this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
970 points (99.0% liked)

Technology

78511 readers
3577 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 32 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

Will I be able to run Blender without issue?

The free and open source 3D creation software developed on Linux and primarily run on Linux? Yeah, you should be fine.

Can I run Steam/Steam games easily?

Absolutely. Games that have a problem running on linux are mostly contained to this with anti-cheat. You can verify your game's compatibility with protondb.com.

Will Discord work?

Of course. Discord has a linux native client.

[–] Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 11 points 4 days ago (2 children)
[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

FYI: You are already on Lemmy, the most Linux friendly place on the Internet. If you ever run into trouble, just ask around. People here will love to help you.

[–] Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

One last thing. Since you are completely new, are coming from a Windows background, and do more than just game, I'd suggest starting with Linux Mint (Cinnamon). You do not have to stick with that distribution forever, but it is probably the most painless introduction since it is Debian/Ubuntu based and most of the help/articles you'll find on the Internet are focused on Debian/Ubuntu/Mint. Debian based distributions are more of a "set it and forget it" experience. Nice and boring.

Other major core distributions that are different from Debian/Ubuntu include Red Hat (Fedora), Arch, and OpenSuSe. Red Hat (Fedora) is a good choice for corporate users since Red Hat is the defacto Linux distribution for the corporate world. Arch is great if you REALLY want to learn Linux and truly get into tinkering with its guts. OpenSuSe is the European option and what some European governments are ditching Windows for.

[–] Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 5 points 4 days ago (2 children)

That's very helpful. Thank you, again. I think I'm going to set up a partition and play with it so I can sort of have one foot in and one foot out to not disrupt my workflow too much while I figure things out. Wish me luck.

Everybody and their mother will have recommendations on their favorite flavor of Linux, but as somebody else about to make the switch with similar priorities as you, I'd suggest also taking a look at Bazzite. It's built on the same distro as the SteamOS and comes in at least two flavors for what your use case is. One of its selling points is that it's an "immutable" version of Linux, which means that it's a lot harder to accidentally break it as a new user.

[–] Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 days ago

Mint also makes setting up dual boot pretty painless. In a few months you may wonder why you still have windows installed taking up space.

[–] FirmDistribution@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

good luck! Linux Mint is a very beginner-friendly distro!

[–] njordomir@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

To top that off, you can dip your toes in by running a live image off a USB thumb drive to check if your hardware is recognized and supported out of the box. I have used Linux for 10-15 years, but never for gaming. This year I made the final jump, the one thing I had kept windows for. I don't play competitive games with anticheat, and everything is running great. I anticipated more bullshit, because 15 years ago, Linux was not so polished. At this point I'm fine with running Linux on elderly folks PCs. It's finally "good enough" to do just about everything and legitimately excels at most things.

[–] sparky@lemmy.federate.cc 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Man, this comment made me feel old :)

So much fun anti-nostalgia for trying to game on Debian fifteen years ago. This game doesn’t really run in WINE, but if you feed the Konami code into launch arguments then you might get working except upside down and in black and white. Oh, you wanted sound with that? Let me introduce you to my main man, ALSA. He’s a dick.

The kids of today will never know the pain. Proton is a game changer.

[–] Tim_Bisley@piefed.social 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Discord didn't play nice with Linux for me. It wouldn't update and then discord wouldn't let me sign in. Had to go thru a multi step process each update to fix it. Only discord did this.

[–] Cricket@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 days ago

Were you using the Flatpak version? You may have better luck with that. There are also a variety of third-party Discord clients for Linux. I've been using GoofCord without issues so far, but it's early days.

https://flathub.org/en/apps/search?q=discord