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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.
I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?
There’s oculus software for my vr but don’t know what I’m going to do with that
Small update: probably going to do Linux mint as that appears to be the most beginner friendly
Update two: that's a lot of comments, and Thanks for all the info
Pico might be a good way to jump shop on VR. Not sure if you can change OS on current hardware. But next purchase you have plenty of options.
AMD drivers: use the built-in MESA drivers that include the official AMD support.
Gmail: ProtonMail for the service, Kmail for the desktop client.
Chrome: Firefox, or Librewolf if you care about privacy.
Office365: LibreOffice for full FOSS or OnlyOfficr for less freedom but more comfort.
iTunes: depends entirely on what you use it for, but I buy my music mostly off of BandCamp these days.
MuseScore: MuseScore
Norton: Why were you using Norton in the first place? It's practically a virus itself. If you need an antivirus on Linux, you might want ClamAV/ClamTK for something that runs locally only, or Microsoft Defender for Linux.
Py-Charm: Py-Charm, VSCode, Vim, Kate/KWrite
Remote Desktop to iOS: I got nothin'
Star Citizen: Star Citizen
Steam: Steam
VPN: Wireguard
Windows Games: install locally using Wine and then add to Steam as a non-Steam game to use Proton for better support.
Windows 10: run it in a VM if you still need it, or keep it on a separate SSD and dual boot into that.
Proton mail has an email and VPN together as a package.
Off the top of my head:
Gmail or any email: Thunderbird is pretty sweet and I need to use it more, but mostly just use the web clients anyway.
If you own GoG games, you can use Heroic Launcher instead of GoG Galaxy. It's gotten amazingly good, really fast. :)
I'd recommend Lutris over Heroic both because it runs locally where Heroic is Electron, and because Lutris allows community-based native Linux ports for games where applicable, eg. for Ultima VII: The Black Gate + The Forge of Virtue, Lutris gives you the option of installing that game with Exult instead of DOSbox, for Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider II, you have the option to install those with OpenLara, for Doom 1 and 2, you have the option to install those with ZDoom, for Little Big Adventure, you can install that with the ScummVM runner, etc.
Also, at least for DOS games where you don't have the option to install a community-based modern port, you can use native DOSbox as a runner instead of Windows DOSbox as well through Lutris.
Oh, and one more bonus particularly for GOG games in Lutris' favor over Heroic, is Lutris uses the offline installers so that if anything ever goes wrong with any given GOG game, you can just reinstall from the offline installer where Heroic operates more like GOG Galaxy or Steam in that it's always downloaded from scratch.
What do you use iTunes for? That stood out to me.
Also Chrome works fine on Linux, though Firefox is a better browser even on Windows.
For anyone who uses Apple Music, I recommend the Cider app. I believe it costs $3 and you get versions for Linux, Mac, and Windows.
I haven’t found any MP3 players on Linux that I’m totally happy with. All of them have some trivial issue (eg not displaying Album Artist correctly).
As I pointed out, if you have an older iPod, eg. like an iPod Video or Classic, or any other player that supports it, Rockbox is a thing you can flash onto it.
I do have one and I have a Mac with iTunes Match (iCloud music syncing for iPhone). That said I keep most of my actual files on my Ubuntu machine and might want to experiment with the iPod at some point.
I use itunes/icoulds for side loading onto my phone
side loading apps? or files?
Apps, iOS if finiky when it comes to that, though I've been looking for a way that works on Linux
There is AFAIK no way to do this.
Apple's never open-sourced the APIs and interfaces and it only works on Macs and Windows. For this you will need to have either a Windows install (recommend separate drive so it doesn't break Linux bootloader) or a persistent or not Windows VM with USB passthrough. I'm not even sure how well the VM situation works but it probably should. You don't even have to have a license for Windows, you can just run it in the VM for this purpose alone but it does mean oh at least 40GB set aside on your drive for the VM image plus more if you want to do things like back-up the phone.
