Afternoon all.
I’m looking to make the switch away from Windows, and I wondered if people had any advice, distro suggestions and so on.
My main use cases for my PC are Gaming, Writing and Image editing. Things I’d love to have working are all my games, Epic, Steam, GoG and Game pass. I already use OpenOffice so I’m probably fine with that. And I currently use Photoshop, so a good alternative for that would be good. Finally Spotify, Discord and VPNs etc
Any and all help and suggestions would be welcomed, thanks in advance.
So from my personal experience I have a few pointer
Don’t dualboot because you’ll keep switching to windows instead of finding solutions to your issues that you inevitably will encounter
There is no replacement to Photoshop but you can do mostly all things with Gimp. It is just different and you’ll need to figure out how. This in itself can be very frustrating because you know how to do a thing in Photoshop but will need to learn it again in Gimp. This is part of it though and imo worth the time. Just like when you learned Photoshop
You may need to use the terminal a few times when you start but in the long run when things are setup you rarely need it unless you really want to mess with things under the hood. For me, I haven’t used the terminal for well over a year
I switched to Mint 2 years ago
Be patient and use the forums or discord servers. And also be thankful and kind to people offering their help for free. Try to find a solution first, and if that does not work, give them as much information as possible when asking for a question. In Linux, find system info and export the system information as a txt file. Share that whenever you ask questions
I ended up sticking my windows NVMe in an external enclosure so I can still boot from it, if needed. You just have to change a couple registry keys first, so it loads the USB driver earlier in boot to allow it to boot off of an external drive.
I can even boot the drive as a VM using QEMU for something quick. You just had to be careful, you don’t accidentally mount the drive at the same time QEMU is using it.
There’s an extension for GIMP that makes it look and feel more like PS. Might make the transition easier.
Changing the shortcuts to copy the ones from Photoshop was the main thing that worked for me!
Dualboot is also much more complicated. No newbie should have to deal with that, imo.
I ended up sticking my windows NVMe in an external enclosure so I can still boot from it, if needed. You just have to change a couple registry keys first, so it loads the USB driver earlier in boot to allow it to boot off of an external drive.
I can even boot the drive as a VM using QEMU for something quick. You just had to be careful, you don’t accidentally mount the drive at the same time QEMU is using it.
I ended up sticking my windows NVMe in an external enclosure so I can still boot from it, if needed. You just have to change a couple registry keys first, so it loads the USB driver earlier in boot to allow it to boot off of an external drive.
I can even boot the drive as a VM using QEMU for something quick. You just had to be careful, you don’t accidentally mount the drive at the same time QEMU is using it.
I ended up sticking my windows NVMe in an external enclosure so I can still boot from it, if needed. You just have to change a couple registry keys first, so it loads the USB driver earlier in boot to allow it to boot off of an external drive.
I can even boot the drive as a VM using QEMU for something quick. You just had to be careful, you don’t accidentally mount the drive at the same time QEMU is using it.