Hey guys, I'm an entry-level IT professional and tech enthusiast.
I'm getting a bit sick of windows for a multitude of reasons and want to try out some Linux distros.
I use my pc for web browsing, university (which uses office 365) where I study software design, software development (vs code, visual studio, jetbrains stuff) and gaming (99% of the time via steam).
My main concerns for switching are that I'll have a hard time with university work because we mostly use teams for video conferences and work together with word, and other office stuff. We also are required to do some virtual machine stuff where we use virtualbox.
Also I'm a bit worried that some games on uplay, epic and other platforms aren't available anymore.
For distros I've been mainly looking at Manjaro, Linux Mint or plain old Ubuntu. Can you recommend anything that might fit for me or will I maybe run into any issues with my chosen three?
Edit: Thanks a lot for all the replies. I've read through all of them even if I didn't reply and it was very helpful. I will test most of your suggestions in a VM before I jump into completely changing my OS. And I'll probably try booting from a USB Drive first. What I didn't mention is that I've already worked with Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS, so I'm not scared about having to use a CLI.
Avoid Manjaro, if you plan on entering the ArchLinux space do it with EndeavourOS.
I would avoid Ubuntu, but that is more because I dislike their politics on snaps.
You are an entry-level IT pro, so, I'd suggest EndeavourOS for personal, Debian for work. Why? Simple, Debian is widely used in professional environments, nobody will look at you weird for using a "less professional" distro.
In terms of University work, you are saying you guys use Teams and Office, probably with a student license that would give you access to a full online Office experience through the browser, just use that.
In terms of gaming, things are looking pretty good nowadays, and with a more personal distro, such as EndeavourOS, you'll get the latest advancements in gaming.
Thanks for the hint. I'm kinda curious about Arch, so I'll definitely check out EndeavourOS.
Unfortunately for work I'm still bound to Windows then because we use Visual Studio. I guess I can just use a VM if I ever need that for personal use though!
Visual studio is available on Linux as a native app from the AUR and some distros repos, I use VS on my endeavourOS with no problems, other than it has a slight tendency to be slow on launch, but that may be due to hardware age.
I did forget to mention that. I don’t like flatpaks and avoid them if possible. Guess you could say I’m a Linux purist lmao
I like Flatpak for things that have proprietary junk like VSCode because of the contention and selective permissions.
If you do go with EndeavourOS, install Rider-EAP from the AUR. It is a professional level C# IDE and the EAP version is free. It has a time limited license but. In my experience, it will update often enough to keep the license active.
I’d recommend opensuse tumbleweed. I would suggest Debian but it moves too slow (updates) for gaming. I think arch is good but you will have to want to learn a bit more about it. Tumbleweed falls closer to Debian with stability and still near arch as far as frequent updates.
One downside of Opensuse compared to Arch is its lacking Documentation.
I use Opensuse TW on my desktop machine for over 10 years now and I use Debian at work, also have a different distro on my laptop.
I have found over the years you can apply a lot of the directions to whatever distro you are using. You just have to do some minor tweaking to the commands. Primarily using the right package manager command for your distro or using distro specific software in place of arch software. I have also found you can use a lot of the AUR programs by searching for said app in your repos.
Or they can use EndeavourOS if vanilla Arch is too complicated. You’ll still have to install things like libreoffice, steam etc. but you don’t have half the learning curve you do with vanilla arch
Between the three I'd go for Linux Mint. It was my first distro too, and it makes the setup process very easy, especially for users coming from Windows. Manjaro and Ubuntu are fine, plenty of people I know love them, but they've both made some decisions in recent years that I don't like. The former being negligent with security updates, and the latter forcing their own, worse, package manager on users. You shouldn't have any issues with Mint.
Most of the apps you mentioned are available for Linux, including Teams and VirtualBox, though you'll probably have to download those from their respective websites. Office 365 still works from a web browser, and you can open its documents locally with LibreOffice (though more complicated documents might have some formatting messed up). I haven't heard of uPlay, but there is an unofficial Linux client for Epic Games (called Heroic Launcher), and ~90% of Windows games either support Linux or work through a compatibility layer such as Proton.
Use Mint. Manjaro is a joke, and Mint fixes the Ubuntu's wrongdoings. The average UI experience is also like Windows. LibreOffice has a config that makes it almost like MicrosoftOffice called "tabbed". I personally thinks that to set up a Virtual Box in Linux is easier than in Windows. For non-steam games you can use Lutris or Heroic for Epic, nowadays you only have unfixable problems with online multiplayer anti-cheat, Valorant, for example.
