Edit2: Writing this from Pop_Os! I had experience with Mint for my Self hosting rig and wanted to see other pastures. Decided to rearrange my three drives, two of them are still Windows, another I emptied and dedicated to Pop OS. That way I still have easy fallback to Windows if I need to do something fast and then I'll know what I have to add to Linux over time.
First things first, I've setup auto-back up. For now it's google drive because it's the easy one. I have to figure how to self host Nextcloud and then use this as a backup storage.
Steam is installed and to be fair, I'm happy with the native linux games. Still going to take a look at Lutris and co out of curiosity.
I mostly miss MusicBee right now. Any recommendation for the most solid music player? Also, what's a good movie player? I used MPV, I need something capable to deal with 3440x1440 resolution and stretch properly.
Also, I wanted to install Bitwarden and the first thing that showed up is Snap Store. I remember hearing about Canonical in a bad way so should I stay clear from that?
Hey!
Today is the day. I finally got fed up with Windows booting up with an advert that I already had yesterday and had clicked on "remind me in three days" reluctantly. I'm finally tired of killing Telemetry.
Now that gaming is less important for me, I feel like now is a good time to switch mainly to Linux. I might keep a small spare drive with a Windows/Steam partition for the occasional incompatible game.
I've just started transferring my precious files to an external drive and I'm preparing for my Exodus.
Still unsure about the distro I'll choose, I would like to avoid distro hoping. But now I made up my mind, I'm leaving windows for the foreseable future.
I started self-hosting three months ago as a way to trialing Linux with the added bonus of being useful and my server is still up and alive so I'm confident I can use Linux without breaking it.
Any welcoming tips?
I'm a bit anxious about the big change, but also relieved I won't have to put up with the bloat/adverts.
Edit: Two hours in and so many kind and useful comments. Thanks for the welcome party! You're all a bunch of good humans :)
and then...
lol. I love it. :P
To OP though, if you really don't want to "distro-hop", you definitely should test drive several. Look into Ventoy, it basically makes a bootable flash drive that has a separate folder/partition you can just drop bootable .iso files into, and then on boot Ventoy shows you basically a boot menu that lets you pick any one of the images to boot. If you get a nice and big usb flash drive, you can get basically ALL of the distros you want to try on one bootable usb stick so test driving them requires a lot less time and effort. You won't get a good idea of performance typically from a live environment, but you get a very good idea for the "look and feel" which will likely help you narrow it down a lot.
Okay so I'm slightly confused and I haven't experimented with that on my server because it's only one single drive. If I have several drives and partition one for the distro, the other drives as storage partitions. Are the data storage drives compatible between distro?
Would that mean that I could go pick a new distro, nuke the "distro drive", but leave the others disk intact and just log in the new distro with my drives as they were?
Yeah I'm not worried about encryption, it's more about convenience to not start from scratch every time, but whatever is critical is duplicated in several places and wouldn't be lost if I were to lose the entire machine. It's more me being lazy and wiling to avoid transferring games and music again if possible.
Basically yes. You also don't need more than one disk, you can just partition a single one.
One common way to do this is to have a separate partition for /home, so anything there will survive nuking your root partition. You can also do /var; not something I've done but that's where system-wide data is kept. And finally you can use something like etckeeper to manage your system-wide config alongside whatever your distros are doing.
Cool! And how do you proceed to switch distro then? Let's say I have done as described above and separated the distro in its own partition. I plug a new USB distro, go through the setup and at the partitioner screen, I reassociate the new distro to where the old one was, and /home to where /home was, etc? And it just picks up that there are files there?
Yep. Most installers will let you specify mount points for partitions, and it will have an option for if you want to format the partition (obviously don't select this for /home!). So you'd have one partition for the root, and one partition for home. You'd set the mount point of the root partition to
/, tell it to format that, and set the mount point of the home partition to/home, and tell it to not format that, and it'll work as you described.See also the other reply to my earlier comment; this is just one way, and maybe not the best way, to handle this.