Hello, Windows 10 user of about a year now. I would like to switch to Linux (Ubuntu or Debian), but have a couple of questions.

  1. Is there a way to play steam games designed for Windows on Linux?/What are the drawbacks of doing this?
  2. Is there a way to transfer files from my old OS to the new one without using external drives (i dont have one ;-;)
  3. Is there a distro more suited to a Windows user going into linux rehab?
  4. Is there anything else I should be aware of?

TIA as always comrades and good day.

    • daisy
      ·
      11 months ago

      You may hear some people extolling the virtues of Arch. Arch mainly brings a wide variety of ways to shoot yourself in the foot as a new user, and should not be used on a machine which you NEED to work. The official stance of the Arch maintainers is "Abandon all hope all ye who enter here" and while they have above average documentation on their wiki, that is where available support begins and ends. Manjaro is scuffed Arch and should be avoided at all costs.

      Oh my goodness yes, I second everything said here a hundred times. Arch is for highly experienced Linux nerds who enjoy living on the bleeding edge of beta software and spending many hours per week fixing the problems that they are guaranteed to run into. Do not use Arch unless you really know what you're doing. And if you really know what you're doing, you're probably smart enough to avoid Arch.

      • sovietknuckles [they/them]
        ·
        11 months ago

        And if you really know what you're doing, you're probably smart enough to avoid Arch.

        Arch has been my OS for 8 years. I agree that you shouldn't use it unless you're prepared to fix your own problems, but if using the latest versions of software is what you want, Arch is the easiest way.

        • frankfurt_schoolgirl [she/her]
          ·
          11 months ago

          Arch is wonderful if you have Linux experience. The documentation is amazing, the core systemd and pacman base is pretty easy to use and similar to other distros, and the rolling release actually means that stufd breaks less often, because there are no mega updates that break a bunch of stuff at once.

    • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
      ·
      11 months ago

      Yeah, Arch is a hell-distro. I'd argue it's the least usable option, and should only be used on a machine you never intend to use for anything other than messing around with a self-breaking linux install. Truly an option for that spare laptop catching dust in a closet somewhere.

      Also, I've had pretty good luck lately with getting Kubuntu to download and install proprietary nvidia drivers, and have switched back from Neon as a result of that and a few other little gripes related to not wanting to be on the LTS version of Ubuntu. Last few installs on different systems with Nvidia drivers have all worked. YMMV of course though.

          • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
            ·
            11 months ago

            About once every year they let the SSL certificates expire which trips a safeguard in pacman where every update will fail.

            yea

            Migrating sucks, won't do it until something breaks too hard. I went with Manjaro for giving me a bunch of different wms to play with and a working kde to fall back on, but it's otherwise unimpressive as an archlinux.

        • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
          ·
          11 months ago

          I mean manjaro is fine if you're experienced, idk why they described it as scuffed. I'd still avoid recommending it to new users. Arch being super bleeding edge makes it prone to things being undertested and things getting busted. Manjaro unstable is a bit less prone to this and testing another step less prone, but I'd still recommend even more experienced people stay on just normal manjaro instead of testing or unstable.

          • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
            ·
            11 months ago

            yeah, i mean i'd never tell someone that doesn't fuck with a unix terminal to touch anything remotely related to arch. i've had to bail myself out more than once from a stick.