In fact, Mint adds even more bugs to the distro than Ubuntu originally has.
i used mint for a few years, it's pretty good and if something works on ubuntu 99% of the time it works on mint too which is handy for tech support
i used manjaro for 3 days before i switched to endeavourOS (another arch based distro) after very strong recommendations to ditch it from a very large number of people lolI'm terms of software, most distro are going to be the same, especially debian-based ones (Ubuntu, mint, pop, etc.) I think Mint is a great choice - cinnamon is a good, familiar desktop environment for windows users, and unlike ubintu it has flatpak support so you get a lot of up to date apps through that. I'll admit I'm biased though, and manjaro is probably great as well - I'd even suggest plain Arch, the new installer makes things really easy if you're somewhat tech savvy.
Office 365 can be accessed online, or a foss office suite like Libreoffice or Onlyoffice can edit and save to Microsoft file formats. Comparability is usually pretty good unless you're doing something really weird.
Unfortunately visual studio is a no-go. VSCode and Jetbrains work though.
Teams will also work through the browser. I believe they also have a PWA now for chrome. My company actually uses teams all the time even though they dev team is mostly on Linux.
There are alternative launchers for games outside of steam. Heroic is one I personally use - it supports Epic and GOG. Just check protondb to see if the games you care about work. IDK about Uplay but if you look around you might find something.
openSUSE Tumbleweed is my choice, I also used Pop_OS! for almost a year but if you plan on gaming and having the latest Mesa drivers and Wine + kernel updates, openSUSE is the way to go. It works the best for me and if you feel that you may want to change change your desktop beetween kde/gnome/x11/wayland I find that openSUSE simplifies that process a lot.
In my opinion, rolling release distros have less issues in the gaming and software development area.
If you're decent at programming try NixOS. 90% of your system is described by one config file and because of how it builds if a fix works for one person it'll work for pretty much everyone
(With exceptions sometimes for hardware specific stuff like Nvidia drivers which is obviously dependant on your GPU)
It's the one distro I've not really encountered any problems with out of the box
Completely agree. I made the switch from Arch to nix two weeks ago. Although I have to admit for a Linux newbie it might be a bit much at once. Maybe start with something easier like Pop is?
I've found NixOS to be one of the easiest distros to use because everything is reproducible, I'm not too sure why everyone who uses it says it's a hard one to begin with
At the start you just go with the template the installer gives you, and add packages to the package list it generates, then as you want more advanced features options start to come in handy and they're just as straightforward
No nasty hidden surprises, everything for the most part works exactly how you'd expect (with the exception of syntax with some of the more funky features but you don't need those to manage a system at the bare minimum
Ubuntu on the other hand when I started using it I had to run a few random commands (disabling broken Nvidia services) after hours of digging just to get my mouse pointer to work after hibernation) and had to do that every single time I switched to a different distro, wasn't even an issue out of the box on nixos
And if you're stuck a fix that worked for someone else will almost always work for you unless it's a hardware specific issue
I was about to ask basically the same question! I'm actually about to make the same move for my home pc, which I mostly use for streaming and gaming. I already gave a try to Fedora on a VM (gotta say this is the nerdiest name out there) , and I was REALLY impress by how simple, smooth and polish this thing is. To the point where I believe 80% of standard users would be better serve by Linux then Windoss or macOS. The univ and college where I work also uses stupid Office365, but I think you can manage most of your requiere interaction with the browser version. I'm gonna keep a Windows partition because audio and video editing isn't quite there yet, and VR doest work, but I mostly use my MacBook (not my choice) for those project so my home PC will probably run Linux 99% of the time, now that gaming works.
As long as you are okay with using the web versions of office, you can basically go with any distro, since all of them have at least a web browser and virtualbox in their repositories, as well as vs code. Jetbrains also works (I've only used intellij but I assume the others are just as easy to set up). I've never tried visual studio on linux though, not sure how well that works.
ubuntu is the most widely used distro and very simple to setup and gaming out of the box with steam is very simple. Distro end of the day doesn't matter all that much because you can change them to your hearts content, but for a beginner, you'd probably have the easiest time with an ubuntu distro.
Doesn't hurt to have virtual box windows on your linux box just so you can easily do some of that other stuff. While I have done fine with libre office for a long time there are definitely problems with formatting so having a windows VM would just solve that issue. Plus teams and w/e.
Epic games will take some serious tweaking, but not impossible.
