Hey guys, I’m an entry-level IT professional and tech enthusiast.
I’m getting a bit sick of windows for a multitude of reasons and want to try out some Linux distros.
I use my pc for web browsing, university (which uses office 365) where I study software design, software development (vs code, visual studio, jetbrains stuff) and gaming (99% of the time via steam).
My main concerns for switching are that I’ll have a hard time with university work because we mostly use teams for video conferences and work together with word, and other office stuff. We also are required to do some virtual machine stuff where we use virtualbox.
Also I’m a bit worried that some games on uplay, epic and other platforms aren’t available anymore.
For distros I’ve been mainly looking at Manjaro, Linux Mint or plain old Ubuntu. Can you recommend anything that might fit for me or will I maybe run into any issues with my chosen three?
Edit: Thanks a lot for all the replies. I’ve read through all of them even if I didn’t reply and it was very helpful. I will test most of your suggestions in a VM before I jump into completely changing my OS. And I’ll probably try booting from a USB Drive first. What I didn’t mention is that I’ve already worked with Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS, so I’m not scared about having to use a CLI.
Avoid Manjaro, if you plan on entering the ArchLinux space do it with EndeavourOS.
I would avoid Ubuntu, but that is more because I dislike their politics on snaps.
You are an entry-level IT pro, so, I’d suggest EndeavourOS for personal, Debian for work. Why? Simple, Debian is widely used in professional environments, nobody will look at you weird for using a “less professional” distro.
In terms of University work, you are saying you guys use Teams and Office, probably with a student license that would give you access to a full online Office experience through the browser, just use that.
In terms of gaming, things are looking pretty good nowadays, and with a more personal distro, such as EndeavourOS, you’ll get the latest advancements in gaming.
Thanks for the hint. I’m kinda curious about Arch, so I’ll definitely check out EndeavourOS.
Unfortunately for work I’m still bound to Windows then because we use Visual Studio. I guess I can just use a VM if I ever need that for personal use though!
Visual studio is available on Linux as a native app from the AUR and some distros repos, I use VS on my endeavourOS with no problems, other than it has a slight tendency to be slow on launch, but that may be due to hardware age.
Are you talking about Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code? Although there’s a lot of overlap in functionality, they are two completely different products and only VS Code has a native version. Regular VS on the other hand I’ve never seen running on Linux.
Consider using the old VM switcheroo. On windows. try some distros out in VMs (I vote Fedora, perhaps KDE spin to ease transition, which gets you ready for RHEL, an enterprise standard server distro). Once you find what you like, get it set up and live in it as much as possible and isolate what you need WinBlows for, e.g. Visual Studio. When you’re ready, install your distro on the metal and spin up a win VM for the stuff you need.
I disagree, playing around in VMs is not giving you much experience. Rather boot from livemedia and play around with the different preshipped DEs/WMs. After you know which desktop environment is to your liking, you are free to chose whatever distro you want. The only real important part of a distro is its packet manager and documentation. Everything else can be exchanged.
For distros I’ve been mainly looking at Manjaro, Linux Mint or plain old Ubuntu. Can you recommend anything that might fit for me or will I maybe run into any issues with my chosen three?
Like others I would caution against Manjaro, the distro maintainers have shown on multiple occasions that they are not exactly on top of it all.
Ubuntu derivatives are typically great works-out-of-the-box distros. Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) has made a number of questionable moves with Ubuntu over the years so I would rather suggest going for Linux Mint instead. Mint is based on Ubuntu but IMHO fixes most of these issues.
My main concerns for switching are that I’ll have a hard time with university work because we mostly use teams for video conferences and work together with word, and other office stuff.
Since Microsoft Teams is an electron app, it works very well as a web app in a chromium-based browser like Brave or chromium itself, there’s no real need to install any separate app. I use it daily that way and I have no issues either with screen sharing, videoconferencing or chat.
Microsoft office is a tougher nut. LibreOffice may or may not work for you - there’s a good chance it won’t be 100% compatible with existing office documents, and may for example slightly change pre-existing formatting. If that doesn’t matter to you, LibreOffice could be completely fine as a replacement. Otherwise, Microsoft Office 365 in the browser works as well on Linux as on Windows, maybe try if that is a workable solution for you in most cases. I find that for me, the web version goes 95% of the way, and for the last 5% I keep a windows 10 VM with Office installed around.
