Basically the forced shift to the enshittified Windows 11 in october has me eyeing the fence a lot. But all I know about Linux is 1: it’s a cantankerous beast that can smell your fear and lack of computer skills and 2: that’s apparently not true any more? Making the change has slowly become a more real possibility for me, though I’m pretty much a fairly casual PC-user, I don’t do much more than play games. So I wrote down some questions I had about Linux.

Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?

Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?

If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?

Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?

How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?

How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?

Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?

Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?

And also, what distro might be best for me?

  • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    12 hours ago

    I agree I honestly don’t like immutable distro’s at all because you can’t install packages the way everyone else does: via package managers. You either have to use the gui software center and if that doesn’t have to app your looking for you have to use distrobox or box buddy which still doesn’t work half the time. That’s just been my experience with bazzite as a person fairly knew to linux.

    • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
      1·
      11 hours ago

      I agree I honestly don’t like immutable distro’s at all because you can’t install packages the way everyone else does: via package managers.

      this is false, rpm-ostree exists and works for this exactly. There’s nothing you can’t do on bazzite that you can do on a non-immutable distro.

      Even if that wasn’t true… package management is just done through flatpak, there’s no real fundamental difference, it’s just an abstraction layer, I don’t see why that would be important to you at all, and comes with numerous benefits:

      1. You cannot break your system with these, ever.
      2. Significantly less burden on package maintainers
      3. You can have many versions of software installed
      4. These applications are sandboxed and thus more secure.
      5. This enables complete graphical management of software, no longer requiring the terminal.

      It not having packages you may need applies to any package management solution, other distros do not package everything either. In fact, the distro with the most packages is an immutable one, nixos.