Basically the forced shift to the enshittified Windows 11 in october has me eyeing the fence a lot. But all I know about Linux is 1: it’s a cantankerous beast that can smell your fear and lack of computer skills and 2: that’s apparently not true any more? Making the change has slowly become a more real possibility for me, though I’m pretty much a fairly casual PC-user, I don’t do much more than play games. So I wrote down some questions I had about Linux.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
And also, what distro might be best for me?
I (unfortunately) have to heavily recommend against using Nobara, especially if you have an Nvidia graphics card. It’s an amateur distribution in the original sense of the word and also lacks a large community, neither does it have a company behind it.
This leads to a lack of proper QA and testing in general. It’s OK but I would not recommend it to anyone
If you want to go with a “traditional” distro, go with Linux Mint, simply the most solid out there. I’d also recommend you check out Bluefin, it’s atomic (meaning that you are basically guaranteed to always have a working system, even after upgrades) and quite modern
It’s true that Nobara is rather new compared to most other distros and doesn’t have as many resources or people, so that’s something to consider. I really like the modifications they make to make gaming a lot easier though. But yeah if you’re not sure what to choose, Mint is perfectly fine.