I have iTunes, because I have an iPhone. I don’t know of any other good way to get mp3s on my phone. (And to get games for emulators)
Thanks! I didnt realize iTunes was still supported.
https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2023/12/transfer-music-ubuntu-iphone/amp/
Seems like you can also use the iOS VLC app to get mp3s on there
Another method is to use KDE connect to transfer the files, which would also work for your game backups
Fooyin's a really good alternative and if you can flash Rockbox onto an older iPod that supports that custom firmware, then it'll just function as a normal external drive, no iTunes sync needed unlike with stock Apple firmware.
emacs
emacs
emacs
emacs
emacs
emacs
emacs
emacs
vim
emacs
emacs
emacs
emacs
emacs
emacs
Like… how. Or is that part of the joke.
I mean, he's joking, but:
AMD Drivers: yeah, this one's not a thing
Chrome: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/EWW.html
Gmail: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryMail
Office 360: https://orgmode.org/
I-Tunes: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/itunes.el (although this one probably doesn't work)
JBL: I have no idea what it is
Muse score: https://github.com/piercegwang/staff-mode
Anti-virus: I don't know of any, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone listed a plugin for checking files
PyCharm: This is the one he said to use Vim
Remote desktop: Emacs can natively open remote files or directories
Star citizen: obviously not
Steam: Obviously not, because it's proprietary, I really wouldn't be surprised if there's a GOG plugin
VPN: https://github.com/anticomputer/ovpn-mode
There's some truth to the joke that emacs is a very complete Operating system.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc&pp=ygUTT2xkIHByb2dyYW1lciBlbWFjcw%3D%3D
This is all I thought about when I read the comment.
Star Citizen runs just fine under linux. For the most part, anyway. Being under active dev it breaks occasionally, but the Linux User Group has always gotten it working again so far.
https://github.com/starcitizen-lug/lug-helper
I would recommend using Wine directly over using Lutris right now, but that's an option you can pick in this script. Join the discord if you have trouble, people are friendly there if you're polite.
Don't use Proton/Steam for it.
Gmail is web-based, you can use it with Firefox. For that matter Linux doesn't bind you to Firefox either, you can use Chrome and other browsers. I never used office 360 or Libre, I just use google docs.
AMD DRIVERS - Linux's built in drivers
Chrome - Chrome
gmail - gmail
Office 360 - Office 360 (web)
Norton - You don't need such piece of adware in Linux
Py-charm - py-charm
Star citizen - Star citizen though steam
VPN - Proton VPN (my suggestion)
Windows 10 - Fedora KDE
My suggestions if you want a smoother transition, repeated ones have Linux versions
At least get clamAV setup. No OS is virus immune. And if wine is installed without proper sandboxing ...
SELinux, wine (and other apps) installed via user flatpak with proper permissions configued, coupled with ufw or firewalld, secure boot enabled and an immutable system should be fine, no?
Ya probably. Toss in flat seal just because.
Opsec is always a balancing act.
You need to double up your newlines :)
Thank you, kind stranger, I haven't noticed my formatting was messed up
Antivirus is completely unnecessary and terrible on windows and linux... and on linux it's uniquely useless. Everything is installed from a centralized repo, antiviruses won't be of any help at all. antiviruses came about because windows let executables just be run easily and simply and used them as the default way of installing software, this was beyond idiotic and the reason that OS became infested with malware. Linux never made that mistake from the start, and so antivirus is unnecessary.
Norton is basically just malware, however.
The real reason you won't need antivirus.
If you have nothing to lose, ie. if you don't play anything with anticheat or you don't use any productivity software with crazy DRM platform-locking you into Windows, do it, switch over.
The bulk of all games will run in Proton or even vanilla WINE now and the minority that's platform-locked into Windows is anything that uses kernel-level anticheat, if you only play single-player games or even virtual board games like Civilization, those will broadly work fine in WINE/Proton and even in the case of the aforementioned Civilization, those games starting from Civ5 onward even have native Linux ports, but the Windows versions tend to perform better in Proton, and as for productivity software, there's plenty of alternatives to things like Maya, Photoshop, Lightroom, or Premiere/AfterEffects to choose from that isn't platform-locked anywhere, eg. Blender as a Maya alternative, Krita or GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, RawTherapee or Darktable as a Lightroom alternative, and KdenLive or Davinci Resolve as a Premiere/AfterEffects alternative.
Oh, and as for Illustrator, you have Inkscape as an alternative, and for Paint Tool SAI, you got MyPaint as an alternative.
