2031: China bans all sales of Windows in China, leading game and software publishers to finally port their products to Linux.
That's a good idea. CEOs should be forced to literally kowtow for market access.
Half of western media reports it as no longer allowing windows in houses
You know what? Let's get some people over here and have a struggle session
can you explain why? I know enough about linux but not enough about BSD to know why one would be superior
i beg of you that "loved the old windows OSes" to just switch to mint, its so easy
It doesn't really matter much, just turn on proton (valve's special windows compatibility software for games) in steam after you've installed it.
You will have to install most of your software through whichever package manager (linuxism for app store) is available in your distro (instead of googling the name of the software, downloading an exe, etc), and you will want to install a program called bottles (the most straightforward IMO) or lutris (more fiddly but more geared toward gamers) which iare frontends for a program called wine, which is the windows compatibility program from which proton was forked. Most games that are not dependent on anti-cheat software will run just fine in either proton or wine.
You can also add non-steam softwares to steam and it will try to run them through proton, and they will show up in your steam library with everything else.
You can't go wrong with either a Fedora spin (besides i3 which is pretty advanced) , or Linux Mint if you're looking for something familiar to a windows user. Really pretty much any distro is fine or at least workable.
https://garudalinux.org/downloads.html
The best one for gaming I can recomend is Garuda gaming editon, it's sick nasty feels like mac osx and has a bunch of kernal updates to make your hardware preform good.
As raven said, it shouldn't matter much, and WINE/proton will do most of the work.
But I'd recommend something Debian-based, and specifically Ubuntu-based, because those are the most popular flavors, and thus the most likely to get proper testing. For reference, raven's rec of Mint is Ubuntu-based. Fedora is the second most common, so you're still likely to find good support. Arch or Gentoo are a lot more likely to require fiddling around to make things work, but honestly if you're installing one of those it's probably because you enjoy that sort of thing.
If you're buying hardware, AMD graphics cards have better Linux support in general, but Nvidia works well if you install the proprietary drivers (which is usually an extra couple of checkboxes on most distros).
Echoing the "it doesn't really matter" answers, but PopOS might be the best if you just want something that will install and go. They also tend to have very good built-in Nvidia support without having to dive into the command line or installing extra packages if that's a concern.
development of an x86-to-RISC-V translation layer
actually quite exciting
it's gonna suck in 10 years when China is some kind of FOSS linux utopia meanwhile in the US windows finds a way to have MSTeams/xbox cloud/Edge do the "windows 12 is ready to install" nagware on unsuspecting ubuntu users while also bios locking users out of installing non-backdoored installations of windows on consumer hardware and then you get accused of being unamerican or hating freedom or a Chinese infiltrator for remembering any of the last 30 years of terrible shit Microsoft has been doing or just wanting to feel like you own a device that you already paid for.
If they really want sound cybersecurity then China's resources and mathematical talent should really been invested in formally verified software like the seL4 microkernel and servers in languages like ATS or F*.
Open source code isn't enough. Bugs and backdoors go hidden for years in a culture that just doesn't want to look down and accept reality. Concrete is made and trusted based on a mathematical formula and software should be the same.
"So I personally consider security bugs to be just "normal bugs". I don't cover them up, but I also don't have any reason what-so-ever to think it's a good idea to track them and announce them as something special." Linus Torvalds
I get the realities of open source projects but the whole industry built on top of it feels so haphazard. It's not related to the Linux kernel which is fairly sound when only running a server but Log4Shell has left a really bad taste in my mouth when it comes to the commercial exploitation of code mostly developed and maintained by volunteers.
Better but not necessarily adequate. Very difficult to make to the case to manager who pretend there is some free market competition in software.
I need to switch my pc tower to linux cause my windows 7 is now unsupported. And I'm not willing to upgrade.
