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.

  • xXthrowawayXx [none/use name]
    ·
    11 months ago
      1. Yes. Steam/wine. Sometimes it doesn’t work right and it’s like playing games made for older versions of windows on newer ones.
      1. Yes, you’ll clear some space on your hard drive, set up dual boot then Linux will see the old windows part of the drive and you can pull files over.
      1. People will tell you all kinds of stuff but the truth is that there isn’t. Fundamental to using any computer is recognizing the layers of abstraction meant to give form, color and texture to the abstract constituent parts of the computer system. If you have this with windows, you’ll just be changing nouns and verbs going to Linux. If you don’t have it you will learn it. Dual boot first and keep that windows install around! You can transfer files over and adjust the sizes of the two partitions but when something breaks or you need to open a ten year old autocad file you’ll be glad it’s still around.
      1. People will tell you to try lots of distros or to try their favorite one. Don’t do this. Pick the biggest one and stick with it. You want a huge pool of resources to pull from when something goes wrong. I used the same one as my high school user group, then switched to my college user group’s preferred distro. Now I just use Debian stable.

    .

    E: if you don’t already have a backup, make one. It’s good to know that nothing can go so wrong that you lose everything and if you didn’t already have a backup you do now.

    • silent_water [she/her]
      ·
      11 months ago
      1. can lead to accidentally wiping the whole drive if you don't understand what you're doing so yeah make a backup and plan ahead for everything getting wiped.
      • xXthrowawayXx [none/use name]
        ·
        11 months ago

        Yeah it’s really important to have a backup no matter what. I once accidentally installed over the wrong whole drive because I wasn’t paying attention. Picked which /dev/sdx i was gonna install to then had to power down and move some things around. Went right back in and picked that device again and it wasn’t till the bar was 1/3 across that I thought “hey, what uuid was that…”

        Another possibility is a damaged drive may fail completely during the install process.

        Definitely make a backup.