As for a good distro to get you started, Debian or OpenSUSE seem pretty solid for beginners, and Debian Stable at least has a backports repo for newer software, and there's also ChimeraOS if you're building your PC into a games console.
Also, if you're looking for a good Foobar2k or iTunes alternative, Fooyin is great for that, and Whipper's a good CD ripper and basically an open Exact Audio Copy clone, although it's text-based. You could also use CUERipper in WINE as another good open alternative to Exact Audio Copy, which is proprietary. CUETools will work fine in Mono as well.
| Software | Linux support |
|---|---|
| AMD driver | ✅ open-source drivers for CPU and GPU are included in the Linux Kernel and work very well. If you have bleeding edge news hardware, check online in which Kernel version they are supposed and choose Linux distro accordingly |
| Web Browser | ✅ Chrome/chromium, ✅ Firefox. All are commonly available in your distro software repository by default, or otherwise with Flatpak |
| Web-based email | ✅ not dependent on OS. Local Email client software are available, one exemple is Thunderbird. |
| Office suite | ✅ LibreOffice, or anything web-based such as Google Docs will work independently of the OS |
| Itunes | Many music players/library managers are available on Linux, I don't have any specific recommendations here, I am self-hosting Jellyfin for my music needs |
| JBL | not sure what you mean here ? Your headset/speakers ? Don't see why it wouldn't work |
| Music score reader/editor | ✅ MuseScore, I also use Guitar Pro (7, 8) inside Bottle (wine) and it works with some tweaks needed for fixing font bug |
| Antivirus | ✅ ClamAV, arguable if you need an antivirus at all |
| Python | ✅ many IDEs are available, a scary amount of Linux distribution rely on Python under the hood 😅 |
| Remote desktop | ✅ RDP protocol (many clients available), ✅ Rustdesk, ✅ anydesk, ✅ TeamViewer) |
| Game platforms | ✅ Steam, ✅ Heroic Games Launcher (for Epic and GOG), ✅ Lutris |
| VPN | ✅ OpenVPN and ✅ Wireguard protocols are supported (maybe others), you can find many providers using these protocols. Most ask you to use their app, but digging a little you often have options to configure the VPN connection without installing anything extra. I know Nord on client works on Linux, I haven't tried other. Mulldav is a very frequent recommendation in Linux communities |
| Windows games compatibility | ✅ Wine/Proton via Steam, Lutris, Heroic and Bottles. The only thing that will block you is competitive multiplayer games with Anti-Cheat |
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Have to agree. Mint runs on long term support versions of Ubuntu releases. A lot of times this can cause issues with gaming because the kernel is so out of date, and thus the graphics driver is as well. Plus, they have snaps which are terrible compared to flatpaks.
Yeah, +1 for Bazzite.
It looks like it's really designed for Linux beginners. They've done a solid amount of work sanding off the rough edges.
As someone who has been using Linux for decades, I'm also impressed with it for a development system. I chose Bazzite because I wanted to be able to play games easily, but since I installed it a month or so ago, I've barely played any. I've installed a few to make sure they work, but I got interested in another project once I installed it, so for me it's been a machine used to set up and administer a Kubernetes cluster, as well as doing some Go / Javascript development.
In the early 2000s, I was one of those guys who ran Gentoo and liked building all my own software on my own machine so that it was perfectly tweaked for what I wanted to do. But, these days, I really like having an OS that's stable and gets out of my way, so I can focus on more interesting things.
Add Steam to "Windows gaming for Linux." Every game I bought on Windows runs great in Linux Mint. Steam has a native Linux client and ot uses a Wine layer called Proton that has all the settings for each game.
To be clear while that is true there are games that won't work at all on Linux, because of anticheat.
And sometimes you need to read protondb for tweaks so that your games run on Linux.
Linux mint is great
AMD drivers: Native, will auto-install as the mesa library, AMD is tits in Linux, it just works.
Gmail: Thunderbird works with Gmail accounts and can sync the calendar.
iTunes: Rhythmbox has a very similar layout to iTunes and so should feel pretty familiar.
