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comment by aloysius
aloysius  ·  3164 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: So... switching to Linux.

Mint or your preferred flavor of Ubuntu, if you want a more "things just work" type environment. Though I'm going to declare a warning I don't see nearly enough: driver support can often be terrible for Linux. A lot of this is because the driver support I and many others will run into problems with, is mainly dealing with personal use as opposed to industrial use (where Linux is run a bit more commonly, from what I can tell), but it's starting to get a little better. It's becoming more popular, and more companies that cater towards personal use are supporting Linux, some (like Valve) are even promoting it. You can also sometimes find independently developed one (this, for a time, made using my Realtek wireless chipset much better).

But like somebody else mentioned, the Arch wiki is gloriously in-depth, not to mention other popular distros (of course Ubuntu) have support forums and wikis with so many random problems documented and explained that you can usually find out what's wrong. Plus, when you're figuring out how to do this, it may be difficult, but you'll start to get a much better idea of what's going on with your computer and how to fix it rather easily, which, at least in my opinion, is often not nearly as obvious on Windows. There's a learning curve, but it's worth it in the long run.

I can't say much for games, except that more are being ported over and with the aforementioned increased promotion by companies like Valve, you might be seeing a lot more games made with the system in mind. Of course, this is still gonna take actual dedication by hardware companies to better support their drivers and build and update them for Linux, but I have my fingers crossed.

As a side note, it's also a much more easily customized environment. If you're a little adventurous, I'd recommend, after getting used to whatever system you're using, installing a new window manager that does tiling like xmonad (my preferred one, as of late) or awesome, they're both pretty solid environments to work with, and allow a lot of customization, while doing wonders for space management.