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.
Linux Mint is great, Ubuntu is ok, I’d stay away from Manjaro. The Manjaro team is known for selectively delaying updates, which can break systems sometimes.
Teams and VirtualBox both work fine on Linux, though personally I’d recommend just using teams in the browser vs downloading the app from Microsoft.
Most games work great on Linux! A really good resource for seeing if the game you want to play works is ProtonDB. There’s a compatibility rating for almost every game on Steam there (even if you didn’t buy the game on Steam, ratings for the Steam version should be fairly accurate). For non-steam games, WineHQ AppDB is another good resource, though I’ve found it can sometimes be a bit out of date when it comes to compatibility (in a good way, it’ll say games are broken sometimes when they actually work fine).
For Epic, you can use the Heroic Games Launcher. It’s an open-source launcher for Epic and GOG games. It’ll automatically handle setting up a wine prefix for you and everything, so all you should need to do is click “install” and then “play” once it’s done. Uplay is a bit more difficult, since there’s no Linux-native launcher, but it’s not impossible. I believe Lutris has an installer for it, you can definitely find instructions on how to do this online.
I’m not gonna lie and say that gaming on Linux is as easy as it is on Windows, especially for a beginner. These games and apps were designed for use on Windows, and if any consideration was given for Linux, it was an afterthought. However, it’s completely possible for many people to never have to use Windows for gaming. It’s so, sooooo much better than it was just a few years ago, and it’s only going to improve from here. You might struggle a bit as a beginner, but with time you’ll learn more about how all this stuff works and eventually, if a game doesn’t work, in most cases you’ll be able to figure out why and fix it.
Personally, I can’t remember the last time I just wasn’t able to get a game running on Linux at all. There was like, one instance where cutscenes didn’t work, that’s the worst case I’ve ever encountered. I mostly stick to single-player games, but still.
ubuntu is the most widely used distro and very simple to setup and gaming out of the box with steam is very simple. Distro end of the day doesn’t matter all that much because you can change them to your hearts content, but for a beginner, you’d probably have the easiest time with an ubuntu distro.
Doesn’t hurt to have virtual box windows on your linux box just so you can easily do some of that other stuff. While I have done fine with libre office for a long time there are definitely problems with formatting so having a windows VM would just solve that issue. Plus teams and w/e.
Epic games will take some serious tweaking, but not impossible.
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.
Between the three I’d go for Linux Mint. It was my first distro too, and it makes the setup process very easy, especially for users coming from Windows. Manjaro and Ubuntu are fine, plenty of people I know love them, but they’ve both made some decisions in recent years that I don’t like. The former being negligent with security updates, and the latter forcing their own, worse, package manager on users. You shouldn’t have any issues with Mint.
Most of the apps you mentioned are available for Linux, including Teams and VirtualBox, though you’ll probably have to download those from their respective websites. Office 365 still works from a web browser, and you can open its documents locally with LibreOffice (though more complicated documents might have some formatting messed up). I haven’t heard of uPlay, but there is an unofficial Linux client for Epic Games (called Heroic Launcher), and ~90% of Windows games either support Linux or work through a compatibility layer such as Proton.
