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The Best way to switch to Linux is to NOT

Okay I know this sounds like click bait but trust me switching over to linux requires you to first master the open source software that you will be replacing your windows/mac counterparts with. Doing it in an unfamiliar OS with no fallback to rely on is tough, frustrating and will turn you off of trying linux. DISCLAIMER: I know that some people cannot switch to linux because open source / Linux software is not good enough yet. But I urge you to keep track of them and when so you can know when they are good enough.

The Solution

So I suggest you keep using windows, switch all your apps to open or closed source software that is available on linux. Learn them, use them and if you are in a pinch and need to use your windows only software it will still be there. Once you are at a point where you never use the windows only software you can then think of switching over to linux.

The Alternatives

So to help you out I’ll list my favorites for each use case.

MS Office -> Only Office

  1. Not for folks who use obscure macros and are deep into MS Office
  2. Has Collaboration and integration with almost all popular cloud services…
  3. Has a MS Office like UI and the best compatibility with MS Office.

Adobe Premiere -> Da Vinci Resolve

  1. It is closed source but available on linux
  2. Great UI, competitive features and a free version

Outlook -> Thunderbird

  1. Recently went through massive updates and now has a modern design.
  2. Templates, multi account management, content based filters, html signatures, it is all there.

Epic Games, GOG, PRIME -> Heroic

  1. Easy to use, 1 click install, no hassel
  2. Beautiful UI
  3. Automatically imports all the games you have bought

PDF Editor -> LibreOffice Draw

  1. Suprisingly good for text manipulation, moving around images and alot more.
  2. There might be slight incompatibilities (I haven’t noticed anything huge)
  3. But hey, it’s free

How do I pick a distro there are so many! NO

So finally after switching all the apps you think you are ready? Do not fall into the rabbit hole of changing your entire OS every two days, you will be in a toxic relationship with it.

I hate updates and my hardware is not that new

  1. Mint - UI looks a bit dated but it is rock solid
  2. Ubuntu - Yes, I know snaps are bad, but you can just ignore them

I have new hardware but I want sane updates

  1. Fedora
  2. Open Suse Tumbleweed

I live on the bleeding edge baby, both hardware and software

  1. Arch … btw

Anyways what is more important is the DE than the distro for a beginner, trust me. Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, etc. you can try them all in a VM and see which one you like.

SO TLDR: Don’t switch to linux! Switch to linux apps.

notthebees ,

Use libreoffice over open office.

HouseWolf ,

To add to the software point, STOP buying hardware that requires some shitty software to fully work.

I did this back in the Windows 7 days years before I even knew anything about Linux. But Razers rootkit managed to load in before the Win7 login screen then crash it. After that I avoided any peripherals with mandatory software and it made my transition to Linux a lot easier than most people I know.

Cris16228 ,

I’ve installed Linux on dual boot because I’ve always loved it and used it as a solo operating system or in dual boot configurations years ago. Now I’m using KDE Neon for the sole reason that it has the wobbly windows. Otherwise, any operating system is fine for me. The only thing I need to find is a good alternative to Affinity Designer 2 or a way to make it work on Linux. I know there’s Inkscape, but I’m not used to it or its user interface.

boredsquirrel ,
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

Libreoffice draw is really bad.

Instead, you either need

  • masterpdf, paid but I guess worth it
  • a mix of: Firefox PDF editor (drawing, inserting images, text annotations), Pdf arranger (bundling PDFs, removing pages, reordering), GIMP (redacting, compressing), Okular (viewing, marking, drawing, bookmarks)
  • stirlingPDF, in a local Podman container, in the browser

There is no free tool that does all the needed things. StirlingPDF is really close though and I am working on good desktop integration.

nickb333 ,
@nickb333@fedia.io avatar

I hate it when someone sends me a PDF form and tells me I can complete it using Acrobat (or whatever it's called this week). Last one I successfully completed with the Firefox PDF ed.

Noel_Skum ,

Enough with your psyop, Bill. Go back to trying to cure malaria to atone for your past sins.

737 ,

OnlyOffice is problematic. They abuse additional clauses in the AGPL license to make code redistribution impossible. Thus, effectively making the software source-available freeware while still profiting from the Free Software image.

teawrecks ,

I would still say dual booting is the superior option, but that might be complicated for some people, so this is probably a good recommendation.

MTK ,

This is good advice, but I would add having a bootable Linux distro on a usb, and using more and more until you find yourself not needing Windows, then move to Linux with just it or a dual boot configuration with Windows as a fallback

LeFantome ,

My concern with this take is that it positions the switch as all downsides. You do not get any of the Linux benefits, just the compromised experience on Windows. You may decide it is not worth it even before switching.

dino ,

Old hardware runs better on Ubuntu than on Fedora or Tumbleweed? Nani?

acceptable_humor OP ,

No I meant it in the sense that for newer hardware mint and Ubuntu LTS usually ends up not having drivers or driver issues. I was setting up my girlfriend’s laptop which isn’t old but crap so I chose mint … It didn’t have the drivers for the trackpad so I had to switch to the edge iso. So what I was saying was if you have newer hardware run fedora or tumbleweed … Not the other way around

adam_y ,
@adam_y@lemmy.world avatar

Or, conversely, just switch to Linux.

Take an hour or so to have a look around the place.

Go on the internet if you have any questions.

People are smarter than you assume and if you want Linux to grow in popularity we need to stop pretending any if this is difficult.

turnipjs ,

Who wants to start a flame war? NixOS is a better bleeding edge distro than Arch. Nixpkgs has way more packages than Arch.

