Hi there!

Seeing the enshittification of Windows unfold, I’m curious about trying out Linux.

I don’t want to move over my main machine just yet, but I’ve got a 9 yo HP Pavilion 15-e001ed spare laptop I want to experiment with. Eventually I want a gaming laptop that can run steam games.

When I googled I found a plethora of pieces of advice, but seeing the proselytizing for Linux here, maybe I could get a bit more personal advice as a potential conscript.

So what advice would you give me to start my journey into Linux?

UPDATE: Ok my cherry is popped, writing this from a fresh Mint install. It’s suprisingly smooth sailing. Only thing is somehow software gets installed on my root partition instead of the home partition I made because people told me so.

But overall not nearly as dounting as I thought it would be. Thanks for the help everybody!

  • owenfromcanada@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    AMD is very well supported in Linux, especially on older hardware. If you use something beginner-friendly like Mint, you shouldn’t have to do anything special to get it working well.

    • Ketata Mohamed@mastodon.tn
      0·
      11 days ago

      @owenfromcanada @Akasazh I just want to mention that old amd GPUs require a proprietary driver, from my humble logic, that requires tinkering, like for Nvidia cards that do require proprietary drivers, but even Nvidia embraced Open-Source so there’s nvidia-open now, in short, now, there’s 0 reason to use proprietary trash, except on special circumstances

      • owenfromcanada@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        11 days ago

        Good to know! I haven’t had any AMD GPUs, but it was my understanding they’ve been well supported for a while.

        Unfortunately, the open source Nvidia driver isn’t suitable for gaming yet. But some distros (Mint at least) provide an easy GUI to switch to proprietary drivers. Very easy tinkering, as these things go.

        • Ketata Mohamed@mastodon.tn
          0·
          11 days ago

          @owenfromcanada do you happen to know the name of such tool? I know Garuda, Ubuntu & many distros have them, but since my priority was stability even on stress conditions, my daily driver is Endeavour OS, but it lacks that feature, it has everything otherwise

          • owenfromcanada@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            10 days ago

            It’s just called “Driver Manager” in Mint, I’m guessing it’s specific to the distro. I’ve tried a few different ones, and it’s by far the easiest to switch compared to any other. I think it can theoretically be installed on any Ubuntu-based distro, but I don’t know of anything for EndeavorOS.