Anti-virus: Linux doesn't really need antivirus in the same way Windows does because it's more locked down and doesn't have the same vectors of attack. If someone is hacking a Linux machine, it's a corporate server, not your desktop PC. If you still think you might need one ClamAV is available for Linux distributions. (.deb for Debian derivaties and .rpm for Fedora derivatives)
Py-Charm: As others have noted, Python is installed natively and is usually already implemented "out of the box" on a fresh install. No need for a program to run it, Python is just... there already.
Remote Desktop: Whatever distribution you have will likely also come with a Remote Desktop client. I am unaware of whether or not they will connect natively to iOS.
Star Citizen: You should be able to add this as a non-Steam game to Steam and use Steam's Proton compatibility layer to play it. A few years ago they were literally asking for Linux players to test it with Proton and Easy Anti-Cheat.
VPN: Linux has extensive VPN support including "roll your own" through either OpenVPN or Wireguard.
Windows Games: Steam, using the Proton compatibility layer, which is essentially WINe, just made a little easier. As with Star Citizen, just add it as a non-Steam game and viola.
Windows 10: The Distribution of your Dreams is just around the corner... I've heard Mint isn't a terrible place to start.
If OP is a gamer and not too comfortable with Linux, Bazzite is a good choice of distribution.
It's a so-called "Atomic" distro. Basically what that means is that it works more like Android / iOS than Windows or a traditional Linux distribution.
The base system including drivers and key applications is built as an image by Fedora. Every 2 weeks or so, they release a new one, and Bazzite users get the new one the next time they reboot. Everything in that base image is tested to work together, so you don't get weird incompatibilities. You can still install all the other software you want, but you tend to do it using Flatpaks rather than rpms/debs. (For someone who doesn't know what that means, Bazzite is a nice OS because that's something you don't need to learn right away.)
Bazzite is meant to be something that you can install on a SteamDeck, or another handheld gaming PC, but it also works great for desktop machines. But, because it's meant for handheld machines, they've worked extra hard to sand away some of the rough edges.
If you're a more advanced user, Bazzite is still good because you can still do almost everything you'd do on a normal distribution, you're just discouraged from doing things that affect the base image because it makes updates slower and means they're not guaranteed to work. I actually really like some of the things you're encouraged to do in Atomic distros that you wouldn't do normally. For example, using distrobox as a way to install certain kinds of dev tools. I currently have one project I'm running in an Ubuntu distrobox and another I'm running in a Fedora distrobox. It keeps some of the tools isolated to the "box" where they're needed. I haven't used Fedora much lately, so it's fun to have the more familiar Ubuntu environment in one, and then the other one where I can experiment and learn.
For someone who doesn't play games, Bazzite probably isn't ideal, but I'd still recommend an Atomic build. There are downsides, but unless you're the kind of person who really likes building their own kernel and making sure it's optimal for their system, it's so nice to have a stable base image so you can focus on the other stuff.
If a tool (or distro) works well for you, it's a good option. Everyone has different opinions on the "best" distro, but since it's very subjective, there is no single "best" distro. There's only 2 distros I recommend against, that's Ubuntu (and close spin-offs) and Manjaro, because they have major objective downsides compared to equivalents like Mint or Endeavour. The distros I generally recommend to new users are Mint and Fedora, but feel free to look around, you're not forced to pick a specific one.
You noted you were likely going to choose Linux Mint, great! It's a "stable" distro, as in, it doesn't change much with small updates. Instead, new release versions (23, 24, 25, etc) come with new changes. Linux Mint comes with an App Store that can install from Flathub, which should be the first place to check for installing new applications.
As for VR, it depends heavily on which exact headset you have, and is not always a great experience on Linux right now (speaking from experience with an Index). The LVRA wiki is a great starting place: https://lvra.gitlab.io/. If you're on a Quest, WiVRN and ALVR exist, though they both have their own downsides. If you're on a PCVR headset from Oculus, your options are more limited. You might also want to consider a different distro, as VR development is moving very fast. Many VR users choose to go with a "harder" rolling release distribution, like EndeavourOS, to receive feature updates quicker.
Also of note, if you have the storage space, you can choose to "dual boot" (even with just one drive). This will give you a menu to choose between Windows and Linux when starting your computer, and will give you time to move stuff over. I generally recommend this, as it provides an option to immediately do a task you know how to do on Windows, when it's absolutely required to do the task asap.