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 :)
In the last few months I switched from years of arch to opensuse to bazzite. I got sick of updating everything all the time. Bazzite (also kinoite, ublue, silver blue, etc.) does everything with just a brief notification and is active next boot. Primary app install via flatpak, appimage, also fedora repos and rpm packages via rpm-ostree. And nix which I haven't delved into yet.
The only things I'm not sure about are the driver's for my brother laser printer, and undervolting requires turning off secureboot or a patch which may be too involved for me with this distro.
I have a Brother printer + scanner too (MFC-L2750DW). Many Brother printers (and a lot of non-Brother printers too) are supported by default in Fedora using a "driverless" method. It's part of "IPP Everywhere" (https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html), AirPrint (Apple), and Direct Print (Microsoft), and most printers support it these days, and Fedora supports all of these. (Other distros likely do too.)
At least in GNOME (on Silverblue here), if it doesn't already show up and work, you can click on "Add Printer..." and it should find and add it. KDE and other desktops will likely be different — although hopefully not much different.
Scanning with "Document Scanner", aka: "Simple-Scan", detects my networked Brother printer for scanning without having to do anything too. https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.SimpleScan
I hope this helps!
I haven't looked into undervolting much. I know some people have mentioned CoreCtrl; I haven't managed to figure it out yet.
If it requires turning off secureboot or a patch, that's a bummer and might be why I couldn't find the settings in CoreCtrl. I haven't seen this when looking it up a while back, however (but the Internet is big). CoreCtrl setup docs @ https://gitlab.com/corectrl/corectrl/-/wikis/Setup don't mention either.
I do see that it requires setting a kernel flag, which on ostree-based distributions is:
(And then reboot.)
I didn't know about driverless printing. If it works out I'll switch my parents over too since the lower maintenance updating is great and printer is the only thing they need that I wasn't sure about.
The undervolting thing is on an old Intel, I think haswell. A lenovo t440p with the standard fare mod pack. I forgot what it was called but there was some procedure involving mok installation and signing the module that allows voltage control, and/or patch to bypass some aspect of it. I was only reading up on it before I switched distros to bazzite after liking it on steam deck and now it looks like I might have to make a custom ublue image to achieve this if I understand correctly. I'll probably just switch to seabios and do away with the uefi entirely though as tianocore doesn't have a bios settings menu but one can be added as a payload when using seabios.