737 ,

Maybe, but arch is simpler

acceptable_humor OP ,

I wrote this for beginners … While you shouldn’t be installing arch either as a beginner but if your are up for it tools like the arch wiki and archisntall are still easier than learning nix os …

I have been using linux since years now and I have no idea what a nix is /j

HexesofVexes ,

Really neat post, I’d not heard of a few of these (never knew libre office draw could edit pdfs!).

Couple of extra ones:

Note taking and pdf annotation: Xournal++ is amazing, it’s also great to use on larger whiteboard screens. Plug and play support for scribe tablets on both windows and Linux.

Emulation (up to ps1): Mednafen is lightweight and comes with a gui. It also supports recording, though not netplay.

Ebook management/reading: Calibre - allows easy importing and exporting of ebooks to devices, also has a great built in search letting you find DRM free versions of a book.

MudMan ,

I keep trying to explain how Linux advocacy gets the challenges of mainstream Linux usage wrong and, while I appreciate the fresh take here, I'm afraid that's still the case.

Effectively this guide is: lightly compromise your Windows experience for a while until you're ready, followed by "here's a bunch of alien concepts you don't know or care about and actively disprove the idea that it's all about the app alternatives."

I understand why this doesn't read that way to the "community", but parse it as an outsider for a moment. What's a snap? Why are they bad? Why would I hate updates? Aren't updates automatic as they are in Windows? Why would I ever pick the hardware-incompatible distros? What's the tradeoff supposed to be, does that imply there is a downside to Mint over Ubuntu? It sure feels like I need to think about this picking a distro thing a lot more than the headline suggested. Also, what's a DE and how is that different to a distro? Did they just say I need a virtual machine to test these DE things before I can find one that works? WTF is that about?

Look, I keep trying to articulate the key misunderstanding and it's genuinely hard. I think the best way to put it is that all these "switch to Linux, it's fun!" guides are all trying to onboard users to a world of fun tinkering as a hobby. And that's great, it IS fun to tinker as a hobby, to some people. But that's not the reason people use Windows.

If you're on Windows and mildly frustrated about whatever MS is doing that week, the thing you want is a one button install that does everything for you, works first time and requires zero tinkering in the first place. App substitutes are whatever, UI changes and different choices in different DEs are trivial to adapt to (honestly, it's all mostly Windows-like or Mac-like, clearly normies don't particularly struggle with that). But if you're out there introducing even a hint of arguments about multiple technical choices, competing standards for app packages or VMs being used to test out different desktop environments you're kinda missing the point of what's keeping the average user from stepping away from their mainstream commercial OS.

In fairness, this isn't the guide's fault, it's all intrinsic to the Linux desktop ecosystem. It IS more cumbersome and convoluted from that perspective. If you ask me, the real advice I would have for a Windows user that wants to consider swapping would be: get a device that comes with a dedicated Linux setup out of the box. Seriously, go get a Steam Deck, go get a System76 laptop, a Raspberry Pi or whatever else you can find out there that has some flavor of Linux built specifically for it out of the box and use that for a bit. That bypasses 100% of this crap and just works out of the box the way Android or ChromeOS work out of the box. You'll get to know whether that's for you much quicker, more organically and with much less of a hassle that way... at the cost of needing new hardware. But hey, on the plus side, new hardware!

1984 ,
@1984@lemmy.today avatar

I don’t understand the difficulty. My kid who used Windows for at least 7 years installed Ubuntu and just started using it. Why is this difficult for people? I helped him boot the computer from a USB stick and that’s it.

Here is the app store, install programs from here.

Ok.

Deebster ,
@Deebster@programming.dev avatar

Yup, I think a lot of people just use their web browser for everything, and they can definitely just switch. Outside of work, how many non-techies have set up their email to use a native program? Very few, in my experience.

I think documents are sometimes the exception, since there’s a sizable (perhaps older) group that like to use Word for everything.

Max_P ,
@Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me avatar

I switched as a kid too, but that makes it really easy because I never ended up depending on a bunch of proprietary Windows only apps. I never learned stuff like Photoshop and Illustrator and Premiere, not even on pirated versions like most kids do. Photoshop CS2 technically ran under wine but the experience was so miserable I learned GIMP instead. My last Windows was XP.

The older you get the more “serious” software you have too, like tax stuff, the whole Windows-centered workflow at work. The deeper you are into the ecosystem the worse it is.

The issue I see over and over and over is not that using Linux in itself is that hard, it’s dealbreaker software and hardware. Oh your capture card isn’t supported. Your audio mixer’s not supported. It sucks. So basically what OP said: you have to switch to Linux friendly software first, then it’s basically just swapping the OS and not flipping your entire computing experience over.

ExtremeDullard ,
@ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

My mom is 80 years old and I got her on Mint years ago - mostly because I was tired of fixing the mistakes Windows let her make.

My mom is a walking disaster with computers but she got used to it and now she can’t mess up anything, and she doesn’t worry about messing up anything anymore too. If she can do it, anyone can do it.

adam_y ,
@adam_y@lemmy.world avatar

I think some folk want to pretend using Linux is hard so that they can feel more… Uh… Technical for using it.

acceptable_humor OP ,

The thing is alot of people who work really well in the windows environment and have been doing so for a while will now have to face both a new environment and new tools. Then there is the problem of time … If you are trying to work while also troubleshooting your OS with none of the tools that you know how to troubleshoot with it could be frustrating.

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