We also are required to do some virtual machine stuff where we use virtualbox.
The de facto standard virtualization solution on Linux is KVM/QEMU, but Virtualbox does appear to exist for Linux, so I don’t see a blocker there.
Also I’m a bit worried that some games on uplay, epic and other platforms aren’t available anymore.
I don’t play much, but I don’t think there’s a good solution to that. Setting up non-Steam gaming setups on Linux (e.g. via Bottles or Lutris) is IMHO finicky at best. Also, AFAIK a number of online multiplayer games don’t work simply because the DRM software refuses to work on Linux. You can check ProtonDB for a database of games and their support on Linux. If there are blockers there, maybe consider a dual-boot setup.
I’d recommend opensuse tumbleweed. I would suggest Debian but it moves too slow (updates) for gaming. I think arch is good but you will have to want to learn a bit more about it. Tumbleweed falls closer to Debian with stability and still near arch as far as frequent updates.
One downside of Opensuse compared to Arch is its lacking Documentation.
I use Opensuse TW on my desktop machine for over 10 years now and I use Debian at work, also have a different distro on my laptop.
I have found over the years you can apply a lot of the directions to whatever distro you are using. You just have to do some minor tweaking to the commands. Primarily using the right package manager command for your distro or using distro specific software in place of arch software. I have also found you can use a lot of the AUR programs by searching for said app in your repos.
Or they can use EndeavourOS if vanilla Arch is too complicated. You’ll still have to install things like libreoffice, steam etc. but you don’t have half the learning curve you do with vanilla arch
As for Office, you’ll need to use the browser version or use a VM (or container or whatever). Besides that, you can expect like 90% of games to run either via Lutris or by adding them to Steam.
If you want to play around, I recomend to try Garuda Linux Dr460nized Gaming. Yes, it is very bloated and has a very gamery aesthetic, but it comes with a lot of cool software and customizations to explore. I recently started to recreate what I like about it on EndeavourOS and it’s a very good learning exercise :)
Some very neat things like how btrfs works, how you get automatic snapshots going with snapper + snap-pac, that fish is a fantastic shell, how to use libalpm hooks, what tools there are for performance and powersaving tweaks, gaming and probably a few more things.
Then also a lot of silly stuff like the importance of Nerd Fonts, Starship and Fastfetch for being able to brag with your distro without saying anything lol
Office 365 won’t work. If you need that specific piece of software, give up and stay on windows. It can however be replaced with libreoffice or OpenOffice. If these work for you, you’re in luck because just about everything supports them. Software design is better on Linux than windows imo, and most if not all of your tools will be available. As for gaming from steam your set. Proton can run just about any game you throw at it. Teams has a Linux client that works, and afaik there is also a web client. Virtual machines are better than on windows by a mile. If you need virtual box it does exist and work, there is however virtual machine manager which is even more powerful and just plain better. Uplay games are a bit trickier, you can use a program called bottles to run the launcher and play your games there, but if you need/want any per-game tweaks you can’t do that. Epic is easy, heroic games launcher is an almost fully-featured epic games launcher replacement with proper wine integration.
For distribution, I have to recommend you steer clear of manjaro. They have had numerous security problems in the past few years, some having been repeated showing they aren’t learning from their mistakes. Additionally it lets you use the aur but that can easily break your system. It’s a poorly managed distribution that I can’t recommend. Ubuntu as well has made some anti-user moves like forcing their tech on users rather than adopting the standards everyone else has. Mint try’s to correct this, and it does a good job. I can recommend mint, however it is fairly slow to get updates and hence is gonna be bad for gaming.
What I recommend is gonna be nobara or fedora. Fedora is a bit trickier to use because the setup and configuration will probably require the command line, however once it’s running it’s really stable and has a lot of newer software so everything you have is up to date. Nobara adds some gaming tweaks on top of that and is a little slow to update major versions, but it has a graphical way to configure probably everything you need and has some qol patches for things like vrr that others don’t have. Additionally as you mentioned you are in IT I think this will be a good fit as the server software that you will interact with is most likely gonna be rhel as it’s the most popular enterprise Linux. It is based upon fedora, so you will be able to interact with it easier should you ever need to.
