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 :)
I just did it about 2 months ago with my two laptops.
One (I use for work, self employed) I installed Manjaro, had a few hiccups in the first 2-3 weeks (some due my inexperience, some I assume is manjaro but i don't really know), anyway now it is stable and working fine.
The other one I use for gaming I installed Garuda, also arch based but with focus in games, so it comes with a lot of stuff you will need for my gaming on linux pre-installed and so far it is great. As insane as it sounds some games that are windows only now run better on my garuda than when I was on windows lol.
The main diference I noticed is Linux sometimes is not for the faint of heart, you have to have both good reason and some commitment to use it (in my case it is also ideological, otherwise I would have stayed in win10 until EOL).
It is true that it makes better use of your hardware (with Nvidia it is complicated... both my laptops have nvidia GPUs) but there is also a learning curve.
The community have some genuine amazing people and some assholes. ignore the assholes and payback the good ones by teaching newcomers when you have earned some xp :)