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?
No*, with options like Wine and Proton (and Lutris and Steam), it’s almost a non-existent problem.
*allegedly some games that rely on kernel-level anticheat won’t work no matter what workarounds you use. I haven’t played these games, so I cannot vouch for it. The games I have played that use anti-cheat have worked fine
Freely, yes. Easily… depends. E.g. Nexus now has a standalone application that automates installing mods. Setting up this to work with the different games is a bit of learning how Wine works, but it’s not terribly frustrating if you have someone helping you understand.
There are always workarounds, but a very small subset are still unusable. The best option is always to find Free Software alternatives, which there are many more available than there are for windows. Even when that’s not an option, there’s always Wine, or virtual machines.
See previous answer.
Depends on the OS, but most beginner-friendly distros that are also good long-term distros have an update program like Windows. There are other methods of updating if you go for an immutable distro (like Nix or Guix), but those distros entail less transferable knowledge than distros like Debian or Manjaro.
Same as it works on windows: the weakest link is the user, and the changes they make to the system without understanding the security implications. Which is to say, the strongest security you can have is picking a distro like Debian or Fedora, making no changes to system configuration, and staying up to date on all your updates.
Don’t run code you find online without knowing exactly what it’s doing behind the scenes, don’t follow guides you found online without understanding exactly what each step is doing to your computer.
No. Why would you think it was?
Yes-ish. There are security program that work to protect you in the background (e.g. App Armor and SELinux), but there’s no program that actively scans for and detects “malicious activity” like Defender does.
I tend to recommend against these types of active scanning software, as they negatively impact system performance, and they’re really only necessary if you’re running software from random websites or opening random email attachments or plugging in random usb drives or running random commands you found online.
I can get more in-depth on this, because my job involves setting up systems and maintaining their security, but that’s only if you’re interested.
Yes, but most people have better experience with AMD than Nvidia. They both work, AMD is just a little less finnicky.
No.
Other people may say otherwise, but that’s because it’s technically possible on all OSes. It just requires so much special knowledge to even unlock the ability to do so, the odds are astronomically against you ever figuring out how to do so, and you will be warned the entire way down.
I recommend getting Virtualbox or VMware on windows and setting up and messing around with a few distros people mention as virtual machines to see which one works best for you. The nicest thing about FOSS is the utter freedom you have, so exploring always pays off more in the long run than sticking to a step-by-step guide.
I use Debian: it’s easy, it’s secure, it’s reliable, it’s not failed me yet. It’s what distros like Linux Mint and Ubuntu are based on. Fedora is also a great mix of reliable, secure, and easy.
I’m happy to get more in-depth on these questions, or really any computing questions you have, I just didn’t want to overload you if you weren’t looking for a thesis. Feel free to ask me to elaborate though.
Building off of this awesome and thorough response. There are some games that you might need a different version of Proton for everything to work right. I had issues with Blue Prince not being able to see any videos that played during the game. With Proton-GE, that is solved. So there might be a little adjustment and tweaks that need to be done but I’ve found everyone in the Linux community more than happy to help.
As to your comment about security vis-a-vis open source software. I think that comes from an inherent misunderstanding about what open source software is because I had a similar thought when I was younger. If a program is open source and you can see all the bones of the software, you can see the code and know how to hack it. That was my thinking at least. But the security comes from having everyone able to view the code and patch out vulnerabilities. Closed source just means that you might have the veil of security through obscurity where it takes a little time to have your bugs exploited.
Debian might have a steeper learning curve than something like Linux Mint or Ubuntu. Fedora and Fedora based distros are pretty good as well, Bazzite hasn’t let me down yet.