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?
That’s true and not true at the same time. The one advantage Windows has in this regard is that everyone is working on the same “distro” as it were. With Linux the various components can vary enough to be confusing. I think that is why it’s important to choose a distro with a sizeable community.
Something like Ubuntu, or an arch derivative like endeavouros are a good choice for that reason.
I would also warm against the copy paste of commands that you don’t know what you are doing with. The one nice thing is that in 2025 you can drop a command into your choice of LLM assistant and get a pretty good description of what it does without breaking out the man pages.