Hi guys, I have a question if you would be so kind. I’m a professional developer looking to finally make a semi break into Linux.
My daily driver is a Legion 5 / 6800H with 3070ti 32GB and I have been running Linux Mint in a virtual box now for a few weeks.
I can’t make a 100% transition over to Linux due to the nature of my work but I could be running at round 80-90% of my work via a Linux OS.
With the above said, I’m finally going to install a dual boot instance today. Is Mint a good starting point? Anyone else have experience with Mint and Legion or would you recommend I start somewhere else? (I have heared many people mention POP OS).
Essentially I want something I can jump head first into and just make a start familiarising myself.
I’m trying to regain some control over my data and a jump to Lemmy and a Jump away from Windows feels like a solid start !
Thank you and keep rocking…
For your hardware setup, I would suggest prioritizing good nVidia driver support over everything. A few distributions do not make the nVidia driver natively available for installation. I expect your Ryzen to be natively supported with 6.1 or 6.2 kernel, but test to see who has the latest nVidia driver to install and thrn decide from there.
Thanks ! I ended up installing Mint and couldn’t be happier.
It installed the Nvidia driver for me, the one thing I did note is it didn’t play well in managing the dual graphic chips.r When I was using a secondary display, there was a huge amount of lag on the second monitor even when mirrored.
I changed the system settings to only use the Nvidia card and job is a good one. It’s been many years since I have dabbled with Linux (I’m talking Windows XP era) and to see how far it’s come and how easy the process is these days was surprising to say the least. I got everything set and today will be the first of using Linux as a daily driver!
Many distro provide LiveCD. How about have a try first? You can test if the basic functions and the drivers included in the system work well on your laptop
Linux mint is a great way to start. Most distros based on debian are. Their is a abundance of information and community support with these distros. Personally i Like OpenSuse but even though it is a amazing all round distro. It is more of a niche and their for i can not recommend it to a new user, intermediate i can absolutely recommend it.
About VMs Why not flip it around and use a Windows VM? personally I prefer it over dual booting if possible. no breaking boot loader when windows updates and you can snapshot windows which can come in handy. make a share between to 2 and you can move files from the VM to the host
Just moved to Linux from Win10 for my workstation. I chose Fedora KDE Plasma and am loving it. Sometimes had to discover different ways to do things. Miss some things from Win10 but found other things that save me time.
Mint is where I started and I think it’s a great way to begin. Lots of helpful GUI interfacing to get you situated. Plus the popularity makes finding help a lot easier.
If I were starting for the first time today, mint would be my choice too. It’s Ubuntu/Debian enough that guides you Google will work, but it’s seperate enough that it doesn’t carry their baggage (eg. snaps, older packages, etc.).
As I’m not starting for the first time today, however, I’ll stick to Fedora - but the cinnamon spin, of course.
Thanks both… I have just installed Mint and I’m up and running :)
Heated Fedora mentioned in a few different places so will definitely keep it on the radar !
If you are interested in Linux also from a professional perspective Fedora is definitly worth a look, as it is basically the community version of Redhat Linux, which is very common in larger companies.
Overall try to stick to stable release distros with your Nvidia GPU. Arch based distros sometimes move too fast for the slower updates of the Nvidia driver to catch up. No problem for AMD or Intel GPUs that have fully open-source drivers though.
