Hi there!
Seeing the enshittification of Windows unfold, I’m curious about trying out Linux.
I don’t want to move over my main machine just yet, but I’ve got a 9 yo HP Pavilion 15-e001ed spare laptop I want to experiment with. Eventually I want a gaming laptop that can run steam games.
When I googled I found a plethora of pieces of advice, but seeing the proselytizing for Linux here, maybe I could get a bit more personal advice as a potential conscript.
So what advice would you give me to start my journey into Linux?
UPDATE: Ok my cherry is popped, writing this from a fresh Mint install. It’s suprisingly smooth sailing. Only thing is somehow software gets installed on my root partition instead of the home partition I made because people told me so.
But overall not nearly as dounting as I thought it would be. Thanks for the help everybody!
Also something to note is that the KDE Plasma desktop environment has a very similar layout to Windows 10/11. It feels incredibly similar, honestly almost 1:1 in some aspects. Tons of distributions use it as their primary DE, or at least give you the option of using it
I work in Windows (company provided laptop) so on average I spend less time on my Linux PC. And I completely agree with you.
KDE as been my go-to desktop because of the familiarity. Some people argue that it has too much costumisation but the defaults give you everything to run a modern PC. While still allowing you to venture into the “terminal”.
The defaults really do give you everything, from a first glance, one might actually think it is Windows because of how the taskbar is set up exactly the same by default.
My partner is a long time gamer on Windows. Her Win11 laptop doesn’t have the same performance as mine so I setup a gaming account for both.
I barely told her anything on how to “operate” it and after a couple of times she has no problem on her own.
Just now, I came back to the pc and see kwrite open with a message from her. Never told her how to do that. She just searched for “notepad” on the menu like she would on Windows.