EDIT: I am thrilled with so many awesome responses! I’m taking notes and looking into all the recommendations. Again, thank you so much for taking the time to help me out (and many others, i’m sure), i’m glad i asked!
Hi,
I’m getting ready to switch to Linux. I’m looking for a kind of checklist of what to do beforehand. When i search online, there is a lot of advice on which distribution to choose and how to set it up, which i already know, but my question is the step before. I made a list of which programs i currently use (almost all have a linux variant or i can use them in the browser) and i am making screenshots of their settings. I have basically everything important backupped, both on my ProtonDrive and on a private server in the house. Is there anything else i need to prepare before switching? I wouldn’t want to overlook something.
(I already have the distribution and am trying it out, but my plan is to actually install debian and without dual boot. Also, many, many years ago i already used debian but then i had the luxury of someone who basically arranged everything for me)
Currently, i run windows 10 with Nvidia GeForce. I already am in the process of degoogling and de-microsofting so to speak, so i don’t use google drive or onedrive, or MS Office anymore (nor a lot of other things).
Apologies if this is not appropriate for this community. Have a great day :-)
Is that nvidia card old, do you need very fast performance? You could use the nouveau drivers which are mostly FOSS.
If you need the proprietary drivers though, I advise against updated Distros except ublue.it
Debian might be an exception as it upgrages so slowly, but I also wouldnt recommend Debian really. Debian + GNOME is probably very fine, even though also here you will miss a lot of cool new updates, but Debian + KDE is simply not ready and all those bugs are now only fixed in Plasma 6.
So my recommendation is a ublue-nvidia image, no matter what desktop you like
It’s not brand new, but i don’t need it for gaming or anything major. Thank you for your recommendations, i will look into it!
A GPU is used for a lot more than just gaming these days. It’s used to render videos, accelerate normal 2D programs (like some terminal emulators), accelerate some websites/webapps (those which use WebGL for eg); also modern DEs like Gnome and KDE also make use of it very heavily, for instance for animations and window transitions. Those smooth animations that you see when you activate the workspace switcher or window overview? That’s your GPU at work there. Are your animations jittery/laggy? That means your setup is less than ideal. Of course, you could ignore all that and just go for a simple DE like XFCE or Mate which is fully CPU-driven, but then the issue of video acceleration still remains (unless you don’t plan on watching HD videos).
Without the right drivers (typically NOT nouveau, unless you’re on a very old card), you may find your overall experience less than ideal. As you can see in their official feature matrix , only the NV40 series card fully supports video acceleration - these are cards which were launched between 2004-2006 - that’s practically ancient in computer terms and I highly doubt your PC uses one of those. Now recent-ish cards do support video acceleration, but you’ll need to extract the firmware blobs from the proprietary drivers (which can be a PITA on normal Debian as it’s a manual process), plus, even after that, the drivers won’t support some features that may be required by normal programs, as you can see from the matrix.
The natural solution of course would be to install the proprietary nVidia drivers, but you do NOT want to do that (unless you’re a desperate gamer) as there’s a high possibility of running into issues like not being about to use Wayland properly, or breaking your system when you update it - just Google “Linux update black screen nVidia” and you’ll see what I mean.
You’ll be avoiding a lot of headache if you just went with AMD; or even just onboard graphics like Intel iGPUs (if your CPU has it) would be a much better option - because in either case, you’ll be using fully capable and stable opensource drivers and you won’t face any issues with that.
Also, watch this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OF_5EKNX0Eg
Do you prefer GNOME or KDE? I would stay away from other desktops for now, as they lack security a lot (Wayland).
Silverblue is GNOME, Kinoite is KDE. I highly recommend you try the images from ublue.it
They are not completely perfect out of the box though, you may need to add Flathub for the apps you need.
KDE, thanks for the link :-)
I am using Kinoite for quite a while, and pretty happy with it.