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?
Isn’t .NET open source and cross platform now? Isn’t there an official Linux runtime? Or is it just the most basic subset of .NET without any of the GUI libraries or other things Windows .NET apps routinely depend on?
There are differences. Most modern apps use .NET Core, which in itself is cross platform. Most of the time, they use a UI framework that is be cross platform as well (AvaloniaUI).
Of course newer apps and older apps made with .Net-Framework that may use Windows specific libraries (eg. System.Windows.Forms, System.Drawing) and lose their cross platform compatibility. They might work with Wine.