Basically the forced shift to the enshittified Windows 11 in october has me eyeing the fence a lot. But all I know about Linux is 1: it’s a cantankerous beast that can smell your fear and lack of computer skills and 2: that’s apparently not true any more? Making the change has slowly become a more real possibility for me, though I’m pretty much a fairly casual PC-user, I don’t do much more than play games. So I wrote down some questions I had about Linux.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
And also, what distro might be best for me?
Here are some answers I can give
1: Depends on which game you play, performance ma be better or worse, cant say without specifics
2: If modding a game requires copying files from here to there, you will have 0 issues, but if it requires some software to do it, you will have to do some digging
3: In some cases, you can use something like WINE to run these applications. But I have personally never done it. A better way would be to search for how to do it in Linux, which look difficult at first, but its just different not difficult
4: That I dont know enough to say, maby WINE can run them
5: Yes, there is a Linux update button on many so called beginner friendly distributions like Ubuntu and Linux Mint
6: Lets just rephrase it this way, a vehicle is open source, anyone can unscrew anything, anyone can change brakes, does that make it less safe?
7: Yes, GPU drivers are very stable these days, there was once a time where it was not true but thats history now
8: No and Yes, Linux will not try to prevent you from breaking your computer if you want, this sounds weird but there are good reasons why. But you gotta understand, Linux is a layered architecture and most of the hardware related stuff lives on the bottom layer, and you need to go out of your way to modify it and disable safety features to cause hardware damage.
Personal note:
1: Anything you can do on a web browser is not an issue, that includes office 365 or Adobe cloud or stuff like that.
2: If you have iPhone and require full support, you are out of luck, I know some folks were able run iTunes through WINE and get its full functionality, but thats just hack and nobody can tell if that works or if you can get it working now. The only support that comes out of the box is being able to copy media from iPhone to computer, cant remember if you could copy media from your computer to iPhones.
3: Adobe support is absent. I know some were able to get older version of Adobe products working with WINE but cant say that works anymore. Like I mentioned previously, being able to use stuff over cloud with a browser is non issue.
4: Libreoffice in Linux is pretty must identical to MS Office. Its just that buttons are in different places and you can save as PDF which will look exactly the same.
5: There is no reason not to atleast have Windows dualbooted, you can find something like Oprekin’s Windows 10/11 lite with everything removed, though it may be absolutely insecure, Windows cannot support Linux’s filesystem so its fine when you need it. It can fit in about 50GB disk space so no reason not to have it.