angrymouse , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Welcome, I was very excited to make a full switch and ditch windows from my life 2 years ago, It makes me love to use my PC again. First, distro, I suggest 2 Mint and EndevourOS, I suggest this two because they are community driven with a great user base and are very user-friendly.

Why Mint? Mint has specific versions, you will update similarly to windows from time to time, you sometimes will not have the latest version of a package but is not that stale as a distro like Debian that aims for maximum stability and is sometimes too old for some normal desktop stuff.

Why endevourOS? EndevourOS is probably the well-rounded, user-friendly rolling release distro out there, you will always have the latest versions of your packages. It is based on arch, that is the fact the best rolling release distro, but have a more normal installation, Arch is just unbearable to install for any non-experienced user, you have to learn so many things that I feel is a waste of time of a new user that want to touch the buttons, but I do recommend to you if you want to understand your system in the future.

Now about the desktop environment, I suggest you take some time choosing and even hoping between them, it would be your daily workflow, and it is more important than distro. Here is a great video talking about the major ones, you can have multiple DEs at the same time, if you install a new DE you can switch between them in your login screen, do not be afraid to test.

About games:

If you use steam, always check games compatibility here. It is a community resource to talk about how you run your games.

If you use GoG or Epic, Heroic is a great launcher that aggregates both.

About wine, wine is a program that translate windows programs to linux, every non-native game on linux run through wine (even valve proton is just a product on top of wine with some additional sauce). Wine has the concept of wineprefix that is the folder that contains your Windows driver (C: disk and configuration about this wineprefix), if you just run a program with wine it will default to the folder ~/.wine on your personal desktop. I took some time to get it, and I believe it would have helped me to understand earlier.

Both steam and heroic uses different wineprefixes to manage your games, but if your game is not from these 3 stores? (you can manage it by hand but… you know, I’m lazy)

There is Lutris, Lutris help you to manage games in different wineprefixes and have an amazing interface to configure a lot of stuff, there is also a repository of installer scripts that you can click and run, I feel lutris a little more complicated cause usually I had to do tinkering (older scripts and things like that). You can also install your games directly or even other programs if you want to keep your wineprefixes organized.

Have a great journey.