💾 Archived View for ax.flounder.online › tech › linux › switchingtolinux.gmi captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:07:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Switching to Linux guide

wip

Why switch

Use superior file systems to NTFS, FAT32
Easier to install common software (but potentially harder to install uncommon software)
Ability to kill whatever system files and processes you want
Smaller operating system size
Faster system installation
No analytical spyware
No nagware (Edge ads when installing other Web browsers, windows 10 upgrade ads)
No artificial system requirements

Why not to switch

If you have a NVIDIA graphics card it will give you issues due to the drivers being proprietary
If you do not want to use a virtual machine to use Windows only software with no viable alternatives that don't run with Wine
If you want rock-solid post-2010 .docx Microsoft Word compatability without relying on the webapp or a virtual machine
If you want to play video games with abrasive anti cheat

Choosing your distro

Play around with Linux distros on a live USB or a virtual machine

Virtual machines aren't as hard to set up as they look

Choosing your desktop environment

GNOME

+ Polished

- No grid view in the file picker

- A crash will take applications with it

- Updates break shell extensions

- Large UI elements for mouse users

- Big titlebars on non-GTK3-4 applications

~ No desktop icons

~ Fullscreen application launcher

KDE

+ Plenty of customization

+ Widgets

- Buggy

XFCE

Whisker Menu recommended

- Does not come with V-sync

~ Updated irregularly

Filesystems

btrfs driver for Windows

ntfs2btrfs - Convert your NTFS drive to BTRFS. for Windows or Linux

Conversion to BTRFS takes about 1-2 hours per terabyte. Reverting back to NTFS takes about 30 seconds.

Windows safe mode is recommended while converting to prevent any applications from accessing the drive you are converting.

btrfs-convert - Convert other Linux filesystems to BTRFS