Edit2: Writing this from Pop_Os! I had experience with Mint for my Self hosting rig and wanted to see other pastures. Decided to rearrange my three drives, two of them are still Windows, another I emptied and dedicated to Pop OS. That way I still have easy fallback to Windows if I need to do something fast and then I'll know what I have to add to Linux over time.
First things first, I've setup auto-back up. For now it's google drive because it's the easy one. I have to figure how to self host Nextcloud and then use this as a backup storage.
Steam is installed and to be fair, I'm happy with the native linux games. Still going to take a look at Lutris and co out of curiosity.
I mostly miss MusicBee right now. Any recommendation for the most solid music player? Also, what's a good movie player? I used MPV, I need something capable to deal with 3440x1440 resolution and stretch properly.
Also, I wanted to install Bitwarden and the first thing that showed up is Snap Store. I remember hearing about Canonical in a bad way so should I stay clear from that?
Hey!
Today is the day. I finally got fed up with Windows booting up with an advert that I already had yesterday and had clicked on "remind me in three days" reluctantly. I'm finally tired of killing Telemetry.
Now that gaming is less important for me, I feel like now is a good time to switch mainly to Linux. I might keep a small spare drive with a Windows/Steam partition for the occasional incompatible game.
I've just started transferring my precious files to an external drive and I'm preparing for my Exodus.
Still unsure about the distro I'll choose, I would like to avoid distro hoping. But now I made up my mind, I'm leaving windows for the foreseable future.
I started self-hosting three months ago as a way to trialing Linux with the added bonus of being useful and my server is still up and alive so I'm confident I can use Linux without breaking it.
Any welcoming tips?
I'm a bit anxious about the big change, but also relieved I won't have to put up with the bloat/adverts.
Edit: Two hours in and so many kind and useful comments. Thanks for the welcome party! You're all a bunch of good humans :)
Welcome to the Linux community!
Sounds like you're about where I was at the beginning of my Linux journey. I was a Windows user from birth (well okay, my very first computer was dual-booted with OS/2) because that's what computers came with, etc. I started playing with Raspberry Pis as a hobby, I learned a little Linux, and at the time you HAD to do a lot of stuff in Raspberry Pi OS through the terminal; it didn't have a GUI package manager yet, so I learned some bash.
Then my laptop died, I got a new one, and Windows 8.1 was inflicted upon me. I decided to try desktop Linux.
I did decide to keep Windows 8.1 around because I still sorta knew how to use it and that's where all the software I knew how to use ran, so I dual booted. I tried out a few distros in VirtualBox, and Linux Mint just felt like home and it's been my preferred daily driver ever since.
It is a different system, you will have to get used to doing things a little differently and thinking in Linux's terms. If you have something you NEED to do, and you're struggling to figure it out in Linux, go ahead and boot into Windows, get it done, turn it in, then come back to Linux and without that time pressure see if you can figure it out now. Eventually you'll stop booting to Windows.
As for gaming: Valve has done a lot for us. It's amazing how good it is now. Used to be there was a list of games that did work on Linux, now it's more efficient to make a list of games that don't. Mainly competitive multiplayer games because of EAC. Some of the high end bells and whistles don't work as well in Linux because they don't get as much attention as Windows does, but I've spent a lot of time in some very good looking games made in Unity and Unreal.