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 :)
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.
Idk if I would suggest Endeavour to a first time user. In my experience it has been perfectly stable and simple, except for some random boot time kernel panics, but the potential for an inexperienced user to break an install without at least some core concepts of a package manager, especially with the AUR, is certainly there.
My example is just me, but I started with Ubuntu 10 years ago, and I broke that shit all the time. I had a not so good internet connection and half of the issues were related to dpkg not committing the installation.
I also think that AUR have the opposite effect comparing with PPAs, that I found much more error prone.