, and is not always a great experience on Linux right now (speaking from experience with an Index). The LVRA wiki is a great starting place: https://lvra.gitlab.io/. If you’re on a Quest, WiVRN and ALVR exist, though they both have their own downsides. If you’re on a PCVR headset from Oculus, your options are more limited. You might also want to consider a different distro, as VR development is moving very fast. Many VR users choose to go with a “harder” rolling release distribution, like EndeavourOS, to receive feature updates quicker.
Also of note, if you have the storage space, you can choose to “dual boot” (even with just one drive). This will give you a menu to choose between Windows and Linux when starting your computer, and will give you time to move stuff over. I generally recommend this, as it provides an option to immediately do a task you know how to do on Windows, when it’s absolutely required to do the task asap.
onlyoffice is also a pretty good option for ms office compatibility
Btw, ungoogled-chromium needs a extension for extension market access. There’s also just Chromium or Brave, Edge or whatever floats your boat.
Legacy iOS Kit works for some things too
Can I run any game on Linux steam if it is bought there?
You can always check proton.db (it keeps a track of how well steam games run on Linux).
So I should do this with at least ny favorite games before wiping my drive and installing a Linux distro?
Bazzite, a gaming-focused Linux distribution, is designed to work really well with Steam. One drawback is that if you have a game installed in Windows on a Windows drive, you can’t use it from Linux steam. But, there is a way to have games accessible to both operating systems. I haven’t done this, yet, but I’m probably going to try it this week.
It involves installing a Windows driver that supports BTRFS partitions.
Here’s the video guide I found.
Probably, yes. Dual-booting may also be an option for the one or two games that don’t work.
1 gotcha for gaming on steam is anticheat enabled games. If you play competitive games where third party anti cheat is required often you will not be able to play them even if they say they support Linux on steam.
Not every game works, but as another user pointed out, ProtonDB is a good resource. If you buy a new game on Steam, and it doesn’t work, you can refund it within the first 2 weeks (and below 2 hours playtime) for any reason. That includes “Ths game does not work on my operating system”.
Ye use amd adrenaline to control overclocking and settings for my GPU and games. I’ve seen recommendations for LACT or CoreCtrl
I use LACT. It’s very easy to use and works well.
AMD Drivers: if your GPU is new enough (which it probably is since you’re playing Star citizen) it should be just magic here since they come together with the kernel.
Chrome: it’s available for Linux, no need to switch. Although Firefox is very nice too.
Gmail: not sure what you mean, Gmail is a website, those are available on any platform. If you meant a desktop email client (which honestly I have never in my life used) there’s Thunderbird.
Office 360: Are you talking about Microsoft 365? Is that not a website too? In any case Libre office is a nice alternative to the classical Office desktop app too in case you want that.
I-Tunes: A quick search online reveals people use wine to run the Windows version of iTunes, although I would probably consider migrating. Spotify has a native client and there are some places where you can buy music and have it locally for playback.
JBL: not sure what this is other than a brand for speakers.
Anti-virus: You almost assuredly don’t need an anti-virus on Linux, as long as you install software through the proper channels (i.e. using the package manager) chances of virus are so small it’s not something to worry about. Most Linux anti-virus serve to check windows binaries in the system to avoid someone using the Linux machine to send virus to Windows users.
PyCharm: it’s available for Linux
Remote desktop to iOS: Not sure this is possible even on Windows, I use remmina for remote desktop, it supports several ways of connecting to the other device so maybe see if it works for you.
Star citizen: Never played it but it seems to be playable with Wine.
Steam: While steam is available not all games are compatible, check out https://www.protondb.com/ to see the status of any specific Steam game.
VPN: should be native on Linux, there’s a protocol caller OpenVPN which most VPN providers will give you a Config file for that you can use directly on the network applet on Linux.
PS: Next time share the list in text, it makes it easier to reply
I would say libre wolf instead of firefox, the rest of the list is spot on
For an average user i would recommend Firefox
For someone tech-savy and privacy focused - LibreWolf
Why? Some websites will not work properly on LibreWolf because of how hardened it is (not extremely, but just enough to break some things on websites). I don’t mean it’s bad, it’s just not for everyone atm since many people want things to just work™
If you want more customizability, then Floorp’s also a great option .
Remote desktop to iOS: Not sure this is possible even on Windows, I use remmina for remote desktop, it supports several ways of connecting to the other device so maybe see if it works for you.
What? This is absolutely possible, and it seems like OP is already doing so from Windows. Remmina is also, as far as I’m aware, a client app, not a server. I would personally recommend Sunshine, with Moonlight as the iOS client, but that’s more geared towards gaming. xrdp would be my recommendation if OP is using the built in Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol currently, as that will continue to work with whichever iOS client they are already using. Otherwise, if they’re using VNC currently, I would go with TightVNC as there are dozens, if not more, iOS clients.
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Yeah, it works with AMD as well.
Use chrome remote desktop as of now stream to both my phone and laptop
He said remote desktop to iOS not from iOS, that means he needs a client on his desktop to access the server on the phone. If it was android the answer is
scrcpybut I’m not aware of any such tools for iOS (since I don’t own an iOS device).I, don’t think that’s what they meant, but I could be wrong.
They didn’t say, we can only read what they wrote and ask if unsure.
I mean, I did read what they wrote. Remote desktop to iOS. Sending the desktop of the computer, to an iOS device. Nobody calls the home screen of a phone a “desktop”.
That wasn’t a criticism, I’m not saying you didn’t read what they wrote.
“Remote Desktop” (and Microsoft’s RDP Remote Desktop Protocol) is a common term, regardless of what the actual destination device is.
OP was not clear what they mean, so we just guess and ask.
iTunes just doesn’t work even for really old ones for just to put some music on iPod. Haven’t tried with Wine 10 but I don’t think that’s changed. This is the only reason I keep a Windows VM with an old iTunes in it.
This is exactly why proprietary stuff sucks !
Edit:
But I’m glad you’re holding to that old iPod without throwing it away ! 👍
Indeed. I hate it. But gotta keep it around until the device is dead. :/
Been using chrome remote desktop to stream to my phone an laptop for remote work, but want a no Google Alternative
For remote desktop you could try TeamViewer
Edit: Also, Thunderbird isn’t amazing imho. I would also look at Betterbird. Much better :o)
Rustdesk, open source, cross platform, self-hostable, and at least in my experience works great
Cool, thank you!
